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.
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.
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:
I have relatives in Texas who a few years back were being told by climate experts that drought (where local reservoirs and other bodies of water had sunk to dangerously low levels) was the new normal. Many folks who had built homes near such bodies of water were being told that their properties were now permanently devalued, being not so much lakefront properties any longer.
Of course, not quite more than a year later those reservoirs and such were once again full to overflowing, and too much water was the new problem. So yeah, whenever a "climate expert" tells you that something is the "new normal", or that you are now in a "permanent state of drought", or whatever, then you can pretty much just safely assume that they're full of it!
In my late teens my normally wet-and-green area got hit hard by a drought. Rivers and reservoirs started drying up, wildfires (small ones, at least) became common occurrences, and temperatures peaked so high at times that roads started buckling and the interiors of cars started melting and so on.
Any of that sound familiar? Well, this all happened in my area circa 1980, but before long conditions returned to normal, where occasional flooding was a far more recurrent issue than anything like a drought was. Nobody was trying to blame climate change at the time, either; it was just "drought".
Be interesting to know if there was a pattern of warming with respect to earlier severe droughts before the industrial revolution.
"Historical documents, tree rings, archaeological remains, lake sediment, and geomorphic data make it clear that the droughts of the twentieth century, including those of the 1930s and 1950s, were eclipsed several times by droughts earlier in the last 2000 years, and as recently as the late sixteenth century. In general, some droughts prior to 1600 appear to be characterized by longer duration (i.e., multidecadal) and greater spatial extent than those of the twentieth century."
I wonder how much of a mess we've created by simply calling it "drought" in the first place. From the article is seems equally likely that the last several hundred years was just a period of abnormally large rainfall in the western US and the true average is much less than we have planned for.
Uhm, okay, you have convinced me that droughts aren't a new phenomenon.
The claim however was that they become more frequent and severe. Not every drought is the same. From your link:
> the 2012–15 period was the driest in at least 1200 years
Also, according to your link, about there was a drought in 12 of the last 20 years, with only one or two years in between droughts, where they previously usually were spaced by around a decade or more.
The data listed there really doesn't seem to contradict the article's claim about more frequent droughts in the future.
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.
https://www.drought.gov/states/new-hampshire
try clicking D3 / W3 or D4 / W4 also to get a good picture of how it's changed.
Post 2000's NH has had the most extreme wet and the least extreme drought of any time period (except maybe the 1970's)
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