That kind of long-term perspective makes it difficult to attribute recent droughts solely to human influences. But, oddly, it’s entirely absent from the 2014 National Climate Assessment. The subsequent CSSR of 2017 doesn’t offer any figure like our Figures 7.9 and 7.10, but it does have half a page of text describing the past millennium.25 Alas, it then spends about twice as long discussing the then most recent six-year California drought, which that state’s governor had declared over six months before the CSSR was released.
