I occasionally check out the map on the drought monitor website. The current map does not look significantly different than maps I have seen over the past 10 years.
The areas of extreme drought may change each year, but the total area affected seems rather ordinary to me.
Duration, duration, duration.
The US southwest is now in the longest period of severe drought in at least 1200 years.
And we're still selling what little water we have to foreign & domestic corporations for a fraction of what residential citizens pay.
We are also refusing to maintain critical water-system infrastructure, setting ourselves up to lose critical water storage capacity [1].
We can get fined for washing our cars at certain times (although it's rarely enforced), but nobody ever turns the screws on the business machine.
[1] https://fox5sandiego.com/news/local-news/north-county/plan-f...
Exactly. I feel like people forget about statistics and trends when it comes to the climate.
Nearly every long term trend and statistics shows climate and environmental conditions getting worse, and it's almost solely due to human activity.
Cherry picking short term events isn't useful, especially when the climate getting worse often means an increase in the duration between normal events and an increase in extreme weather.
not including California? The California drought recently ended and now all the reservoirs are quite full.