Environmentalist destroying California

 Jeffrey Folks:

Recently, Molly Taft at Gizmodo proclaimed, "California's Epic Snowstorms Are Great News."  Great  news, indeed, with snowfall running some 150% above normal for the Sierra Nevadas, or "200% of average for snow water equivalent."

For years, climate alarmists bemoaned the multiyear drought that, they insisted, would utterly "destroy" California.  The drought, they wrote, was the product of global warming and was thus more or less permanent.  Say goodbye to California agriculture; life in California cities; and, eventually, life on Earth.

Those claims were false, as this year's massive Sierra snow-pack shows.  When the snow melts in the spring, that water will fill the reservoirs, irrigate the crops, and help fulfill the needs of California cities.  Even before the strong start to this year's snowfall, the 2012–2016 drought had begun to abate.  If the snowfall continues through the spring, drought conditions will abate in much of the state.

That's not good enough for environmentalists, who respond that it will take more than one snowfall to end drought conditions, which may be true, and who predict that by 2050, there may be successive years with no snow-pack at all — which seems like wild speculation.

The California drought was highly politicized from the beginning, with environmental regulators insisting that much of California's precious water supply must be released into the Pacific Ocean to support wildlife.  As Victor Davis Hanson points out in The Dying Citizen (2021), California "restricts long-ago contracted water allotments to Central Valley agriculture on the theory that ever greater percentages of stored Sierra Nevada and Northern California water should be freed to flow ... to the sea."  Hanson also notes that only one major dam has been built in California during the past 40 years (while many have been removed) — this despite the fact "that thirty million Californians live in naturally desert conditions" (Dying Citizen, p. 57).

Certainly, California has been experiencing a water crisis, just as it has had a forest fire crisis, an energy crisis, a housing crisis, a homelessness crisis, and a hundred other crises, but all of them are man-made.  The reasonable course of action for water supply is to release overflow only, build more dams, and apply market-based pricing to control demand.  There might have been a shortage, but there never would have been a "crisis" if environmentalists had not gotten involved in what is quite simply a market for an essential product.

The truth is that there have always been droughts and periods of high rainfall.  The climate changes, and it has done so for eons.  Today, it is only one degree Celsius higher than it was in 1850 — a time of unusual cold.  In other words, today's "heat" is a return to more normal conditions that existed before the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850 A.D.).

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Environmental wackos are a danger to mankind and other animals.  They are creating an artificial shortage of water to "save" a pretty worthless baitfish and feed the runoff into an ocean where it is not needed.