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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought.

I lost a lot of respect for anxiety over drought in California when my university set out little fact cards ("Please save water!") on all the dining tables with the following information handily presented:

Rainfall last year: 210% of annual average rainfall

Rainfall this year: 20% of annual average rainfall.

That's not a drought. We're significantly above average over just the last two years. (As of years ago.) How can ABOVE-average water supply be an emergency?

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This is a wildly oversimplistic way of viewing the situation.

The most obvious confounding factor is that California relies heavily on Sierra snowpack to provide water throughout the year. Snow that melted last year and ran out to sea is simply no longer available to us this year, no matter how much of it there was. There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.

Further, we need the vast majority of this moisture to come as snowpack in the year it does fall, so it can be naturally distribute throughout the warmer months. When most of that water arrives in the spring and summer, it quickly runs off. As things get drier, this problem worsens since the ground becomes less able to absorb moisture in the short term.

> Snow that melted last year and ran out to sea is simply no longer available to us this year, no matter how much of it there was. There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.

It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".

Reservoirs are expensive. The commenter you are replying to was careful to use the phrase "economically plausible."

Saying that there is not an economically plausible way of producing or keeping water is just saying that you don't want the water very much. This immediately proves that, if you are in a drought, it doesn't really matter.

Water is cheap.

Available free running water is cheap. Building reservoirs, with all their environmental and social impacts, is not cheap.

I think you misunderstand the scale of which we are talking about here. This isn’t a swimming pool or a lake’s worth of water.

Here's a list of dams and reservoirs in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in....

You'll note that there was one completed in the 2010s and one in the 2000s. There were 33 completed in the 1920s.

The US produces 30 times as much as it did in 1920, in real terms. It is "economically plausible" for a nation 30 times richer than it used to be to produce some tiny fraction of the infrastructure it used to produce.

Californians might not want to build reservoirs, Californians might be too incompetent to build reservoirs, Californians might prefer blaming a snowpack that melts out slightly earlier to building reservoirs, California might prefer saving snails and slugs to building reservoirs, but California, undeniably, has the money to build reservoirs.

Has it occurred to you that we already built ones where they're geographically and economically feasible, and that's why we've slowed down their construction?

Reservoirs require land with natural geographic boundaries (such as valleys), will displace any human populations in them, and will completely destroy whatever existing flora and fauna exists in there. Perhaps Californians are trying to wrangle with the idea that destroying ecosystems at great financial expense to deal with the problems caused by destroying other ecosystems isn't the right way to approach problem-solving.

> There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.

Seems like the own definition of forest to me.

Incompatible with arsonists and liquid gold diggers in any case. They must to choose one path or the other. Is either returning the water that forests own, so there is clouds, so there is snow, and punish severely arsonists, nature eaters and boycoters..

Or accept the place being sucked dry for money until the resource vanishes for everybody

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