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.
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.
No - they're saying that what we call "drought" isn't actually drought, in historical context. It just seems that way if we're looking at too short of a timescale.
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.
> Williams was part of a team that published a similar study in 2020. At the time, they found the drought since 2000 was the second-worst after the late 1500s megadrought. With widespread heat and dryness over the past two years, the current drought has passed that extreme mark.
So when they first looked, it was the year 2020 and they looked at the period between year 2000 and 2020. And now they are looking at that plus the additional 2 years that has passed since last time they looked.
You are ignoring an important piece of evidence: I've told you that I'm on a very slow internet connection. Now, I could be lying about that (I'm not sure how I could prove it to you) but if it is in fact true then that would explain my failure to come up with additional evidence. I have been trying to access drought data directly but it all seems to be hiding behind complex visualizations which I cannot currently access.
However, I think it is telling that so far not a single participant in this conversation has (AFAICT) even tried to get to the actual drought data to see if there is anything there. Somewhere out there, one of you has to be on a high-bandwidth connection, so you could go get the data and settle this, where I currently cannot. That would seem to me to be a more constructive (to say nothing of definitive) way to address this than to accuse me of confirmation bias and rationalizing.
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