California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-01-09/california-has-no-areas-of-dryness-first-time-in-25-years

by thnaks • 6 months ago

459 250 6 months ago

latimes.com

bwoah• 6 months ago

https://archive.is/aB3c4

kens• 6 months ago

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.”

lo_zamoyski• 6 months ago

Sounds like the addiction cycle.

scarmig• 6 months ago

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.

echelon• 6 months ago

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.

NamlchakKhandro2• 6 months ago

the 80 year cycle

DANmode4• 6 months ago

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.

tobinfricke• 6 months ago

This is practically all that need be said on the topic

bix6• 6 months ago

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.

gosub1004• 6 months ago

how to be a novelist: use 10^n words when 10^(n-1) will do.

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

"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?

floren2• 6 months ago

Maybe he could have just replaced that whole section with a couple graphs showing average rainfall and crop yield for the Salinas Valley.

calepayson• 6 months ago

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.

floatrock5• 6 months ago

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.

RataNova5• 6 months ago

That passage is such a good reminder of how long this rhythm has been part of California's identity

johnsmith18402• 6 months ago

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.

cptroot• 6 months ago

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?

throwaway99830• 6 months ago

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/

foolfoolz2• 6 months ago

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

mturmon3• 6 months ago

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.

Analemma_• 6 months ago

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.

jeffbee4• 6 months ago

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.

johnsmith18402• 6 months ago

This is my point. They know what to do but have trouble doing so.

Retric• 6 months ago

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.

water-data-dude• 6 months ago

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).

Der_Einzige• 6 months ago

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.

mturmon3• 6 months ago

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.

jeffbee4• 6 months ago

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.

foolfoolz2• 6 months ago

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

luhn• 6 months ago

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.

inanepenguin• 6 months ago

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.

tverbeure• 6 months ago

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.

RataNova5• 6 months ago

It gets lost when everything is summarized as wet

cjboco• 6 months ago

And yet our water rates are still as if we are in a drought.

lotsofpulp• 6 months ago

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.

mikestew• 6 months ago

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.

accrual• 6 months ago

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.

whartung• 6 months ago

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.

trollbridge2• 6 months ago

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.

obidee22• 6 months ago

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.

dekhn• 6 months ago

When I got here in '91 people told me "if it's yellow, let it mellow, if it's brown, flush it down".

awesome_dude2• 6 months ago

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 :-)

gosub1004• 6 months ago

but still allowing developers to build brand new houses and encouraging high-density multi-unit buildings.

zobzu2• 6 months ago

im not sure you're allowed to state all this! kidding but yeah.

jedberg2• 6 months ago

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.

Loughla• 6 months ago

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.

jedberg2• 6 months ago

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.

rootusrootus• 6 months ago

And we grow all your food

Well, not all of it, California leads IIRC.

philk10• 6 months ago

yeh, my natural pond in Michigan has lost about 15 feet, the snow we're getting now won't be enough to regain it

block_dagger• 6 months ago

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.

KerrAvon2• 6 months ago

Parts of Orange County are really beautiful after the rare good rain. Doesn't wash away the rampant bigotry, though.

Supermancho• 6 months ago

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).

cdrnsf2• 6 months ago

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.

jeffbee4• 6 months ago

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?

dcrazy5• 6 months ago

Perhaps GP is thinking of last winter?

aetherson• 6 months ago

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.

bps4484• 6 months ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY3• 6 months ago

Weren't there massive floods, in the Bay Area, last year?

jmspring• 6 months ago

Spent 7+ years north of Truckee. There have been wetter/more snow years.

JohnMakin• 6 months ago

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.

dilyevsky2• 6 months ago

not even close to 2023 or 2017 seasons here in norcal, not by a mile...

wbl• 6 months ago

I am so sad I missed 2023. But now I have the skills to really enjoy the next dump.

zobzu2• 6 months ago

curious where in CA. in the past 15y ive def. seen more rain lol.

nomel• 6 months ago

I think this has to be seen as "over some span of time", because a drought is an "over some span of time" thing.

RataNova5• 6 months ago

It's rain on already saturated ground plus wind, which turns into downed trees and infrastructure issues instead of just replenishing water

lisper2• 6 months ago

Ironically, the rest of the country is having a drought:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/01/18/winter-dro...

cg5280• 6 months ago

Colorado is having a record low snow season. It's been tough for skiing.

mikestorrent2• 6 months ago

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!

jmb99• 6 months ago

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

apitman• 6 months ago

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.

cogman10• 6 months ago

Same in idaho. We are looking at historic lows for our reservoirs.

xedrac• 6 months ago

Yeah, I want another 950" of snow at Alta Ski Resort again. That year - 2023 I think, was unreal!

ignoramous• 6 months ago

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.

gosub1004• 6 months ago

wildfire is part of nature.

b00ty4breakfast2• 6 months ago

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.

NamlchakKhandro2• 6 months ago

welcome to australia

suzzer99• 6 months ago

You're all in California's rain shadow.

jms703• 6 months ago

But its so hot lol

PlatoIsADisease• 6 months ago

I had a joke that hit well: "California is in a drought? Who would have thought it doesn't rain in a desert."

quesera• 6 months ago

I don't get it.

It does rain in deserts, of course. But most of California is not a desert anyway.

recursive• 6 months ago

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.

dragonwriter3• 6 months ago

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”.

dragonwriter3• 6 months ago

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.

dcrazy5• 6 months ago

It must only be funny to people who are unfamiliar with California’s climate.

gbnwl• 6 months ago

Are you under the impression that California as a whole is a desert?

legitster• 6 months ago

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.

baggy_trough2• 6 months ago

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.

jimt1234• 6 months ago

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.

Hatrix• 6 months ago

Groundwater and aquifers still depleted.

mturmon3• 6 months ago

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.

sharpy• 6 months ago

We are having an unusually dry and sunny winter in PNW.. I wonder if it is related.

francasso• 6 months ago

We already know he'll want a prize for that. Anyone has a Nobel for making it rain that usually goes to God?

windowpains• 6 months ago

If only we built reservoirs to keep the water for the drought years it would be great news.

bdamm• 6 months ago

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.

al_borland• 6 months ago

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.

devilbunny• 6 months ago

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.

kyboren2• 6 months ago

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.

oatmeal1• 6 months ago

The problem isn't storage capacity. It's wasteful consumption growing water-intensive crops in the desert.

bibimsz2• 6 months ago

crops are kind of important though

ryankshaw• 6 months ago

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.

mikestorrent2• 6 months ago

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.

to11mtm• 6 months ago

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?

jagged-chisel• 6 months ago

Stupid brain …

“… free of doughnuts …”

Definitely had me clicking.

fuzztester• 6 months ago

Until ... 10 . 9 . 8 ...

bibimsz2• 6 months ago

Yeah cause Trump made them stop dumping the water into the ocean

shakna• 6 months ago

Or maybe the 6th greatest year of rainfall in the last hundred years.

quaddoggy• 6 months ago

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.

WalterBright2• 6 months ago

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?

danans2• 6 months ago

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.

WalterBright2• 6 months ago

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.

asdff2• 6 months ago

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.

nandomrumber5• 6 months ago

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.

offsign• 6 months ago

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)

zamadatix• 6 months ago

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!

jama2112• 6 months ago

Wait so who is being dishonest, the old article, the new one, or both?

LegitShady• 6 months ago

yes!

nandomrumber5• 6 months ago

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.

direwolf20• 6 months ago

Both!

lern_too_spel2• 6 months ago

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.

RataNova5• 6 months ago

The difference between 0% and almost 0% is mostly a cartographic one

PunchyHamster2• 6 months ago

my reaction is pretty much "well, it's middle of winter"

Noaidi• 6 months ago

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.

Hyperlisk• 6 months ago

This reminds me of a related issue: http://iscaliforniaonfire.com/

dangero8• 6 months ago

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?

kevinwang• 6 months ago

From the link alone, it looks like the state actively funds cloud seeding research, not active practical cloud seeding?

dangero8• 6 months ago

Applied research is active cloud seeding

stevenhubertron• 6 months ago

This doesn’t seem important to note at all.

dangero8• 6 months ago

It can affect current rainfall numbers, future rainfall, and future projections

spiderfarmer2• 6 months ago

If you’re truly interested in the subject, contact the organizations actually doing research in the subject. Leave your tinfoil hat at home.

Dig1t• 6 months ago

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.

mattmaroon2• 6 months ago

That’s silly. If you know about it, so do the lawyers who would come out of the woodwork to take these cases.

dangero8• 6 months ago

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=...

avree• 6 months ago

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/

dangero8• 6 months ago

Applied research is active cloud seeding

Animats• 6 months ago

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...

dangero8• 6 months ago

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.

mmaunder• 6 months ago

“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!

markhahn• 6 months ago

so you're saying wildfires are kind of like a war, so DJT has fixed 9 wars!

vee-kay9• 6 months ago

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)?

weird-eye-issue4• 6 months ago

Desalination uses a lot more energy and is higher cost

akdor1154• 6 months ago

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.

guelo• 6 months ago

"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.

clarionbell• 6 months ago

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

vee-kay9• 6 months ago

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.

floatrock5• 6 months ago

Good catch. The shibboleth revealed the russian bot farmer.

losvedir• 6 months ago

LA is not the capital. Sacramento in the north, and inland, is.

vee-kay9• 6 months ago

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.

mrguyorama3• 6 months ago

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.

vee-kay9• 6 months ago

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

RataNova5• 6 months ago

Yet being "drought-free" today doesn't contradict climate change

ifwinterco2• 6 months ago

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

PunchyHamster2• 6 months ago

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

Jensson• 6 months ago

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.

FrustratedMonky2• 6 months ago

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.

jfindley• 6 months ago

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.

lithocarpus2• 6 months ago

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.

telesilla• 6 months ago

.. 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

hit8run• 6 months ago

Thanks Governor Gavin for not using the water reservoirs during the fires! Now we can use them to sprinkle!

MelvinButtsESQ• 6 months ago

Thank god Trump opened the valves. California is now seeing water the likes of which has never been seen before.

patwater10• 6 months ago

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)

knowitnone3• 6 months ago

but prices will stay inflated

eudamoniac• 6 months ago

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.

nandomrumber5• 6 months ago

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...

California is free of drought for the first time in 25 years

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