I only found one article. GP linked to the data that the article is based on, showing a day when California was almost drought-free but still had abnormally dry areas.
There’s ample dishonesty to go round, no one has to miss out if they don’t want to.
Arguably, there are an infinite number of things that are dishonest, and only a finite number of things that can be honest at any given moment.
Therefore one can honestly say that there are effectively zero honest things, and the entirety of human thought and speech, the noosphere as it where, is the singular dishonesty.
I'm not sure that "effectively zero" is quite right; "approximately zero" seems more correct. And on that note, there are also approximately zero instances in the history of the universe where someone has responded to your comment, but hey look, I'm doing it now!
This might be a stupid question, but if "drought" means "abnormally dry" yet an area is in "drought" 90% of the time, does that not just mean the definition of drought is wrong?
It would be more accurate to say that dry periods in california are just "normal weather" and the occasional wet periods are the abnormal weather.
I enjoy the rare periods when it's sunny in the UK, but I wouldn't refer to a typical cloudy period as a "sun drought" because the sun is what's abnormal
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
The idea that California is now "free of drought" is funny, it may be technically correct by the way the word drought is used, but it doesn't mean the underlying factors that contributed to the likelihood and severity of recent decades of drought have improved - it just means we got a lot of precipitation now, but another dry year and we'll be back in drought again.
It's not quite as simple as that though - in most places, especially California, water shortages are not a simple natural imbalance between the amount of rain that falls and how much flows out in rivers and streams.
If demand is far higher than supply due to overuse by industry that's definitely a water shortage - there isn't enough of it, and something is probably suffering as a result. I don't think that's a useful definition of drought though. If someone builds a massive factory consuming 100s of millions of gallons of water per day that's definitely going to cause a problem but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that there's suddenly a drought.
I think the definition of drought is instead current rainfall compared to historical average - which then leads to the question of if the change is just that rainfall has now been low for so long the historical average has changed, or if rainfall has actually improved. I don't think the article addressed this, but I only skimmed it so maybe I missed it.
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
All I'm saying is that people or no people, wet or dry, there is an actual calculation and a drought scale. The conversation seems to be wanting to place 'blame', but you can have droughts anywhere, under a lot of conditions (like people moved in) for lots of reasons.
I looked it up
Calculating drought involves comparing current conditions (precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water levels) to historical norms using standardized indices like the Palmer Drought Index (PDSI) or the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which measure water supply/demand imbalances over short or long periods to assign severity levels (e.g., D0 Abnormally Dry to D4 Exceptional Drought).
A common method uses indices that turn negative as drought intensifies, with thresholds indicating different drought stages, often combined with expert analysis for the official U.S. Drought Monitor.
Common Drought Indices
Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI):
Uses precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture.
Calculates water supply and demand.
Values: Below -0.5 indicates drought; below -2.0 is moderate.
Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI):
Focuses on precipitation deficits at various timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6 months).
Classifies drought: e.g., -1.0 to -1.49 is Moderate, -2.0 or less is Extreme.
Yes exactly, saudi arabia doesn't have an ideal amount of rainfall for providing water to people and growing crops, but nobody say it's in a "drought".
It would be nice if it rained more in california, but we can't base definitions on what we'd ideally like to happen
Would help if the water heavy industries moved to areas with actual water to spare but that ain't gonna happen when the cost of water management is mostly dumped on tax payers and not companies using it
.. loosely inspired by the California water wars—early 20th-century conflicts over water rights that enabled Los Angeles to access resources from the Owens Valley.
Bone dry here in Utah. Just as local government has been lowering their guard on the Great Salt Lake issue due to a couple strong snowpack years. Really hope we're proactive in response to the lack of snow.
Unironically, wet / dry cycles isn't good news for California either.
Research published in the aftermath of the fire examines how this extremely wet to extremely dry weather sequence is especially dangerous for wildfires in Southern California because heavy rainfall leads to high growth of grass and brush, which then becomes abundant fuel during periods of extreme dryness.
I wonder how much of an effect human activity has on these cycles. Obviously, there are cycles within nature that don't include human activity but is this particular "equilibrium" (if we could call it that) the result of human settlements and all that entails or have they always happened this way but without a huge chunk of the population being in the midst of these modulations to witness it and be affected by it.
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
Huge amount, but maybe not in the way you intended.
Many of California's ecosystems have evolved to expect fires. Humans can't stand fires and aggressively put them out. So fuel that would be regularly burned off in mild wildfires instead builds up into megafires that exceed the limits of what the ecosystem can handle (a lot of California trees are fire-tolerant, but there's a point where the flames get too high and too intense).
So yeah, the human activity that affects these cycles is caused by our cognitive dissonance and fear to phrases like "mild wildfire".
Depends on how you quantify human impact. Lodgepole Pine (for example) is fire adapted. That's not something that evolved overnight. So it's safe to say that broad swaths of California have been experiencing a feast-famine cycle since before humanity developed agriculture.
Most of the actual wild fires just get put out. The big ones are happening because the build up is too big since all the smaller ones have been put out. It's all in service of the forestry industry.
what difference does the cause make if the end result is exactly the same as a natural event?
secondly, you could just as easily make this a case against CA environmental restrictions on logging. How many houses could have been built with those trees that went up in smoke? How many people could have been employed by the lumber industry? Now all those "green" trees are CO2 warming the atmosphere. It's almost as if CA wants crises (housing, employment, environment) because it gives their politicians more money and power.
Well, for starters, the Dixie Fire burned nearly a million acres and huge swaths of the Plumas and Lassen National Forests - the largest and most expensive fire in California history. It burned 70% of Lassen National Park.
I agree that forests are an economic resource and would argue that a fire, caused by humans and exacerbated by human forest management, is a devastating outcome economically. These aren’t wildfires that are merely periodically clearing the forest floor allowing for better forest propagation, they’re burning hot enough to kill everything - trees, soil, and anything in between. Along many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California, you can see aspects of slopes that have been burned at various times over decades and see that those forests burned are struggling to come back. I hiked the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail this past summer and would argue that I have a decent sense of the status quo of the scope and qualities of the devastation of forest fire in those forests affected by those fires I’ve cited.
What difference does it make?
1. These aren’t forest regenerating/undergrowth clearing events - they’re apocalyptic in their devastation. A million acres unnecessarily burned in the Dixie Fire.
2. Forests are limited, threatened resources. Muir wrote a passage calling the sheep herd he was tending in his first summer in his beloved Sierra “hooved locusts” but managed to rationalize the devastation wrought by those sheep immediately after by reasoning that there still remain thousands of untouched high Sierra meadows. Just as there aren’t a thousand Tuolumne Meadows, there aren’t a thousand Lassen or Plumas National Forests. Every single one is irreplaceable on a timeframe that takes into account forest regeneration and the scale of these fires.
3. Paradise, CA. was completely devastated by the Camp Fire - the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history - and started by poorly maintained PG&E power infrastructure. Lahaina, Hawaii was utterly devastated in a similar fashion by a fire with a similar causes Even ignoring that our forests are being irrevocably destroyed, human caused forest fires are engulfing and destroying entire communities, killing people unable to evacuate ahead of wind driven firestorms.
4. Besides forest health, threat to life and property, here’s one that I’d actually expect to land: the threat posed by increasingly powerful fires started by humans and exacerbated by human activity (including the forest management you cited) driven by increasingly extreme weather conditions and events is going to make home insurance untenable. People are already being widely priced out of insurance markets whose actuaries are now pricing in risks that include potential for outcomes like every single home in Lahaina/Paradise/Malibu/Santa Monica is devastated.
What does it matter? Well, even handwaving away the devastation wrought on our forests by man made fire, those fires that affect you and your home insurance bill are essentially that complete set of fires that aren’t naturally occurring events. You don’t have to take my word for it - an actuary will have you understanding it sooner or later.
Not great up here in Vancouver either - lots of rain but not snow. The problem with this is that even though we'll have full reservoirs at the start of the summer, when the rain ends, we deplete the lakes rapidly, and that slope downward gets steeper every year. It really makes me think that we'll need more dams, more reservoirs, to hold in more of the precious fresh water rather than letting it all run out. All winter long the rivers have been at really high flow rates because the lakes are full and the dams are wide open letting it go... but we'll miss that water in a few months!
Damn, is this the first time ever the east coast is doing better than Colorado? We’ve had record snowfalls all over Quebec, I spent all day last Friday skiing in a foot of fresh powder. Unheard of on the ice coast*.
*not literally. But still, crazy amount of snow this year so far
I've lived in California my whole life (and the same town for most of that). This was the most rain I can remember in decades and the most "destruction" I've seen caused by it. Between the ground being saturated and wind before/after/during the storms there were plenty of downed trees.
We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.
California is big, and the LA basin can be extremely dry. For me this is the most I’ve seen since the one bad el nino season in the 90’s, but that one didn’t last nearly as long. It seems normal the last few years to get winter storm conditions that last months.
2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.
Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.
I wish I'd missed it. We had 12 feet of snow in 3 weeks where I live in the Sierra, and we're only at 4,500 feet above sea level. We average several feet a year, so we know snow, but not 12 feet in 3 weeks. We couldn't see out of our windows. I spent 3-8 hours a day for 3 weeks clearing snow from our driveway and cul-de-sac, only to have to wait longer for the county to clear the road beyond. We were running out of places to put the snow we cleared. Towards the end, people could no longer clear their roofs because the snow on the ground was so high. Decks collapsed everywhere, as did several roofs. There was no getting out for supplies, emergencies, etc. The ski resort nearest us closed because it was too difficult to get there.
Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.
The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.
I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.
The statewide rain totals for the 2025-2026 water year so far rank 6th out of the years of the 21st century, so aren't that remarkable in context. Do you live in a place that got slapped with a peculiarly high rainfall?
California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.
This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.
We're north of Los Angeles and the area has never really handled rain well. This is also entirely anecdotal having lived here for ~35 years.
Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.
That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.
I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.
Well, it’s also not what I was thinking about. There were some huge floods. It may have been more than a year ago. When you get to my age, time does weird things.
Nevermind. It’s not something that’s worth any agita. It’s obvious that it’s not something that left many scars.
Same with SoCal - it's the size of NY State. CA's big and somewhat evenly populated (at least compared to similar states out east) so there's inevitably some form of environmental issue somewhere. Not to minimize these incidents ofc.
Heavy rain is usually very localized. I live in Norcal and I've seen many situations where we were getting hammered with multiple inches an hour while a few dozen miles away it wasn't raining at all, and vice versa. So even in a wet year whether your neighborhood gets slammed is a crap shoot.
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
People also forget ARkStorm scenarios, which involve rains akin to 1861-1862, submerging the whole of the Central Valley. Likely several times worse in damages than the biggest earthquake possible in California.
> And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
Just as true with economic cycles and so many other things.
I read that recently and meant to look up the reality of that cycle. I mostly pay attention to ENSO but looking it up now I see there is a 15-30 year PDO cycle.
I think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them.
It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
Ahh but don't you know? A picture is worth a thousand words, so your charts would be upping the measures word count, not reducing it by an order of magnitude
Previous CA resident anecdata, I remember droughts being a normal part of life in central CA 1990-early 2000s. Don't run sprinklers during certain hours, odd/even watering, "the water bill" exclaimations, etc. Like another commentor mentioned I don't anticipate this will last, but it's nice to see the "official" state change even if for a bit.
I recall rather absurd demands such as telling restaurants not to offer water (as if a glass of water makes
any difference) and telling residents to skip showers.
That was widely ridiculed, but despite how it sometimes seems policy makers are not so stupid to believe saving water from cups not drunk would make a meaningful difference directly.
One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
This is a great example of how patronizing policies developed by intellectual authorities backfire in the real world.
The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?
Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
There is a base amount of water that everybody uses as a basic necessity, and then there is water used on top of that for water hungry lawns that is not. If all you can do is set a flat, non-progressive, water usage rate, the wealthy people who use a disproportionate amount of water will not change their behavior.
The same anti-tax Republicans who gave California the disastrous Proposition 13 also gave us Proposition 218. The people in charge of water policy know what they're doing better than you do, but their hands are tied by the voters. https://www.ppic.org/blog/prop-218s-ongoing-impacts-on-calif...
I'm always surprised when people think they know something better than the professionals and just complain about it to other non-professionals. Just explain your idea to the professionals. If it's actually reasonable, they will change what they do. I have done this successfully with local governments many times.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.
Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.
I don't know why California's electricity costs so much, but the gas prices are high due to regulation distorting the market. California has special California gas produced only at in-state refineries. It's for a good cause--California's gas, "CARB gas" is cleaner. But the gas market in California is segregated from the wider US market
> Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
No, the amount of water conserved through these measures was absolutely meaningless even at scale. You are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of use.
Yeah. Farmers measure water use in acre-feet and assess flows at thousands of gallons per minute range.
The food in your plate consumes far more water than a glass of water. If anything, more water and less food eaten would be a good water conservation measure.
I remember during one drought, the day the LA Department of Water and Power was going to declare water rationing, we got, some crazy number, 7-8" of rain in the basin.
We got so much, we got "Lake San Fernando Valley" as the Sepulveda Dam did the job it was put up to do all those years ago and flooded. People had to move so fast (behind the dam is the a large park and recreation area, no homes were directly impacted) they abandoned their cars, and, later, divers with scuba gear were being arrested for looting them.
Isn't this the same state where the rich people water their plush lawns even in the peak of summer during drought?
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
No, this is the state where the vast vast vast majority of water is used in incredibly inefficient agricultural practices because those consumers were allocated water "Rights" in a stupid system over a hundred years ago and have never had to pay market rates for water and are therefore not incentivized to do anything to not waste water.
Instead, factions are heavily incentivized, by the way that water rights system works, to spend millions insisting that Californians must use an even smaller fraction of the state's water budget than they already do.
Wait, the richest state does not price water usage properly?! So rich elites are paying low price for water, even though the region can have droughts?
(I mentioned "richest state" because a rich state should tax the wealthy more, and subsidize basic amenities for the poor. So if poor pay less for water, it's okay, because the wealthy pay a pricier rate for water, so they don't tend to waste water.)
This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
But what is even more ridiculous is when prudent citizens are fined for conserving water during drought.
Like, that entire saga about the "Delta smelt" was manufactured by a lobbying group who serve a group of rich farm companies who have very junior water rights.
California has a "dual" water rights system. "Appropriative" rights the stupidity is called. If you claimed a shitload of water back in the 1800s as "yours", you still have total claim over that water today, and most who came after you to claim water have less right to water than you do. These rights resolve first come, first serve, and "In times of shortage the most recent (“junior”) right holder must be the first to discontinue such use".
The way these rights interact is such that, the oldest "claim" will never ever ever have to reduce their water usage, even if things are utterly drastic. This water rights system is simply divorced from reality. Californian farmers have no reason to adopt more sustainable or conservative methods of farming.
The "riparian" water rights supposedly carry higher privilege than those old rights, but "all riparian rightsholders share the burden of conservation in times of shortage", and the water claims work differently, so they interact in awful ways.
The complex and outright stupid interaction of these rights mean you as someone with a really shitty appropriative water right benefits much more from getting the rest of the state to use less water than you benefit from yourselves using water more efficiently.
>This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
I'm not saying that everyone who waters their lawn during a drought is an appropriative rightsholder. I think it's mostly agricultural users. In fact, I am directly saying that caring at all about the 10% of Californian water usage that is municipal is a distraction. Hell, California goes so far as to classify 50% of "water usage" as "environmental" when what that actually means is water that you didn't take out of the stream, to help make it look less bad that in terms of actual water used, it's 80% agricultural, 20% urban.
That monumental usage of California's extremely limited water resources accounts, btw, for only 2% of the state's GDP, despite the economics of that grown produce continuing to improve. All of this pain is just to enrich specific individuals, and not that many of them.
"villages"? You're not from here are you? Makes me wonder if internationally you're getting general anti-American propaganda or if Republican anti-California propaganda is leaking worldwide.
If the richest state in the USA cannot do effective seawater desalination project to feed itself, but would rather drain out lakes and rivers from 400+ miles away (thus rendering those places unfit for farming, and forcing the locals there to get water from somewhere else long distance off), and the locals of that richest state happily waste that expensively sourced water during drought years, then it is plain and simple mismanagement of precious water resources.
If you aren't yet terrified of climate change, and if you think such mismanagement of natural resources is sustainable in the long-run, you need a rethink, my friend.
The droughts are going to get worse. Case in point: Madagascar.
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
Read the last line:
[The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Cadillac Desert is the usual recommendation on how f'd water deals are in the West, the Owens Valley landgrab is merely the opening chapter. No argument there.
It's the urban/rural division subtext of the brown lawns and the economically-infeasible desal techno-saviorism that comes off a bit russian botish.
The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas. Brown lawns is pennies in front of the steamroller. Pennies that are effective at stoking urban/rural divisions, but still pennies in the grand scheme of things.
My country is considered to be among the world's most fertile land as it has world's largest rivers, which spew out fresh alluvial soil (very fertile for agriculture).
But when drought hits any corner of my nation, the rich and poor folks alike take extra efforts to conserve water. It is rare to see excess public wastage of water during drought.
Perhaps it is because some parts of this ancient land is already permanently aridified into desert long ago, and the rains can be erratic even during non-drought years. So people have learnt to respect water to a good extent.
To put it into perspective, the vast Sahara desert was once a lush rainforest. Cutting down the jungle trees and mismanagement of water resources by humans, is what turned into a forbidding barren desert.
So it is certainly shocking to see one of the richest lands in the world (which can certainly throw enough money at almost any civic problem), wasting water, especially during drought. And it is shocking and infuriating to see people with common sense (who are conserving water during drought) being punished by the state for doing so.
> The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas.
Wait, what? California owned water is being shipped overseas?!! Even during drought?
I really don't know how to respond to such madness. All I can say such a crime (although , I have a feeling this is somehow legal) should be considered like a felony at the very least.
I heard California got a good governor. While other states have been de-funding public schools and suspensing school launches for the poor kids, he is ensuring the opposite, so such compassion will help to school and grow the new generations to be better contributors to society and nation. Maybe you Californians ought to do some mass-signatures campaign writing to him and other officials, urging them to reform the unethical historical laws and corrupt policies on water rights.
Ah, my bad, you are right. LA is not the capital of California. Thanks for the correction, appreciate it!
But I guess the relevance of my point still stands.
Rich regions need to do better at water management. They cannot simply keep crying wolf (whining about droughtsand water scarcity), when their bad water-infrastructure planning and bad practices (e.g., watering big laws during severe droughts) are exacerbating the problems.
From what I can gather online, Florida seems to have double the desalinatiom plants than California. So definitely, California can do a lot better at civic infrastructure, especially for water management.
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
California is richest state in USA, it's is richer than many countries, it can afford such cost. Florida has more than double the desalination plants than California, and it is poorer than California.
Read the last line: [The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Okay so we went from California should use desalination plans because Florida does even though that was factualy incorrect to we just need to build a couple of nuclear reactors
Putting politics aside there would still be a large cost and environmental impact to that
You were the one who mentioned that desalination plants are huge cost and needs lots of electricity.
I've merely rebutted those excuses with logical answers.
California's GDP is $4.1 trillion. If it were a country, it would be world's 4th largest economy!
So its wealth can be directly compared to India, which is $4.5 trillion GDP and recently overtook Japan to become world's 4th largest economy.
Humanity has not yet found a better alternative to massive energy supply than nuclear reactors. Solar & windmill technology are getting better as well for energy tapping and efficiency.
But California's largest solar plant (~500 MW capacity) is shutting down in 2026, due to "high operating costs", and the other few solar farms in the state are smaller capacity farms.
Meanwhile, China and India have world's largest solar farms, and are building more. They also have huge wind farms, and are experimenting alternative new methods such as tidal-wave based energy generation.
China controls 11 of the top 15 largest solar farms globally, with the Gonghe Talatan Solar Park leading at 15.6 GW capacity – equivalent to Singapore’s entire land area and capable of powering millions of homes annually. capacity of the solar parks shall be 500 MW and above.
India's solar power installed capacity was 135.81 GW as of 31 December 2025, which will be tripled to 300 GW approximately by 2030. Indian government has mandated that new solar farms must be above 500MW capacity. (However, smaller parks are also considered where contiguous land may be difficult to acquire in view of difficult terrain and where there is acute shortage of non-agricultural land.)
California gets a lot of sunshine and wind, why doesn't it do the needful to resolve its water mismanagement by doing better in large-scale seawater-desalination and energy-generation/harvesting ?
The answer is obvious: because it doesn't want to.
California prefers to waste water because it is accustomed to bleeding other water-rich regions dry, and no one is bothered to bell the cat: to leverage California's immense wealth to permanently resolve its water woes by massive seawater-desalination projects and huge solar & wind farms supported by a nuclear reactor or two (yes, nuclear reactors are not eco-friendly, but they are only energy-rich solutions for massive energy needs; neither are solar or wind farms really evo-friendly as their broken equipments typically don't get recycled properly and end up in landfills.)
Past: I live in a large coastal city, which gets its energy mostly from a nuclear reactor, and few small-scale solar farms & wind farms. The city/district is also prone to droughts, but it gets its daily water from seawater desalination plants, couple of rivers, and some lakes as rain water catchment areas. The local government here also mandated rainwater harvesting to be done by every building (they catch rainwater on their roof terraces, it gets piped down to water dumps/tanks, and they use that water till it lasts.) The city/district take extra care to try not to lose precious rain water, so it manages drought seasons well. The city/district does NOT pipe its water from other regions, so nearby regions don't blame the city/district for bleeding then dry of their precious water.
strange because this is one of the warmest winters in decades. snow levels are far below normal, i saw 8% of normal in truckee. full reservoirs now are great but keeping them filled depends on a long snow melt going into june. i don’t think this is going to be a good year for that
It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.
The warmth partially explains the rain. Storms far across the pacific have formed and traveled east to land on California. Unfortunately it also means, as you said, we can't capture as much of it as snow pack.
Note that these indicators are looking at the drought monitor which just tracks soil moisture. There are active efforts underway to develop more comprehensive looks at precip and storage (snow, ground, reservoir etc)
The southern end of the central valley (San Joaquin region, whole central valley is outlined in red) is particularly hard-hit by groundwater depletion. Some of that storage does not come back, because the ground compacts after the groundwater is withdrawn.
And is the only state with no drought right now. Although they way they figure it is a bit biased -- it's based on how much water there is compared to historical values, so it's easier to be "drought free" if you've been in a drought for a while.
Yeah hey but for real. The news is focused on California droughts all the time, but my part of flyover country is very, very dry. Like ponds that have never been empty are dry, sort of thing. It's getting bad. . . And we grow all your food.
Between this and all the political nonsense that's happening right now, I feel like a passenger that's noticed the car is out of control while the driver is still opening his beer.
California actually produced the most food of any state. :). But I know what you mean, the water is just as critical in the middle of the country as it is on the edges. Water is critical everywhere, and this problem is just going to get worse and worse.
California leads in the value of goods sold, because it produces a lot of relatively expensive agricultural products like almonds, avocados, tomatoes, etc. Additionally, it’s a larger state, so it naturally will inflate the totals. If you look at food staples, and at the amount produced by square mile, the Midwest is definitely the main food producer of the US.
A 1 square mile state that produced nothing but wheat would beat any other state in terms of “amount of staples produced per square mile,” but it wouldn’t be able to sustain a population. That’s not a useful metric.
It absolutely is about storage capacity. If California built out a better system of reservoirs, it wouldn't need to take water from other states in the Colorado river basin.
Sure, I'm not saying they don't, but it isn't a critical crop for day to day life, biologically speaking. No one is going to die for not eating almonds.
We don’t decide what to grow based on what someone decides is “critical for living.” We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost. Some countries in the Eastern Hemisphere tried the first way and it didn’t work out very well.
Sure - the problem is that the almond farmers are being incentivized to grow almonds by giving them a significantly below market cost. If the the costs reflected reality, almonds wouldn’t be profitable.
Municipal water users subsidize the growth of those almonds because of a water rights system that was imagined when California was mostly empty.
Agricultural users should be free to pay market rates for their water like everyone else. They will absolutely still be able to make a profit growing almonds since they basically own the market.
California has already invested a lot into reservoirs. In fact, as a pilot, I recall noticing that nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs. I doubt there is much room left for economically building more; all the easy ones have been taken, and more. Surely the cost benefit of just investing a lot into desalination must be getting close.
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
I wasn't aware of the Doheny project, thanks! But it seems that that project timeline is at least as long as the one CCC killed.
With these kinds of timelines and that kind of regulatory risk, I don't think large-scale desalination is going to fix California's drought issues, regardless of whether it could.
We only have one because the Coastal Commision issued one for a plant around 1990 in a previous drought. The permit was maintained through to the current drought, at which point the Coastal Commission tried to get it shut down, but they lost since it was already permitted. Note that maintenance on the plant during the wet years was contentious; I don't know how it polled, but there were vocal people complaining about it, since it was barely used. Had those people prevailed, water would have been much dearer in the most recent drought.
Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
What is the price of desalinated water vs water that literally falls from the sky.
They both need to be chlorinated and piped to the end user, but desalinated water is typically at the wrong end of existing delivery infrastructure to take advantage of it.
And irrigators often have things like God deliver much of their water via rain, rivers etc.
So it stands to reason that desalinated water must be much more expensive.
Did reverse osmosis suddenly become energetically inexpensive while I wasn’t paying attention?
Did we build a bunch of nuclear power plants by the coast to use the waste heat for flash distillation?
Did brine disposal suddenly become a trivial issue to solve?
> nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Could use some large scale geo-engineering. Pity that we don't have a radiation-free way of blowing a gigantic hole into the ground that can store a few trillion litres.
Probably bad idea, and definitely 'Need to bid it to responsible parties' question but would there be a way to safely use even separated 'landfill refuse' to build significant parts of the enclosing structure?
That’s almost always going to be cheaper to source from a nearby quarry than municipal sorting centres when you’re talk multiple millions of cubic meters.
I've lived in California for 20 years so this is my first year of non-draught. We've been enjoying the unusual prevalence of greenery in Orange County.
In the 70s and 80s there were big beautiful thunderstorms. Lightning would crash down for hours and the torrential fall rains would flood streets in north orange county (tri-city area) again and again. It rained so hard I had to take shelter under a tree when I was 8, due to how the rain and wind was threatening to knock me down. It rained for a week straight once, which was memorable. As was the times the rain ruined Halloween (more than once).
In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> Are these done in California?
People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.
California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.
The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.
You need some outflow to carry away salts. Otherwise, the water just evaporates and leaves the salt there, and eventually the land becomes unable to grow crops. This has historically been a serious problem in Mesopotamia, for example.
There has been quite a lot of investment in spreading grounds, aquifer recharging, and stormwater capture. Last year, LA county recaptured enough water to meet the yearly water needs of 2.4 million people.
Does this mean 2.4 million peoples personal drinking and cleaning use in a typical residential area?
Or are they including all the industrial water use those people contribute to by existing? That then includes industrial agriculture, and all industrial water use that enables modern life.
I suspect they mean only the first one, which is at least misleading, and at worst a lie intended to deceive.
Went to Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week and there's miles of (bad) water. Unfortunately the Park Service but the kibosh on paddle boarding, etc. Should be a good bloom this spring.
Hot take, but I find it hard to care very much about water shortages, especially near the coast. A single nuclear power plant dedicated to desalinization would fix the whole problem. That this is still politically infeasible indicates to me that the drought is not really a big deal.
There’s a country in the Middle East that has insufficient natural water supply, and they manage to thrive and be a centre of learning, innovation, industry, and culture.
Water supply and sanitation in Israel are intricately linked to the historical development of Israel, because rain falls only in the winter, and largely in the northern part of the country. Irrigation and water engineering are considered vital to the country's economic survival and growth. Large-scale projects to desalinate seawater, direct water from rivers and reservoirs in the north, make optimal use of groundwater, and reclaim flood overflow and sewage have been undertaken. Among them is the National Water Carrier, carrying water from the country's biggest freshwater lake, the Sea of Galilee, to the northern part of the Negev desert through channels, pipes and tunnels.[4] Israel's water demand today outstrips available conventional water resources. Thus, in an average year, Israel relies for about half of its water supply from unconventional water resources, including reclaimed water and desalination. A particularly long drought in 1998–2002 had prompted the government to promote large-scale seawater desalination. In 2022, 86% of the country's drinkable water was produced through desalination of saltwater and brackish water.
People shouldn't really be celebrating anything here. Wet winters just mean that the much more important snowpack isn't happening:
> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
That is basically doomer nonsense. Of course we can and should celebrate the lack of drought, even if there is some mathematically more optimal way for the precipitation to be falling.
“Despite the welcome relief, climate change is expected to intensify weather swings from heavy rainfall to extreme dryness in a cycle that can fuel catastrophic wildfires.”
…but we’re still fucked and don’t you dare forget it!
The costs of delivering potable water and removing sewage/excess rain from a given lot or area is unrelated to the quantity of rainfall in a timespan measuring less than quite a few years.
Of the $250 of a water bill on Seattle’s Eastside, about $50 of it is something I can do anything about (use less water). The rest is fixed costs even if I never use a drop. It isn’t hard to imagine that California isn’t much different.
This is really cool but please don't attribute this to the success or failure of any politician.
Remind us who it is you think is doing this? No one in the HN comments as of this writing. And what is a politician going to do about weather? One doesn’t make drought go away with policy.
There was one (now-flagged) comment that personally blamed Gavin Newsom for intentionally depleting the reservoirs as part of some nefarious urbanization conspiracy.
> have no more to do with current politics than Trump did with the recent electromagnetic storms
Greenland has fairly strong aurora. Maybe Trump triggered the solar radiation storm to show Americans what Greenland has that they don't. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
All the best sites were built on long ago. Dams require favorable geography. More can be built to squeeze out a bit more storage, but there are diminishing returns.
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california, his office sued over those Trump-era water rules, arguing they violated environmental protections for endangered fish.... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020. So given those facts, I would argue that yes the current Governor is responsible for what happened 100%.
take a look at SB 79 is a 2025 California state law (Senate Bill 79, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener) that overrides local zoning limits to allow higher-density multifamily housing near major public transit stops, signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 10th 2025, despite local resistance by residents.
Gavin Newsom ran on building housing, and SB79 is him fulfilling his mandate from voters, "local resistance by residents" is why California has some of the most expensive housing in the world.
Gavin Newsom also vetoed AB 2903, the bipartisan bill for auditing of California's $24 billion spent and squandered on fixing the homeless problem, which only got worse. SB79 is another example of Newsom intent to change zoning laws to allow developers to build high density housing which is what the parent comment was about. if you want to be a shill for the governor, thats your business. It looks like willfull graft to me.
there would be no drought if the 2020 Federal regulations were followed. the only reason there's no drought today is because the federal government stepped in and finally opened up the water lines in the North coming south.
keep in mind there used to be a big freshwater lake (Tulare Lake) in the middle of California for at least ten thousand years.....
> In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california ... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020.
How would diverting water from Northern California, where drought was the worst in 2020, to the Central Valley possibly end the drought?
Filling up reservoirs that are upstream by moving water downstream sounds like quite the magic trick.
1. Trump’s order in 2020 had nothing to do with fire, so it doesn’t support your position that this has anything to do with fires.
2. The water management plan has nothing to do with where water flows to fight fires.
3. A legal fight in 2020 is not caused by a bill that was passed in 2025.
> there would be no drought in 2020
That’s not how droughts work. A drought is a lack of rainfall. Moving water can reduce the problems caused by a drought, but it cannot prevent a drought.
If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
The new Sites Reservoir and capacity increase of the existing San Luis Reservoir are both expected to start construction this year. Several other recent proposals like the Pacheos Reservoir have been cancelled due to cost but it is not the case that California is doing nothing re: new water infrastructure.
Sites Reservoir isn't going to do a damned thing for municipal water systems in most of the state. You have to remember that there is not such a thing as a statewide municipal water policy. Every city or region has its own thing going on. The Sites capacity is dedicated to its investors, so depending on where you live it could be a helpful resource, or it could be irrelevant.
It does rain in deserts, California isn't mostly desert (about 38% by land area), and drought is defined relative to normal rainfall, so even a place that usually has very low rainfall can have droughts.
And also droughts are defined by lower than normal precipitation. So if it didn't rain in a desert, and it's still not raining in a desert, that wouldn't even be a drought anyway.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1]
Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area.
The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But
there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.
Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.
https://archive.is/aB3c4
Makes for a catchy headline, but you only have to go back to Jan 9, 2024* to find a similarly 'drought free' California:
https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/Maps/CompareTwoWeeks.aspx
(*Technically slivers of the state in the far north/south were 'abnormally dry' in 2024, a small difference from 2026)
For a quicker way to find near-alls you can go to https://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/DmData/DataTables.aspx?state,... and select "All" at the bottom then sort D0-D4 ascending. It looks like 2011 had many dates 0.01 cumulative percent area!
The difference between 0% and almost 0% is mostly a cartographic one
my reaction is pretty much "well, it's middle of winter"
Wait so who is being dishonest, the old article, the new one, or both?
I only found one article. GP linked to the data that the article is based on, showing a day when California was almost drought-free but still had abnormally dry areas.
Both!
yes!
There’s ample dishonesty to go round, no one has to miss out if they don’t want to.
Arguably, there are an infinite number of things that are dishonest, and only a finite number of things that can be honest at any given moment.
Therefore one can honestly say that there are effectively zero honest things, and the entirety of human thought and speech, the noosphere as it where, is the singular dishonesty.
The dishonest-gularity.
I didn’t find this particularly helpful if I’m honest
I'm not sure that "effectively zero" is quite right; "approximately zero" seems more correct. And on that note, there are also approximately zero instances in the history of the universe where someone has responded to your comment, but hey look, I'm doing it now!
This might be a stupid question, but if "drought" means "abnormally dry" yet an area is in "drought" 90% of the time, does that not just mean the definition of drought is wrong?
It would be more accurate to say that dry periods in california are just "normal weather" and the occasional wet periods are the abnormal weather.
I enjoy the rare periods when it's sunny in the UK, but I wouldn't refer to a typical cloudy period as a "sun drought" because the sun is what's abnormal
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
The idea that California is now "free of drought" is funny, it may be technically correct by the way the word drought is used, but it doesn't mean the underlying factors that contributed to the likelihood and severity of recent decades of drought have improved - it just means we got a lot of precipitation now, but another dry year and we'll be back in drought again.
Drought doesn't mean "abnormally dry" though, it means lack of rain resulting in water shortage. And California has had a lot of water shortages.
It's not quite as simple as that though - in most places, especially California, water shortages are not a simple natural imbalance between the amount of rain that falls and how much flows out in rivers and streams.
If demand is far higher than supply due to overuse by industry that's definitely a water shortage - there isn't enough of it, and something is probably suffering as a result. I don't think that's a useful definition of drought though. If someone builds a massive factory consuming 100s of millions of gallons of water per day that's definitely going to cause a problem but I'm not sure it's reasonable to say that there's suddenly a drought.
I think the definition of drought is instead current rainfall compared to historical average - which then leads to the question of if the change is just that rainfall has now been low for so long the historical average has changed, or if rainfall has actually improved. I don't think the article addressed this, but I only skimmed it so maybe I missed it.
> If someone builds a massive factory consuming 100s of millions of gallons of water per day that's definitely going to cause a problem
Lots of factories in Washington, seemingly no problem.
Are you implying 800 miles worth of latitude, along with North Pacific weather in general, is irrelevant?
It’s very relevant,
and the next 200 years of settlers should probably take note,
instead of just continuing to barrel into a place that was unreasonable to live in when it started, and hasn’t changed much in that regard.
I think what he is getting at is : deserts are already dry, what makes a drought in the desert?
It isn't just, a lot of people moved to the desert, so now there is a drought because there isn't enough water.
I don't have reference, but I think there is some definition around change from average.
Drought it something like X months with Y% less precipitation than last 5 year average. or some such calculation.
If you have a fertile abundant landscape covered in old growth forests and marshes, and then cut all the forests, put roads everywhere, and plough up the marshes for farming, the landscape then holds a lot less water and the weather becomes less stable, which can exacerbate natural fluctuations in rainfall and temperature making droughts more common and more severe.
This is effectively what happened to large parts of the middle east that were once fertile and lush. It's a trend all over the world really.
There are many ways humans can work the opposite direction to increase the ability of the land to stabilize the weather and increase hydrological robustness to mitigate droughts, e.g. regenerative agriculture or projects in asia and africa to green the desert, I don't know enough about them but it's a good idea and I hope it's executed well.
All I'm saying is that people or no people, wet or dry, there is an actual calculation and a drought scale. The conversation seems to be wanting to place 'blame', but you can have droughts anywhere, under a lot of conditions (like people moved in) for lots of reasons.
I looked it up
Calculating drought involves comparing current conditions (precipitation, temperature, soil moisture, water levels) to historical norms using standardized indices like the Palmer Drought Index (PDSI) or the Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI), which measure water supply/demand imbalances over short or long periods to assign severity levels (e.g., D0 Abnormally Dry to D4 Exceptional Drought).
A common method uses indices that turn negative as drought intensifies, with thresholds indicating different drought stages, often combined with expert analysis for the official U.S. Drought Monitor.
Common Drought Indices
Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI):
Uses precipitation, temperature, and soil moisture. Calculates water supply and demand. Values: Below -0.5 indicates drought; below -2.0 is moderate.
Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI):
Focuses on precipitation deficits at various timescales (e.g., 1, 3, 6 months). Classifies drought: e.g., -1.0 to -1.49 is Moderate, -2.0 or less is Extreme.
Yes exactly, saudi arabia doesn't have an ideal amount of rainfall for providing water to people and growing crops, but nobody say it's in a "drought".
It would be nice if it rained more in california, but we can't base definitions on what we'd ideally like to happen
at least looking at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Droughts_in_California I'd agree with that assessment.
Would help if the water heavy industries moved to areas with actual water to spare but that ain't gonna happen when the cost of water management is mostly dumped on tax payers and not companies using it
.. loosely inspired by the California water wars—early 20th-century conflicts over water rights that enabled Los Angeles to access resources from the Owens Valley.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinatown_(1974_film)
.. By 1926, Owens Lake was completely dry due to water diversion
Ironically, the rest of the country is having a drought:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/01/18/winter-dro...
Bone dry here in Utah. Just as local government has been lowering their guard on the Great Salt Lake issue due to a couple strong snowpack years. Really hope we're proactive in response to the lack of snow.
Same in idaho. We are looking at historic lows for our reservoirs.
Same in Oregon. Snowpack way below normal.
Yeah, I want another 950" of snow at Alta Ski Resort again. That year - 2023 I think, was unreal!
Unironically, wet / dry cycles isn't good news for California either.
I wonder how much of an effect human activity has on these cycles. Obviously, there are cycles within nature that don't include human activity but is this particular "equilibrium" (if we could call it that) the result of human settlements and all that entails or have they always happened this way but without a huge chunk of the population being in the midst of these modulations to witness it and be affected by it.
This might be a good time to recommend you all read the first 5 pages of East of Eden by George Steinbeck. It’s about how the Salinas valley goes through flood and draught cycles, and how every time they’re in one cycle they forget the other one ever happened
For a non-fiction look at the topic of water in California - and really the whole shaping of the state - I highly recommend "Dreamt Land".
*John?
thank you lol
Huge amount, but maybe not in the way you intended.
Many of California's ecosystems have evolved to expect fires. Humans can't stand fires and aggressively put them out. So fuel that would be regularly burned off in mild wildfires instead builds up into megafires that exceed the limits of what the ecosystem can handle (a lot of California trees are fire-tolerant, but there's a point where the flames get too high and too intense).
So yeah, the human activity that affects these cycles is caused by our cognitive dissonance and fear to phrases like "mild wildfire".
Depends on how you quantify human impact. Lodgepole Pine (for example) is fire adapted. That's not something that evolved overnight. So it's safe to say that broad swaths of California have been experiencing a feast-famine cycle since before humanity developed agriculture.
wildfire is part of nature.
Yes, of course, those natural wildfires started by downed power infrastructure [1], bullets [2], and campfires on red flag days [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dixie_Fire
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldor_Fire
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Davis_Fire
Most of the actual wild fires just get put out. The big ones are happening because the build up is too big since all the smaller ones have been put out. It's all in service of the forestry industry.
Veritasium has a great video showing an intuitive simulation of this: https://youtu.be/HBluLfX2F_k?t=1168&si=7IwK98FnIcYV9HnH
Yes, of course human activity causes some fires.
Now do all the other ones started by lightning and lets have a complete list.
Why would I collect the list of the things that I'm specifically not talking about?
what difference does the cause make if the end result is exactly the same as a natural event?
secondly, you could just as easily make this a case against CA environmental restrictions on logging. How many houses could have been built with those trees that went up in smoke? How many people could have been employed by the lumber industry? Now all those "green" trees are CO2 warming the atmosphere. It's almost as if CA wants crises (housing, employment, environment) because it gives their politicians more money and power.
Well, for starters, the Dixie Fire burned nearly a million acres and huge swaths of the Plumas and Lassen National Forests - the largest and most expensive fire in California history. It burned 70% of Lassen National Park.
I agree that forests are an economic resource and would argue that a fire, caused by humans and exacerbated by human forest management, is a devastating outcome economically. These aren’t wildfires that are merely periodically clearing the forest floor allowing for better forest propagation, they’re burning hot enough to kill everything - trees, soil, and anything in between. Along many parts of the Pacific Crest Trail in Northern California, you can see aspects of slopes that have been burned at various times over decades and see that those forests burned are struggling to come back. I hiked the entirety of the Pacific Crest Trail this past summer and would argue that I have a decent sense of the status quo of the scope and qualities of the devastation of forest fire in those forests affected by those fires I’ve cited.
What difference does it make?
1. These aren’t forest regenerating/undergrowth clearing events - they’re apocalyptic in their devastation. A million acres unnecessarily burned in the Dixie Fire.
2. Forests are limited, threatened resources. Muir wrote a passage calling the sheep herd he was tending in his first summer in his beloved Sierra “hooved locusts” but managed to rationalize the devastation wrought by those sheep immediately after by reasoning that there still remain thousands of untouched high Sierra meadows. Just as there aren’t a thousand Tuolumne Meadows, there aren’t a thousand Lassen or Plumas National Forests. Every single one is irreplaceable on a timeframe that takes into account forest regeneration and the scale of these fires.
3. Paradise, CA. was completely devastated by the Camp Fire - the deadliest and most destructive fire in California history - and started by poorly maintained PG&E power infrastructure. Lahaina, Hawaii was utterly devastated in a similar fashion by a fire with a similar causes Even ignoring that our forests are being irrevocably destroyed, human caused forest fires are engulfing and destroying entire communities, killing people unable to evacuate ahead of wind driven firestorms.
4. Besides forest health, threat to life and property, here’s one that I’d actually expect to land: the threat posed by increasingly powerful fires started by humans and exacerbated by human activity (including the forest management you cited) driven by increasingly extreme weather conditions and events is going to make home insurance untenable. People are already being widely priced out of insurance markets whose actuaries are now pricing in risks that include potential for outcomes like every single home in Lahaina/Paradise/Malibu/Santa Monica is devastated.
What does it matter? Well, even handwaving away the devastation wrought on our forests by man made fire, those fires that affect you and your home insurance bill are essentially that complete set of fires that aren’t naturally occurring events. You don’t have to take my word for it - an actuary will have you understanding it sooner or later.
welcome to australia
Colorado is having a record low snow season. It's been tough for skiing.
Not great up here in Vancouver either - lots of rain but not snow. The problem with this is that even though we'll have full reservoirs at the start of the summer, when the rain ends, we deplete the lakes rapidly, and that slope downward gets steeper every year. It really makes me think that we'll need more dams, more reservoirs, to hold in more of the precious fresh water rather than letting it all run out. All winter long the rivers have been at really high flow rates because the lakes are full and the dams are wide open letting it go... but we'll miss that water in a few months!
Solar panels can also help, as BC gets long sunny days when the reservoirs are low.
Damn, is this the first time ever the east coast is doing better than Colorado? We’ve had record snowfalls all over Quebec, I spent all day last Friday skiing in a foot of fresh powder. Unheard of on the ice coast*.
*not literally. But still, crazy amount of snow this year so far
Neighboring ski areas in Maine have just so so snow. NOAA Northeast snowpack map. One of my favorites.
https://www.weather.gov/images/nerfc/ops/nohrsc_full_sd.png
I usually use this one but the previous includes Quebec.
https://www.weather.gov/images/nerfc/ops/NOHRSC_SD_highcontr...
You're all in California's rain shadow.
I've lived in California my whole life (and the same town for most of that). This was the most rain I can remember in decades and the most "destruction" I've seen caused by it. Between the ground being saturated and wind before/after/during the storms there were plenty of downed trees.
We were also down to running sprinklers once a week (lawns are silly), but have had them off entirely for a bit now.
Spent 7+ years north of Truckee. There have been wetter/more snow years.
California is big, and the LA basin can be extremely dry. For me this is the most I’ve seen since the one bad el nino season in the 90’s, but that one didn’t last nearly as long. It seems normal the last few years to get winter storm conditions that last months.
2025 was the coolest summer I’ve ever experienced living where I do near the coast with an onshore breeze that is now frigid and very wet at times. I usually get fog now in times of the year it rarely happened - almost like san francisco’s notorious summers.
Tracking local weather patterns used to be part of my last career so this stuff I notice pretty well.
not even close to 2023 or 2017 seasons here in norcal, not by a mile...
I am so sad I missed 2023. But now I have the skills to really enjoy the next dump.
I wish I'd missed it. We had 12 feet of snow in 3 weeks where I live in the Sierra, and we're only at 4,500 feet above sea level. We average several feet a year, so we know snow, but not 12 feet in 3 weeks. We couldn't see out of our windows. I spent 3-8 hours a day for 3 weeks clearing snow from our driveway and cul-de-sac, only to have to wait longer for the county to clear the road beyond. We were running out of places to put the snow we cleared. Towards the end, people could no longer clear their roofs because the snow on the ground was so high. Decks collapsed everywhere, as did several roofs. There was no getting out for supplies, emergencies, etc. The ski resort nearest us closed because it was too difficult to get there.
Immediately after, we had a foot of rain in two weeks. That took care of much of the snow. But it also washed away significant roads (along with several feet of earth beneath them), some of which took a year or more to get back open.
The ground was so saturated that many septic systems failed in my neighborhood, some with water running into the houses through toilets/drains because the underground water table on the high side of their property was above those drains (artesian springs aren't so charming when they are coming through your septic system and out of your toilet). Most of those folks have installed one-way valves now, but that still means you can't flush in such scenarios because the water has nowhere to go. Ours didn't flow in reverse, but our drains/toilets stopped draining for ~2 months.
I like winter weather, but I'd be happy to never relive Feb/Mar of 2023 in the Sierra. I'll still take it over the floods that happen in valleys and flat lands as a result of such events.
If it makes you feel better 2017 was way better =) incredible conditions all the way into mid May. I was skiing palisades at squaw on 4th of July
The statewide rain totals for the 2025-2026 water year so far rank 6th out of the years of the 21st century, so aren't that remarkable in context. Do you live in a place that got slapped with a peculiarly high rainfall?
California is big! That's also why there have technically been small parts of California which have been in drought for the last few years while most of the state is in good shape.
This year, Southern California is having a wet year while most of Northern California is having a relatively dry one.
We're north of Los Angeles and the area has never really handled rain well. This is also entirely anecdotal having lived here for ~35 years.
Some of the towns in our county have developments built on floodplanes. In our neighborhood, only some streets have storm drains so many of them flood. On one of the main roads numerous trees fell over damaging walls and homes.
That last set of storms that really stands out were the El Niño events in the early oughts.
I wonder if overall rainfall doesn't tell the whole story. From my experience in SF (and admittedly CA is big and people will have very different experiences) there has been an enormous amount of rainfall early in the season and then another enormous amount over the holidays, but the rest has been dry. The total may not be that much but the acute heavy storms have been pretty intense.
Weren't there massive floods, in the Bay Area, last year?
The Bay Area is the size of Massachusetts. Depends on where in the Bay.
I guess I'm wrong. It was south of the Bay area. I live in NY, but I remember hearing from friends in CA that it got very bad.
I think this story is only the latest one:
https://www.reuters.com/business/environment/more-rain-expec...
That article is about flooding that is about as far from the Bay Area as Suffolk, VA is from New York City.
It's in California but California is...large. Especially along the North-South axis.
Well, it’s also not what I was thinking about. There were some huge floods. It may have been more than a year ago. When you get to my age, time does weird things.
Nevermind. It’s not something that’s worth any agita. It’s obvious that it’s not something that left many scars.
Same with SoCal - it's the size of NY State. CA's big and somewhat evenly populated (at least compared to similar states out east) so there's inevitably some form of environmental issue somewhere. Not to minimize these incidents ofc.
Perhaps GP is thinking of last winter?
Heavy rain is usually very localized. I live in Norcal and I've seen many situations where we were getting hammered with multiple inches an hour while a few dozen miles away it wasn't raining at all, and vice versa. So even in a wet year whether your neighborhood gets slammed is a crap shoot.
It's rain on already saturated ground plus wind, which turns into downed trees and infrastructure issues instead of just replenishing water
curious where in CA. in the past 15y ive def. seen more rain lol.
I think this has to be seen as "over some span of time", because a drought is an "over some span of time" thing.
As John Steinback said in East of Eden:
“I have spoken of the rich years when the rainfall was plentiful. But there were dry years too, and they put a terror on the valley. The water came in a thirty-year cycle. There would be five or six wet and wonderful years when there might be nineteen to twenty-five inches of rain, and the land would shout with grass. Then would come six or seven pretty good years of twelve to sixteen inches of rain. And then the dry years would come, and sometimes there would be only seven or eight inches of rain. The land dried up and the grasses headed out miserably a few inches high and great bare scabby places appeared in the valley. The live oaks got a crusty look and the sage-brush was gray. The land cracked and the springs dried up and the cattle listlessly nibbled dry twigs. Then the farmers and the ranchers would be filled with disgust for the Salinas Valley. The cows would grow thin and sometimes starve to death. People would have to haul water in barrels to their farms just for drinking. Some families would sell out for nearly nothing and move away. And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.”
People also forget ARkStorm scenarios, which involve rains akin to 1861-1862, submerging the whole of the Central Valley. Likely several times worse in damages than the biggest earthquake possible in California.
> And it never failed that during the dry years the people forgot about the rich years, and during the wet years they lost all memory of the dry years. It was always that way.
Just as true with economic cycles and so many other things.
Maybe the common person isn’t built to boom/bust for 7 years at a time for the good of the shareholder,
maybe we just want to be somewhat okay the whole time.
the 80 year cycle
I read that recently and meant to look up the reality of that cycle. I mostly pay attention to ENSO but looking it up now I see there is a 15-30 year PDO cycle.
This is practically all that need be said on the topic
That passage is such a good reminder of how long this rhythm has been part of California's identity
Sounds like the addiction cycle.
how to be a novelist: use 10^n words when 10^(n-1) will do.
I think there are authors where this definitely applies and I don’t think Steinbeck is one of them.
It feels analogous to complaining about how Michelangelo painted the Sistine chapel on the ceiling instead of on a canvas where we wouldn’t have to crane our necks to see it.
"yes, I would my steak well done and macerated into an easily digestible paste with no seasoning".
There's more to good prose than just conveying the bare nutrients, y'know?
Here ya go with literally an order of magnitude fewer words:
> The Salinas Valley cycles through wet and dry decades. Droughts cause ruin and exodus, yet people always forget the previous climate phase.
I dunno, doesn't seem to have the same impact on me. Maybe there is something to that whole prose thing.
Maybe he could have just replaced that whole section with a couple graphs showing average rainfall and crop yield for the Salinas Valley.
Ahh but don't you know? A picture is worth a thousand words, so your charts would be upping the measures word count, not reducing it by an order of magnitude
Previous CA resident anecdata, I remember droughts being a normal part of life in central CA 1990-early 2000s. Don't run sprinklers during certain hours, odd/even watering, "the water bill" exclaimations, etc. Like another commentor mentioned I don't anticipate this will last, but it's nice to see the "official" state change even if for a bit.
I recall rather absurd demands such as telling restaurants not to offer water (as if a glass of water makes any difference) and telling residents to skip showers.
That was widely ridiculed, but despite how it sometimes seems policy makers are not so stupid to believe saving water from cups not drunk would make a meaningful difference directly.
One of the big hurdles for changing human behavior at scale is improving awareness. Even people who want to conserve their water usage benefit from frequent reminders to actually make changes stick. Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
This is a great example of how patronizing policies developed by intellectual authorities backfire in the real world.
The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
All this actually does in practice is diminish trust in authorities to make good decisions. If the drought policies are bogus, which other ones are too? Fuel economy standards? Air quality? OSHA?
Instead of this nonsense - just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
Of course, the answer there is usually “Oh but there are special interests that need to be able to consume as much water as they want without paying more for it, even in a drought!” And thus as usual the problem is not the personal conduct of individual citizens but corrupt and spineless politicians who are not actually interested in solving any problems.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
There is a base amount of water that everybody uses as a basic necessity, and then there is water used on top of that for water hungry lawns that is not. If all you can do is set a flat, non-progressive, water usage rate, the wealthy people who use a disproportionate amount of water will not change their behavior.
The same anti-tax Republicans who gave California the disastrous Proposition 13 also gave us Proposition 218. The people in charge of water policy know what they're doing better than you do, but their hands are tied by the voters. https://www.ppic.org/blog/prop-218s-ongoing-impacts-on-calif...
I'm always surprised when people think they know something better than the professionals and just complain about it to other non-professionals. Just explain your idea to the professionals. If it's actually reasonable, they will change what they do. I have done this successfully with local governments many times.
> just allow the market to set the price of water based on what’s available.
I'm 100% with you overall on the basic thrust of your comment, however I can't help but think that if we were adjusting water prices, somehow they'd go up by 60% in the dry years and go down 10% in the wet years.
Maybe that's just because here in California we pay 2x-3x what anyone else in the US pays for electricity, and 50% more than most people pay for gas.
I don't know why California's electricity costs so much, but the gas prices are high due to regulation distorting the market. California has special California gas produced only at in-state refineries. It's for a good cause--California's gas, "CARB gas" is cleaner. But the gas market in California is segregated from the wider US market
> The premise is, the general population is too stupid to do the right thing themselves
This isn't premise, it's observable fact.
> and need to be reminded of the drought by being inconvenienced by completely ineffective performative policies.
This is just evidence that the authorities are also members of the general population.
You didn't use the word "almonds" in this post and for that I commend you.
Well it didn’t work. I don’t elect my representatives to change human behavior at scale.
So you don’t think the government should have any economic policy? No taxes, education, or social welfare services?
What do you elect them for then?
> Being reminded the state is in a drought every time you go to a restaurant was an effective way to keep lots of people regularly conscious of the issue. Even if they complained about the method.
So treating your citizens like cattle.
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> as if a glass of water makes any difference
Just FTR, it's not a single glass of water, it's n glasses of water per day multiplied by some number of days and some number of restaurants
So, more likely, 2 or 3 glasses of water :-)
No, the amount of water conserved through these measures was absolutely meaningless even at scale. You are talking about a fraction of a fraction of a percent of use.
Yeah. Farmers measure water use in acre-feet and assess flows at thousands of gallons per minute range.
The food in your plate consumes far more water than a glass of water. If anything, more water and less food eaten would be a good water conservation measure.
> So, more likely, 2 or 3 glasses of water :-)
When I got here in '91 people told me "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down".
but still allowing developers to build brand new houses and encouraging high-density multi-unit buildings.
I remember during one drought, the day the LA Department of Water and Power was going to declare water rationing, we got, some crazy number, 7-8" of rain in the basin.
We got so much, we got "Lake San Fernando Valley" as the Sepulveda Dam did the job it was put up to do all those years ago and flooded. People had to move so fast (behind the dam is the a large park and recreation area, no homes were directly impacted) they abandoned their cars, and, later, divers with scuba gear were being arrested for looting them.
im not sure you're allowed to state all this! kidding but yeah.
Isn't this the same state where the rich people water their plush lawns even in the peak of summer during drought?
And where 90% of the water for its huge capital city-district (Los Angeles) is not even sourced locally (say, by desalination of seawater, as it is a coastal city), but it's instead piped from hundreds of miles away, while banning the villages at the source locations from using the local rivers/lakes as all that precious water gets piped away to feed the thirsty city-district (Los Angeles)?
No, this is the state where the vast vast vast majority of water is used in incredibly inefficient agricultural practices because those consumers were allocated water "Rights" in a stupid system over a hundred years ago and have never had to pay market rates for water and are therefore not incentivized to do anything to not waste water.
Instead, factions are heavily incentivized, by the way that water rights system works, to spend millions insisting that Californians must use an even smaller fraction of the state's water budget than they already do.
The state needs to reform those water rights.
Wait, the richest state does not price water usage properly?! So rich elites are paying low price for water, even though the region can have droughts?
(I mentioned "richest state" because a rich state should tax the wealthy more, and subsidize basic amenities for the poor. So if poor pay less for water, it's okay, because the wealthy pay a pricier rate for water, so they don't tend to waste water.)
This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
But what is even more ridiculous is when prudent citizens are fined for conserving water during drought.
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
Like, that entire saga about the "Delta smelt" was manufactured by a lobbying group who serve a group of rich farm companies who have very junior water rights.
California has a "dual" water rights system. "Appropriative" rights the stupidity is called. If you claimed a shitload of water back in the 1800s as "yours", you still have total claim over that water today, and most who came after you to claim water have less right to water than you do. These rights resolve first come, first serve, and "In times of shortage the most recent (“junior”) right holder must be the first to discontinue such use".
The way these rights interact is such that, the oldest "claim" will never ever ever have to reduce their water usage, even if things are utterly drastic. This water rights system is simply divorced from reality. Californian farmers have no reason to adopt more sustainable or conservative methods of farming.
>https://www.waterboards.ca.gov/waterrights/board_info/water_...
The "riparian" water rights supposedly carry higher privilege than those old rights, but "all riparian rightsholders share the burden of conservation in times of shortage", and the water claims work differently, so they interact in awful ways.
The complex and outright stupid interaction of these rights mean you as someone with a really shitty appropriative water right benefits much more from getting the rest of the state to use less water than you benefit from yourselves using water more efficiently.
>This is ridiculous. No wonder they are watering lawns and wasting water in other ways during droughts.
I'm not saying that everyone who waters their lawn during a drought is an appropriative rightsholder. I think it's mostly agricultural users. In fact, I am directly saying that caring at all about the 10% of Californian water usage that is municipal is a distraction. Hell, California goes so far as to classify 50% of "water usage" as "environmental" when what that actually means is water that you didn't take out of the stream, to help make it look less bad that in terms of actual water used, it's 80% agricultural, 20% urban.
That monumental usage of California's extremely limited water resources accounts, btw, for only 2% of the state's GDP, despite the economics of that grown produce continuing to improve. All of this pain is just to enrich specific individuals, and not that many of them.
"villages"? You're not from here are you? Makes me wonder if internationally you're getting general anti-American propaganda or if Republican anti-California propaganda is leaking worldwide.
If the richest state in the USA cannot do effective seawater desalination project to feed itself, but would rather drain out lakes and rivers from 400+ miles away (thus rendering those places unfit for farming, and forcing the locals there to get water from somewhere else long distance off), and the locals of that richest state happily waste that expensively sourced water during drought years, then it is plain and simple mismanagement of precious water resources.
If you aren't yet terrified of climate change, and if you think such mismanagement of natural resources is sustainable in the long-run, you need a rethink, my friend.
The droughts are going to get worse. Case in point: Madagascar.
The point raised is valid however. Los Angeles in particular notoriously bad track record when it comes to managing water resources and depriving upstream communities of them.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars
Good catch. The shibboleth revealed the russian bot farmer.
Guess again which nation I'm from.
Of course, it is easier to blame some Big Bad Wolf, when one wants to hide the skeletons in the closet. So you do you.
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
Read the last line: [The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Cadillac Desert is the usual recommendation on how f'd water deals are in the West, the Owens Valley landgrab is merely the opening chapter. No argument there.
It's the urban/rural division subtext of the brown lawns and the economically-infeasible desal techno-saviorism that comes off a bit russian botish.
The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas. Brown lawns is pennies in front of the steamroller. Pennies that are effective at stoking urban/rural divisions, but still pennies in the grand scheme of things.
My country is considered to be among the world's most fertile land as it has world's largest rivers, which spew out fresh alluvial soil (very fertile for agriculture).
But when drought hits any corner of my nation, the rich and poor folks alike take extra efforts to conserve water. It is rare to see excess public wastage of water during drought.
Perhaps it is because some parts of this ancient land is already permanently aridified into desert long ago, and the rains can be erratic even during non-drought years. So people have learnt to respect water to a good extent.
To put it into perspective, the vast Sahara desert was once a lush rainforest. Cutting down the jungle trees and mismanagement of water resources by humans, is what turned into a forbidding barren desert.
So it is certainly shocking to see one of the richest lands in the world (which can certainly throw enough money at almost any civic problem), wasting water, especially during drought. And it is shocking and infuriating to see people with common sense (who are conserving water during drought) being punished by the state for doing so.
> The big scale in water politics is in the colorado river compact and how water rights are bought up by foreign alfalfa farmers to effectively ship water overseas.
Wait, what? California owned water is being shipped overseas?!! Even during drought?
I really don't know how to respond to such madness. All I can say such a crime (although , I have a feeling this is somehow legal) should be considered like a felony at the very least.
I heard California got a good governor. While other states have been de-funding public schools and suspensing school launches for the poor kids, he is ensuring the opposite, so such compassion will help to school and grow the new generations to be better contributors to society and nation. Maybe you Californians ought to do some mass-signatures campaign writing to him and other officials, urging them to reform the unethical historical laws and corrupt policies on water rights.
LA is not the capital. Sacramento in the north, and inland, is.
Ah, my bad, you are right. LA is not the capital of California. Thanks for the correction, appreciate it!
But I guess the relevance of my point still stands.
Rich regions need to do better at water management. They cannot simply keep crying wolf (whining about droughtsand water scarcity), when their bad water-infrastructure planning and bad practices (e.g., watering big laws during severe droughts) are exacerbating the problems.
From what I can gather online, Florida seems to have double the desalinatiom plants than California. So definitely, California can do a lot better at civic infrastructure, especially for water management.
Desalination uses a lot more energy and is higher cost
In the era of solar power saturating the grid in daytime, the energy cost is far less of an issue - At least, I assume California has similar characteristics to Australia in this regard.
There's still cost involved, and solar seems to be around 30% of the total
California is richest state in USA, it's is richer than many countries, it can afford such cost. Florida has more than double the desalination plants than California, and it is poorer than California.
Well first of all Florida absolutely does not do large scale sea water desalination
And second of all when we're talking about large scale electricity needs then cost is obviously not the only concern
>Florida absolutely does not do large scale sea water desalination
The point is that California MUST do large-scale sea-water desalination, and it can certainly afford to do so.
>we're talking about large scale electricity need
A nuclear reactor or two will solve those problems. That's how nations with huge populations and large electricity needs solve that energy problem.
>cost is obviously not the only concern
Talking of cost, the "environmental cost" of its water (mis)management is certainly does not seem to be California's concern.
-------
California couple Fined $500 for brown lawn.. in a drought:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lX3UIZxzJL0
------
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Aqueduct
Read the last line: [The impact of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Project to the Owens Valley region was immediate and detrimental to future agricultural work of local farmers. In 1923, in an effort to increase the water supply, the city of Los Angeles began purchasing vast parcels of land and commenced the drilling of new wells in the region, significantly lowering the level of groundwater in the Owens Valley, even affecting farmers who “did not sell to the city’s representatives.”[44] By 1970, constant groundwater pumping by the city of Los Angeles had virtually dried up all the major springs in the Owens Valley, impacting the surrounding wetlands, springs, meadows, and marsh habitats.[45] The consequent transfer of water out of the Owens Lake and Mono Lake decimated the natural ecology of the region, transforming what was a “lush terrain into desert.”]
Okay so we went from California should use desalination plans because Florida does even though that was factualy incorrect to we just need to build a couple of nuclear reactors
Putting politics aside there would still be a large cost and environmental impact to that
You were the one who mentioned that desalination plants are huge cost and needs lots of electricity.
I've merely rebutted those excuses with logical answers.
California's GDP is $4.1 trillion. If it were a country, it would be world's 4th largest economy!
So its wealth can be directly compared to India, which is $4.5 trillion GDP and recently overtook Japan to become world's 4th largest economy.
Humanity has not yet found a better alternative to massive energy supply than nuclear reactors. Solar & windmill technology are getting better as well for energy tapping and efficiency.
But California's largest solar plant (~500 MW capacity) is shutting down in 2026, due to "high operating costs", and the other few solar farms in the state are smaller capacity farms.
Meanwhile, China and India have world's largest solar farms, and are building more. They also have huge wind farms, and are experimenting alternative new methods such as tidal-wave based energy generation.
China controls 11 of the top 15 largest solar farms globally, with the Gonghe Talatan Solar Park leading at 15.6 GW capacity – equivalent to Singapore’s entire land area and capable of powering millions of homes annually. capacity of the solar parks shall be 500 MW and above.
India's solar power installed capacity was 135.81 GW as of 31 December 2025, which will be tripled to 300 GW approximately by 2030. Indian government has mandated that new solar farms must be above 500MW capacity. (However, smaller parks are also considered where contiguous land may be difficult to acquire in view of difficult terrain and where there is acute shortage of non-agricultural land.)
California gets a lot of sunshine and wind, why doesn't it do the needful to resolve its water mismanagement by doing better in large-scale seawater-desalination and energy-generation/harvesting ?
The answer is obvious: because it doesn't want to.
California prefers to waste water because it is accustomed to bleeding other water-rich regions dry, and no one is bothered to bell the cat: to leverage California's immense wealth to permanently resolve its water woes by massive seawater-desalination projects and huge solar & wind farms supported by a nuclear reactor or two (yes, nuclear reactors are not eco-friendly, but they are only energy-rich solutions for massive energy needs; neither are solar or wind farms really evo-friendly as their broken equipments typically don't get recycled properly and end up in landfills.)
Past: I live in a large coastal city, which gets its energy mostly from a nuclear reactor, and few small-scale solar farms & wind farms. The city/district is also prone to droughts, but it gets its daily water from seawater desalination plants, couple of rivers, and some lakes as rain water catchment areas. The local government here also mandated rainwater harvesting to be done by every building (they catch rainwater on their roof terraces, it gets piped down to water dumps/tanks, and they use that water till it lasts.) The city/district take extra care to try not to lose precious rain water, so it manages drought seasons well. The city/district does NOT pipe its water from other regions, so nearby regions don't blame the city/district for bleeding then dry of their precious water.
strange because this is one of the warmest winters in decades. snow levels are far below normal, i saw 8% of normal in truckee. full reservoirs now are great but keeping them filled depends on a long snow melt going into june. i don’t think this is going to be a good year for that
It's not quite that dire. Statewide 69% normal to date. Snowpack peaks March-April, so still have a ways to go in the season. https://snow.water.ca.gov
But yeah, snowmelt plays a huge role in supplying water into the summer, so just looking at precipitation totals isn't the full picture.
The warmth partially explains the rain. Storms far across the pacific have formed and traveled east to land on California. Unfortunately it also means, as you said, we can't capture as much of it as snow pack.
Here's the data from the Berkeley snow lab, located along I80 at the Sugar Bowl exit: https://cssl.berkeley.edu/
Snowfall is currently 75% of normal.
It gets lost when everything is summarized as wet
We are having an unusually dry and sunny winter in PNW.. I wonder if it is related.
Note that these indicators are looking at the drought monitor which just tracks soil moisture. There are active efforts underway to develop more comprehensive looks at precip and storage (snow, ground, reservoir etc)
Groundwater and aquifers still depleted.
Here's a nice animation tracking this (covers up to 2022, not sure about 2025): https://grace.jpl.nasa.gov/resources/42/grace-and-grace-fo-t...
The southern end of the central valley (San Joaquin region, whole central valley is outlined in red) is particularly hard-hit by groundwater depletion. Some of that storage does not come back, because the ground compacts after the groundwater is withdrawn.
And is the only state with no drought right now. Although they way they figure it is a bit biased -- it's based on how much water there is compared to historical values, so it's easier to be "drought free" if you've been in a drought for a while.
Yeah hey but for real. The news is focused on California droughts all the time, but my part of flyover country is very, very dry. Like ponds that have never been empty are dry, sort of thing. It's getting bad. . . And we grow all your food.
Between this and all the political nonsense that's happening right now, I feel like a passenger that's noticed the car is out of control while the driver is still opening his beer.
California actually produced the most food of any state. :). But I know what you mean, the water is just as critical in the middle of the country as it is on the edges. Water is critical everywhere, and this problem is just going to get worse and worse.
California leads in the value of goods sold, because it produces a lot of relatively expensive agricultural products like almonds, avocados, tomatoes, etc. Additionally, it’s a larger state, so it naturally will inflate the totals. If you look at food staples, and at the amount produced by square mile, the Midwest is definitely the main food producer of the US.
A 1 square mile state that produced nothing but wheat would beat any other state in terms of “amount of staples produced per square mile,” but it wouldn’t be able to sustain a population. That’s not a useful metric.
> And we grow all your food
Well, not all of it, California leads IIRC.
yeh, my natural pond in Michigan has lost about 15 feet, the snow we're getting now won't be enough to regain it
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If only we built reservoirs to keep the water for the drought years it would be great news.
The problem isn't storage capacity. It's wasteful consumption growing water-intensive crops in the desert.
It absolutely is about storage capacity. If California built out a better system of reservoirs, it wouldn't need to take water from other states in the Colorado river basin.
crops are kind of important though
You can grow almonds elsewhere, they are not needed for daily life
CA, apparently, grows almonds for the entire United States, and 80% of the world's almonds, too.
Sure, I'm not saying they don't, but it isn't a critical crop for day to day life, biologically speaking. No one is going to die for not eating almonds.
Is it economically important? For sure.
Is it critical for living? No.
We don’t decide what to grow based on what someone decides is “critical for living.” We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost. Some countries in the Eastern Hemisphere tried the first way and it didn’t work out very well.
Sure - the problem is that the almond farmers are being incentivized to grow almonds by giving them a significantly below market cost. If the the costs reflected reality, almonds wouldn’t be profitable.
Municipal water users subsidize the growth of those almonds because of a water rights system that was imagined when California was mostly empty.
Agricultural users should be free to pay market rates for their water like everyone else. They will absolutely still be able to make a profit growing almonds since they basically own the market.
> We decide what to grow based on what sells for a decent margin above cost.
The problem, as others said, is that their cost is artificially low as they don't pay market rate for water.
They don’t have to be grown in the desert
Almonds aren’t grown in the desert, they’re grown in the Central Valley. And they’re grown there because before it’s incredibly fertile soil.
California has already invested a lot into reservoirs. In fact, as a pilot, I recall noticing that nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs. I doubt there is much room left for economically building more; all the easy ones have been taken, and more. Surely the cost benefit of just investing a lot into desalination must be getting close.
Well, the California Coastal Commission put the kibosh a few years ago on a decades-long desalination project: https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/05/california-desali...
I haven't heard of any new desalination projects making headway since. The cost-benefit analysis may favor it, but I'm not sure the politics do. Of course, those politics will probably change in 10-15 years in our next big drought cycle, and then we'll really wish we'd gone forward with more desalination.
Doheny was approved shortly after the Huntington Beach desal plant was killed. Update from last month: https://www.ocregister.com/2025/11/26/landfill-trash-could-h...
Poseidon currently runs a desal plant in Carlsbad. My understanding is that the water the plant releases into the ocean requires exemptions for how concentrated it is. Additionally, the plant draws plankton filled water. Not really what we want in California.
There are better desal solutions out there like OceanWell. They have a deep water desalination solution that solves many of the problems of conventional desal. They just signed a project in Nice, France in the past few days. Also, they are working with the city of Las Virgines over the past few years.
If I remember correctly, the new desal plant in Doheny has a slightly different approach to draw water in from beneath the sand, using the sand as a prefilter. But I'm not sure how that works better than drawing water in from near the surface. I can't imagine how the plankton can possibly escape the suction forces drawing them into the sand.
I wasn't aware of the Doheny project, thanks! But it seems that that project timeline is at least as long as the one CCC killed.
With these kinds of timelines and that kind of regulatory risk, I don't think large-scale desalination is going to fix California's drought issues, regardless of whether it could.
We only have one because the Coastal Commision issued one for a plant around 1990 in a previous drought. The permit was maintained through to the current drought, at which point the Coastal Commission tried to get it shut down, but they lost since it was already permitted. Note that maintenance on the plant during the wet years was contentious; I don't know how it polled, but there were vocal people complaining about it, since it was barely used. Had those people prevailed, water would have been much dearer in the most recent drought.
Desalination must be insanely expensive; I’m always shocked it wasn’t done decades ago.
Considering California always seems to have power and water issues, I’d think combining these things would make a lot of sense. Some of these exist and there seems to be a fair bit of research in the area. I have to image at some point that will be the direction California would need to go. Of course, if they are all-in on solar and wind, then maybe not.
> Desalination must be insanely expensive
It isn't. Mostly there are environmental concerns.
Prove it.
Show us the data.
What is the price of desalinated water vs water that literally falls from the sky.
They both need to be chlorinated and piped to the end user, but desalinated water is typically at the wrong end of existing delivery infrastructure to take advantage of it.
And irrigators often have things like God deliver much of their water via rain, rivers etc.
So it stands to reason that desalinated water must be much more expensive.
Did reverse osmosis suddenly become energetically inexpensive while I wasn’t paying attention?
Did we build a bunch of nuclear power plants by the coast to use the waste heat for flash distillation?
Did brine disposal suddenly become a trivial issue to solve?
> nearly all lakes in California are actually man-made reservoirs
This is sometimes true even in much wetter states, though. I recall being thoroughly surprised to find that out that Virginia (!) has only two natural lakes, one of which is basically just an open area (though a large one) of the Great Dismal Swamp.
Could use some large scale geo-engineering. Pity that we don't have a radiation-free way of blowing a gigantic hole into the ground that can store a few trillion litres.
Probably bad idea, and definitely 'Need to bid it to responsible parties' question but would there be a way to safely use even separated 'landfill refuse' to build significant parts of the enclosing structure?
You need clean fill to build up earthen dams.
That’s almost always going to be cheaper to source from a nearby quarry than municipal sorting centres when you’re talk multiple millions of cubic meters.
I've lived in California for 20 years so this is my first year of non-draught. We've been enjoying the unusual prevalence of greenery in Orange County.
In the 70s and 80s there were big beautiful thunderstorms. Lightning would crash down for hours and the torrential fall rains would flood streets in north orange county (tri-city area) again and again. It rained so hard I had to take shelter under a tree when I was 8, due to how the rain and wind was threatening to knock me down. It rained for a week straight once, which was memorable. As was the times the rain ruined Halloween (more than once).
Parts of Orange County are really beautiful after the rare good rain. Doesn't wash away the rampant bigotry, though.
Yet being "drought-free" today doesn't contradict climate change
In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
Are these done in California?
> In other arid areas, people use terracing on hills so the water runoff is slowed and the water can soak into the aquifers. Also, dikes are built around fields to hold the water and also let it soak into the ground.
> Are these done in California?
People terrace where the only arable land is in hills or mountains. The vast majority of California's farmland is flat as a board.
California's central valley also has one of the most massive systems of water control (aqueducts, levees, etc) in the world.
The problem with water and Ag in California is caused by the massive disparities in water rights that make it extremely cheap for some and expensive for others, depending on their water rights.
I infer they aren't bulldozing a dike around the flat farmland to prevent runoff and allow the water to soak into the ground.
This will also reduce flooding from overloading the rivers with water.
> I infer they aren't bulldozing a dike around the flat farmland to prevent runoff
Earthen dikes and berms are a common feature around farmland in California.
You need some outflow to carry away salts. Otherwise, the water just evaporates and leaves the salt there, and eventually the land becomes unable to grow crops. This has historically been a serious problem in Mesopotamia, for example.
There has been quite a lot of investment in spreading grounds, aquifer recharging, and stormwater capture. Last year, LA county recaptured enough water to meet the yearly water needs of 2.4 million people.
Does this mean 2.4 million peoples personal drinking and cleaning use in a typical residential area?
Or are they including all the industrial water use those people contribute to by existing? That then includes industrial agriculture, and all industrial water use that enables modern life.
I suspect they mean only the first one, which is at least misleading, and at worst a lie intended to deceive.
Why would anyone be speaking in terms of the latter and not the former? Come on.
Went to Badwater Basin in Death Valley last week and there's miles of (bad) water. Unfortunately the Park Service but the kibosh on paddle boarding, etc. Should be a good bloom this spring.
This reminds me of a related issue: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/
I hope no one takes his headline as good news. Because it really signals dramatic changes in moisture in the atmosphere due to climate change.
Hot take, but I find it hard to care very much about water shortages, especially near the coast. A single nuclear power plant dedicated to desalinization would fix the whole problem. That this is still politically infeasible indicates to me that the drought is not really a big deal.
Right.
There’s a country in the Middle East that has insufficient natural water supply, and they manage to thrive and be a centre of learning, innovation, industry, and culture.
Water supply and sanitation in Israel are intricately linked to the historical development of Israel, because rain falls only in the winter, and largely in the northern part of the country. Irrigation and water engineering are considered vital to the country's economic survival and growth. Large-scale projects to desalinate seawater, direct water from rivers and reservoirs in the north, make optimal use of groundwater, and reclaim flood overflow and sewage have been undertaken. Among them is the National Water Carrier, carrying water from the country's biggest freshwater lake, the Sea of Galilee, to the northern part of the Negev desert through channels, pipes and tunnels.[4] Israel's water demand today outstrips available conventional water resources. Thus, in an average year, Israel relies for about half of its water supply from unconventional water resources, including reclaimed water and desalination. A particularly long drought in 1998–2002 had prompted the government to promote large-scale seawater desalination. In 2022, 86% of the country's drinkable water was produced through desalination of saltwater and brackish water.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_supply_and_sanitation_in...
so you're saying wildfires are kind of like a war, so DJT has fixed 9 wars!
We already know he'll want a prize for that. Anyone has a Nobel for making it rain that usually goes to God?
Stupid brain …
“… free of doughnuts …”
Definitely had me clicking.
Until ... 10 . 9 . 8 ...
People shouldn't really be celebrating anything here. Wet winters just mean that the much more important snowpack isn't happening:
> Recent storms have brought snow to the Sierra Nevada mountains, but the state’s snowpack remains below average. According to the Department of Water Resources, the snowpack now stands at 89% of average for this time of year.
> Much of the West has seen warmer-than-average temperatures and relatively little snow so far this winter. The snow in the Rocky Mountains remains far below average, adding to the strains on the overtapped Colorado River, a major water source for Southern California.
Refilling the reservoirs is nice and all, but this is still essentially a payday loan out of the future.
One of the complexities of global warming is that it makes weather more extreme in all directions. It can be true that the same stretch of ground can be more susceptible to flooding in the same year it's more susceptible to drought.
That is basically doomer nonsense. Of course we can and should celebrate the lack of drought, even if there is some mathematically more optimal way for the precipitation to be falling.
This definitely isn't doomer nonsense. Rain is great - we'll take what we can get here in CA, but the snowpack is far more important.
Saying that we should not celebrate the end of drought is definitely doomer nonsense, no matter what the snowpack is doing.
but prices will stay inflated
“Despite the welcome relief, climate change is expected to intensify weather swings from heavy rainfall to extreme dryness in a cycle that can fuel catastrophic wildfires.”
…but we’re still fucked and don’t you dare forget it!
Thank god Trump opened the valves. California is now seeing water the likes of which has never been seen before.
And yet our water rates are still as if we are in a drought.
The costs of delivering potable water and removing sewage/excess rain from a given lot or area is unrelated to the quantity of rainfall in a timespan measuring less than quite a few years.
Of the $250 of a water bill on Seattle’s Eastside, about $50 of it is something I can do anything about (use less water). The rest is fixed costs even if I never use a drop. It isn’t hard to imagine that California isn’t much different.
But its so hot lol
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This is really cool but please don't attribute this to the success or failure of any politician.
Remind us who it is you think is doing this? No one in the HN comments as of this writing. And what is a politician going to do about weather? One doesn’t make drought go away with policy.
There was one (now-flagged) comment that personally blamed Gavin Newsom for intentionally depleting the reservoirs as part of some nefarious urbanization conspiracy.
There's a lot of virtue signaling being above partisanship here, but this one is extreme.
I didn't see any mention of politics in the article, nor in the comment section, so who exactly are you writing this comment for, yourself?
> have no more to do with current politics than Trump did with the recent electromagnetic storms
Greenland has fairly strong aurora. Maybe Trump triggered the solar radiation storm to show Americans what Greenland has that they don't. Makes you wonder, doesn't it?
Yeah cause Trump made them stop dumping the water into the ocean
Or maybe the 6th greatest year of rainfall in the last hundred years.
Thanks Governor Gavin for not using the water reservoirs during the fires! Now we can use them to sprinkle!
The dams in california were built years ago for a smaller population and since then they've only removed them.
If we simply built like the people who first came to california did we would never have water shortages again.
Any water shortage is a 1:1 failure of the state to do the clear and obvious task needed.
Water policy isn't as simple as you might think. Dams aren't a magical fix, they cause a lot of issues (like crashing the salmon populations, etc.). They're expensive to build and maintain, and the water you store in a big reservoir doesn't magically stay in place - you lose a lot to evaporation and you lose a lot that ends up going into the groundwater system. A much bigger part of the problem is western water law, where water rights are assigned based on prior appropriation and are lost if they aren't exercised. That leads to a lot of bullshit, like people growing very water hungry crops (alfalfa, rice) in the middle of the desert.
The reason we don't build like the people who first came to California did isn't because we're stupid, it's because we've learned a lot of lessons the hard way. If you're interested in some of the history I'd recommend Cadillac Desert, which is about western water in general, but which focuses a lot on California (including the machinations that the movie China Town was based on).
Thanks for contributing these insights. Having worked with hydrologists for 15 years or so -- water is complicated, and people who say there are simple solutions generally do not know the domain.
A moment's reflection should make this clear. It's such a fundamental resource, touching everything we do. We just tend to take it for granted.
A lot of stuff re: Salmon Populations is primarily around native groups wanting to continue their traditional life styles.
In the era of Trump/Republicans, I don't expect native issues to matter at all. "Drill baby drill" and all that.
So, actually, it is pretty simple if you're willing to finish the settler colonialist project that is our country.
You should really read the book mentioned in the post you're responding to.
All the best sites were built on long ago. Dams require favorable geography. More can be built to squeeze out a bit more storage, but there are diminishing returns.
https://www.ppic.org/publication/dams-in-california/
Can I ask why you see this as a clearcut issue? Dams have environmental costs, upfront monetary costs, maintenance costs, and can't prevent drought if conditions persist for multiple years. Why are dams the best way to address drought?
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Got any sources for that?
In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california, his office sued over those Trump-era water rules, arguing they violated environmental protections for endangered fish.... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020. So given those facts, I would argue that yes the current Governor is responsible for what happened 100%.
take a look at SB 79 is a 2025 California state law (Senate Bill 79, authored by Sen. Scott Wiener) that overrides local zoning limits to allow higher-density multifamily housing near major public transit stops, signed into law by Governor Newsom on October 10th 2025, despite local resistance by residents.
All urban use is 11% of California water.
SB79 has nothing to do with the drought.
Gavin Newsom ran on building housing, and SB79 is him fulfilling his mandate from voters, "local resistance by residents" is why California has some of the most expensive housing in the world.
Gavin Newsom also vetoed AB 2903, the bipartisan bill for auditing of California's $24 billion spent and squandered on fixing the homeless problem, which only got worse. SB79 is another example of Newsom intent to change zoning laws to allow developers to build high density housing which is what the parent comment was about. if you want to be a shill for the governor, thats your business. It looks like willfull graft to me.
there would be no drought if the 2020 Federal regulations were followed. the only reason there's no drought today is because the federal government stepped in and finally opened up the water lines in the North coming south.
keep in mind there used to be a big freshwater lake (Tulare Lake) in the middle of California for at least ten thousand years.....
> In 2020 federal memo and regulatory changes under Trump's first administration to send more water from Northern California to Central Valley agriculture via federal projects were ignored by the governor of california, and instead of allowing the water to flow into southern california ... had he done what the current administration forced him to do, there would be no drought in 2020, there would be no empty reservoirs in 2020.
How would diverting water from Northern California, where drought was the worst in 2020, to the Central Valley possibly end the drought?
Filling up reservoirs that are upstream by moving water downstream sounds like quite the magic trick.
1. Trump’s order in 2020 had nothing to do with fire, so it doesn’t support your position that this has anything to do with fires.
2. The water management plan has nothing to do with where water flows to fight fires.
3. A legal fight in 2020 is not caused by a bill that was passed in 2025.
> there would be no drought in 2020
That’s not how droughts work. A drought is a lack of rainfall. Moving water can reduce the problems caused by a drought, but it cannot prevent a drought.
At best dams let you draw down water based on average rainfall. They cost water via evaporation if you don’t have excess rainfall to store.
Thus removing dams was actually useful amid a 25 year drought.
If you look into the actual design capacity of our municipal water systems, many of them were designed for far larger populations. The EBMUD, for example, intentionally secured 325 million gallons per day in upstream capacity because that was 10x the needs of the service area in 1929. Implicitly they assumed that the service area would grow to 4 million people, but it never did, primarily because of zoning. Today EBMUD delivers only about 120 MGD. We could more than double the service area population without water issues.
dams have trade offs that they stop sediment outflows which can cause faster erosion. this is a big reason many california beaches have gone from mostly sandy to mostly rocky
Yeah, and with California's typical topography (relatively younger mountains), there's a lot of sediment at the ready than can fill dams and render them worse than useless -- i.e., costs money, loses capacity fast, alters river and coast.
E.g.: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matilija_Dam#History
> Almost immediately after construction, the dam began silting up. The dam traps about 30% of the total sediment in the Ventura River system, depriving ocean beaches of replenishing sediment. Initially, engineers had estimated it would take 39 years for the reservoir to fill with silt, but within a few years it was clear that the siltation rate was much faster than anticipated.
There are similar sites all over the state. If you happen to live in the LA area, the Devil's Gate Dam above Pasadena is another such (but originally built for flood control, not for storage).
It's just not as easy as GP comment imagines.
The new Sites Reservoir and capacity increase of the existing San Luis Reservoir are both expected to start construction this year. Several other recent proposals like the Pacheos Reservoir have been cancelled due to cost but it is not the case that California is doing nothing re: new water infrastructure.
Sites Reservoir isn't going to do a damned thing for municipal water systems in most of the state. You have to remember that there is not such a thing as a statewide municipal water policy. Every city or region has its own thing going on. The Sites capacity is dedicated to its investors, so depending on where you live it could be a helpful resource, or it could be irrelevant.
Investors? It's publicly funded.
It is funded by water districts, and they are the ones who get to use it.
This is my point. They know what to do but have trouble doing so.
I had a joke that hit well: "California is in a drought? Who would have thought it doesn't rain in a desert."
It does rain in deserts, California isn't mostly desert (about 38% by land area), and drought is defined relative to normal rainfall, so even a place that usually has very low rainfall can have droughts.
I don't get it.
It does rain in deserts, of course. But most of California is not a desert anyway.
And also droughts are defined by lower than normal precipitation. So if it didn't rain in a desert, and it's still not raining in a desert, that wouldn't even be a drought anyway.
It’s a joke relying on several layers of not understanding basic concepts for its humor. Kind of worried about the environment in which it “hit well”.
It must only be funny to people who are unfamiliar with California’s climate.
Are you under the impression that California as a whole is a desert?
It’s important to note that rainfall in CA is not 100% natural. The state actively funds cloud seeding.
https://www.grants.ca.gov/grants/gfo-23-311-advancing-precip...
Example of a recent $2.5M grant.
This information is often buried in budgets under applied research grants. I suspect they obscure this information because it could create liabilities, for example, if gov funded rain seeding creates flooding and human death are they partially responsible for this?
From the link alone, it looks like the state actively funds cloud seeding research, not active practical cloud seeding?
Applied research is active cloud seeding
This doesn’t seem important to note at all.
It can affect current rainfall numbers, future rainfall, and future projections
Santa Clara County had an active cloud-seeding program from 1954 through 1994.[1] Santa Clara County used to be a major agricultural area. The goal is not to create rain, but to move it. Get the clouds to dump over the agricultural areas instead of the inland mountains. It worked, a little. But there was a concern that it was making wildfires worse, by doing what it was intended to do and thus making the inland forests more dry.
[1] https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/valleywater.org.us-west-1...
To my point, liability concerns are listed on that pdf as a reason why Santa Clara County stopped.
Cloud seeding can definitely increase rain over California even by your logic. Clouds don't respect state boundaries.
That's a grant, to research them, which is important. There are programs that are shut down, since they learned from them: https://sawpa.gov/santa-ana-river-watershed-cloud-seeding/
Applied research is active cloud seeding
If you’re truly interested in the subject, contact the organizations actually doing research in the subject. Leave your tinfoil hat at home.
There are companies that do cloud seeding:
https://www.rainmaker.com/
>Though cloud seeding has been in use around the world for 80 years, we recognize that people have valid questions about how the technology works.
Nothing tinfoil about it.
Thank you. Every time I talk about cloud seeding in CA people have a strongly negative response without any facts and I'm not really sure why
That’s silly. If you know about it, so do the lawyers who would come out of the woodwork to take these cases.
Here’s a research report relating to weather modification. It references even a prior California case where a flood happened in an area utilizing cloud seeding.
https://digitalcommons.pace.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...
No what’s silly is the idea that they’re simultaneously trying to hide it and still publicly admitting to it.