Comment by jfindley
1 month 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.
> 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.
Are you implying 800 miles worth of latitude, along with North Pacific weather in general, is irrelevant?
It’s very relevant,
and the next 200 years of settlers should probably take note,
instead of just continuing to barrel into a place that was unreasonable to live in when it started, and hasn’t changed much in that regard.