For the global warming alarmist community, the inconvenient facts about droughts is that previous climate change produced more severe and longer lasting droughts
Read here. The historical evidence strongly supports that the severe climatic conditions of the Little Ice Age (pre-1850) produced extreme droughts that often affected Georgia and other locations of the Southeast U.S.
A new study of the U.S. Southeast confirms the known facts about droughts. Pederson et al. found that droughts during the end of the Little Ice Age were more severe and of longer duration than those of the 20th and 21st centuries. In essence, previous climate change, especially during cooler periods, produced more extreme climatic conditions in many parts of the world.
"A paper published today in Environmental Research Letters uses tree-ring proxies to reconstruct drought conditions of the American Southeast from 1665 to 2010. The authors find "The reconstruction shows that the recent droughts are not unprecedented over the last 346 years. Indeed, droughts of extended duration occurred more frequently between 1696 and 1820. Our results indicate that the era in which local and state water supply decisions were developed and the period of instrumental data upon which it is based are amongst the wettest since at least 1665." [N. Pederson, A. R. Bell, T. A. Knight, C. Leland, N. Malcomb, K. J. Anchukaitis, K. Tackett, J. Scheff, A. Brice, B. Catron, W. Blozan, J. Riddle 2012: Environmental Research Letters]
Conclusion: The empirical, inconvenient facts about droughts is that they have been found to be more frequent and more severe during cooler climate change regimes.
Previous drought-flood, climate-history, peer-reviewed postings.