Comment by ifwinterco
1 month 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
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.
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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.
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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