…is too big to fail.
We need the rain, but I suspect we’ll get a lot of it in places that hurt rather than help. But the old saying is that droughts always end with floods. And it’s not clear that the drought will be over with a single wet winter. There’s a lot of snowpack to build and reservoirs to fill to get back to sufficient margin.
The remnants of Hurricane Ono just hit southern Alaska/BC. Quite a remarkable occurrence. The Central Pacific hurricane season has been the most active on record.
“seven out of every 10 years are dry”
Do Californians realize this or are they in denial about their historical climate? Dry is normal and yet people seem to expect otherwise.
Hope you guys are working on more ways to save some of that rain water.
We’ll save some of it in the locak mountain reservoirs, but almost everything that falls in the LA basin ends up in the ocean pretty quickly.
Here in Western Washington, we had a couple years back-to-back that pretty much exposed the mentality, competence, and planning of the powers that control the dams and reservoirs. I can’t recall which years they were precisely, but something like 09 and 10.
One year’s winter was wet-and-snowy. Record snowpacks and total precipitation in the mountains. And Seattle was having water rationing before we reached July. (It was the mild “No watering on XX days!” sort, but … rationing. Nearly inside a rain forest.)
There was a broohaha and some political hay – through August-October-ish.
The very next year was a nearly-a-record-low precipitation. And … no rationing of any sort. Not one peep..
I’ve heard nothing about trying to exploit the huge underground aquifer left over from the last ice age that was discovered a couple of years ago off the California coast. Not even any exploratory drilling. Nada. But then again socialists are just as much about rationing for control as they are for “redistributing” wealth.
I grew up in SoCal, and I do remember learning in school (in the late 80’s, so pretty much ancient history) about the yearly averages of rainfall, and how rainfall varied a lot from year to year, with there being more dry years than wet ones. I also remember them saying that the baseline years cited for “average” when planning the aqueduct systems turned out to be from a couple of wetter than normal decades.
Is this stuff still in the school curriculum there?
If I were the representative of the Coachella Valley, I would support a Mississippi River Outlet Pipeline. The old Miss discharges 593,000 cubic feet per second into the Gulf of Mexico, and no one cares after that. So no one should care if California siphoned off 5% of that, to keep the nation’s bread basket going. The output of the Mississippi is 2/3 that of the water consumption of the entire United States, so it should be used as a renewable resource, IMHO.
If the moonbats ruling California weren’t openly hostile to free markets and private resource development I have to believe a solution, or solutions plural, would be in place.
But such solutions would offer insufficient central control and opportunity for graft.