Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

California declared drought free for first time in seven years

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 242 posts

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#171

Post by LoSboccacc »

docker_up wrote: post #42

As someone who has lived in the Bay Area for over 20 years, I knew this would happen. I was never worried for a second that the drought was the "new normal". I believe the climate will continue to change and cycle. Yes, we are experiencing global warming, and yes our environment is heading for disaster, everyone was too easy to believe that this particular drought was the "new normal" with little proof.

> yes our environment is heading for disaster

now I'd like to see which model predicted the end of the drought and see when those predicts its return.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#172

Post by jshen »

pfdietz wrote: post #158
jshen wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love market based economies, but not the idea that markets solve all problems. You said something about “their water”, and that’s the problem. Going back to the history of CA water rights, there is no clear concept to determine who owns water. If I buy the house on the river upstream from your house on the river, who owns the river water? I went to college in CA and had to take a bunch of CA history classes. I high…

Are you saying there are no water rights in the current system? If there are, what's wrong with being able to trade them?

The very wealthy buying all the water and selling it at a huge markup with poor people dying of thirst.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#173

Post by UncleEntity »

gdubs wrote: post #114
phkahler wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that California has the flu and people think its cancer. Getting the flu sucks but you're probably not gonna die. I remember forest fires as well as mudslides in CA back in the 1970s. Perhaps the last few years were an extreme, but note that going to that extreme and back took about a decade. Most people haven't been there long enough to know what normal is and just buy in to all the media hype.

Sorry, but this is just flat out wrong. Yes, drought and fire have always been a fact of life for California. But if you map the frequency and severity of fires alone, it’s on a remarkably upward trajectory over the past two decades. It’s climate change.

> But if you map the frequency and severity of fires alone, it’s on a remarkably upward trajectory over the past two decades. It’s climate change.

...or it could be because the forests are so out of balance because they need fire to thrive that smaller events have oversized effects.

Before people started blaming severe forest fires on climate change they blamed the fires on the policy of systematically putting out all fires which allowed fuel to pile up on the forest floor allowing them to burn much hotter resulting in the trees dying. Before this policy the fires would just burn through the underbrush and the trees would survive as this is how they evolved.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#174

Post by dror »

John Steinbeck, "East of Eden", 1952.

"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."

...

"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."

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#175

Post by mturmon »

benj111 wrote: post #36
jayess wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “The reservoirs are full, lakes are full, the streams are flowing, there’s tons of snow,” said Jessica Blunden, a climate scientist with the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “All the drought is officially gone.” https://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-rain-california... EDIT: Sorry, you're referring to aquifers, not reservoirs.

This quote gets me thinking about how snow is treated in this system. It isn't like water in a stream because it stays where it is. It isn't like a reservoir or aquifer because the water isn't trivially dispatchable. I suppose it depends where the snow is, some could be 'permanent', some seasonal melt, some gone by next week. So really we should be differentiating the different types of snow?

Snow is really important. It is quantified as “SWE” or snow water equivalent, the amount of water that would be released when the snow melts.

SWE is monitored by satellites, aircraft, and by in situ measurements like from snow pillows. In California, the state DWR tracks SWE to estimate reservoir influx.

More: https://aso.jpl.nasa.gov

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#177

Post by southern_cross »

gdubs wrote: post #114
phkahler wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that California has the flu and people think its cancer. Getting the flu sucks but you're probably not gonna die. I remember forest fires as well as mudslides in CA back in the 1970s. Perhaps the last few years were an extreme, but note that going to that extreme and back took about a decade. Most people haven't been there long enough to know what normal is and just buy in to all the media hype.

Sorry, but this is just flat out wrong. Yes, drought and fire have always been a fact of life for California. But if you map the frequency and severity of fires alone, it’s on a remarkably upward trajectory over the past two decades. It’s climate change.

If go back a bit further you'll find that (for example) one of the big, deadly wildfires from a couple of years ago was almost identical to a wildfire that happened in that same area back in the 1960s (IIRC). And during that earlier fire a few structures burned too (there weren't that many around at the time), so thinking ahead they banned any further construction in the most dangerous part of that area. Only to conveniently forget about that ban during the 1980s and later, so in the second fire you now had a much higher human toll. So two almost identical fires but with very different outcomes, at least in human terms.

Also, most people apparently don't understand the distinction between "wildfire" and "firestorm". Since upwards of 97% of wildfires are actually human-caused these days, of course a human has to be present for that to happen. No humans means far fewer wildfires.

But a lot of what we've been seeing lately are actually firestorms, where a single structure catches fire and then that spreads uncontrollably to the next structure and so on until everything flammable is basically burned out. Firestorms happen because there are few if any resources available to put the fire out while it's still small. So while the original source of ignition may very well have come from a wildfire, the firestorm can keep burning and spreading long after the wildfire itself has basically played out, at least in that immediate area.

And no, climate change has little or nothing to do with this.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#178

Post by pdonis »

gdubs wrote: post #160
pdonis wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over the past two decades, yes. But humans have been in California for a lot longer than two decades. Over all the time humans have been in California (which is basically since the last Ice Age at least, possibly longer since we don't know exactly when it was first settled by Native Americans), what we're seeing now is probably well within the range of variation. We can't know for sure because we don't have 12,000 ye…

Yes, but this is the same argument people make about how you can’t attribute a given hurricane to Climate Change (although science has becoming more capable of those kinds of attributions in recent years). Yes, climate fluctuates. Yes, there have plausibly been years of drought and fire in centuries past that would rival recent years. But absent the specific data you say is lacking, if you believe that climate scienc…

> there’s an obvious reason for the dramatic uptick between the 1970s and today: CO2 in the atmosphere, put there by humans

The fact that this reason is "obvious" doesn't mean it's correct. Climate models based on the assumption that human CO2 emissions are the primary cause of warming have been significantly over-predicting warming. So I don't think we can say human CO2 emissions are the primary cause. We are still too uncertain about how the climate works for that.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#179

Post by pdonis »

jshen wrote: post #152
pdonis wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I understand it, the history of water rights in CA, and indeed in the US west generally, is a history of lack of markets; it's all been political maneuvering by various factions to make sure they aren't the ones who go short when the water gets divided up. There has never been an actual market to allocate the limited supply of water to the highest value uses. If there were, agriculture in much of CA wouldn't exist…

How do you determine who owns water in the first place.

In a world in which transaction costs are sufficiently low, Coase's Theorem says it doesn't matter: you make the best initial choice you can, and then people execute free market trades to get to the overall most efficient allocation.

So one way of looking at the whole problem is to ask why transaction costs are too high to make this feasible. And the obvious answer is politics.

Re: California declared drought free for first time in seven years

#180

Post by vadym909 »

whalesalad wrote: post #27

The experience here in Orange County over the last few months has been nuts. Being able to hang out down near the ocean and see the San Gabriel mountains just decked out in snow is surreal: https://i.redd.it/kueaye5p6si21.jpg Another photo: https://i.redd.it/vy7dlavrh0f21.jpg Anaheim hills, an area that rarely gets snowed on: https://i.redd.it/trbf198kb6i21.jpg Then we roll right into the poppy/wildflower superbloom…

so beautiful. thanks for sharing
Post reply on HN