I get the feeling that droughts have happened before, are happening now, and will happen again; and we are just not able as humans to control the climate.
In fact I found this study that proves that history does repeat.
Thankfully, due to technological advancement though - it is nowhere near as damaging as it once was - in fact now these are barely a blip on the radar on human life. In times past, it is easy to forget that a simple drought halted all commerce, caused great famines, and without transportation and local food sources available, people were dying.
Just take a look at the history and see the trend lines for the evidence of improvement that advancements like electricity and internal combustion have given us:
Scroll down to the graph, click "1895 - Present (Monthly)", and click the different levels of exceptional drought/exceptional wetness.
You can see that NH has been trending wetter for the last 100 years (as with all the northeast), more or less the opposite of the southwestern US. Large periods of exceptional wet have happened in my life, with fewer big droughts than ever. (Alas, we're in a drought right now.)
You can also see that California had some unusually wet periods in the 80's and 90's, which might have informed policy, but were simply an anomaly: https://www.drought.gov/states/california
To be fair most of that decade has been a state-declared drought (2012-2016) :) and I believe the interceding years were also usually low in terms of precipitation even though they didn't meet the formal definition of a drought.
Climate change is a long-term thing. No single weather event can definitively be tied to it.
This drought is just one event in a long line of documented historical droughts in California. Yes, it's worse than the other ones in recorded history, but we've only been recording for ~200 years so the sample size is small. We can observe further back via tree rings and other creative forensics, but you also have to factor in the different climate. It's not like California didn't have any major droughts before global warming.
Additionally, humans have gutted the only major rainforest in our hemisphere in just the past 30 years. It's entirely possible that the California drought has much more to do with the Amazon being slash-n-burned than due to carbon emissions (although they both contribute to global warming).
A drought isn't climate change. The annual weather is a chaotic system, and a drought for a year or two (or even 10) is normal. Climate change is much longer term.
Yes I'm in New Hampshire in that very unfun drought right now. But droughts like this were the norm. Now they're more rare.
On drought.gov if you scroll below the map and click 1895 - Present in the graph at the bottom of the page, you'll see just how common droughts in NH used to be compared to the much high "abnormally wet" conditions of today.
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