The first is that climate change is real, accelerating and overturning long-held assumptions about how much water we can expect, when we can expect it, and how we should manage it.įor years, climate scientists have told us that extreme events will become more extreme. It’s long past time to face some difficult truths.
Happy new year california how to#
We can rethink how to have a healthy agricultural community that grows more food with far less water, and how to protect California’s rich but deeply threatened environment. We can change the way we collect, treat, move and use water. But we can do far more than that to actively prepare California’s water system for whatever shapes up over the Pacific. We can only watch the weather patterns swirl and shift, the storms form, move and dissipate. Will the next water year be wet or dry? We don’t know. We’ve seen rapidly disappearing snow that simply evaporated off the mountains rather than producing runoff, the death of native salmon when the temperatures in our rivers rose to lethal levels, parched farms, extreme fires that even now are sweeping through our dry forests, expanses of exposed mud at the bottom of our emptying reservoirs, and the nonstop overdraft of groundwater sucked up by stronger and stronger pumps from deeper and deeper wells, causing Central Valley communities on the frontlines to lose access to safe and affordable drinking water. Every drought is different, but with climate change upping the ante, the current drought has been one for the record books. A repeat of the past two years would be catastrophic. The past two years have been bad: years of drought, heat, fire and ecological collapse. We’re looking ahead with no small amount of worry. This is the time of year we start to look out over the Pacific for the storms we hope will bring life-giving precipitation, replenishing our rivers and streams, coating our mountains with snow, refilling our reservoirs and recharging our soils, forests, wetlands and groundwater.Īnd while we hope for a good water year, we also hope for moderation in the face of ever-worsening climate change, for storms that don’t overwhelm our levees, flood our cities and towns, or wash away our farms and homes.
1, the official beginning of the state’s wet season. For those of us who work on California water challenges, the start of the new year isn’t Jan.
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