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It's not evidence of anything but your own confirmation bias.

If you can't see why "the first thing I found may not be holding up well to criticism, but since it only took me five minutes to find, there obviously must be a lot more out there" is a bad argument, then you're just rationalizing.



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.

[UPDATE:] Found some drought data:

http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/cas/adai/papers/Dai-drought_WIRES201...




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