California doesn’t need a global
carbon-emissions regime; it needs a better water system.
That California’s catastrophic drought is a result of global warming has
become a commonplace of contemporary political rhetoric.
That truism isn’t true: Most scientific accounts of California’s current
dry spell link recent low precipitation to naturally occurring
atmospheric cycles, not to global warming.
Indeed, most of the global-warming models
relied upon by those advocating more-invasive environmental policies
predict that warming would leave California with wetter winters — winter
precipitation being critical to the snowpack-dependent state — rather
than the drier winters at the root of the state’s current water crisis.
What some studies do suggest is that warmer temperatures make the
effects of scanty precipitation more intense for California’s end users
of water, a reasonably straightforward proposition — higher temperatures
will probably contribute to higher demand for water and will certainly
contribute to the much more significant problem of evaporation, which
steals tremendous amounts of water away from California’s outdated
storage-and-conveyance infrastructure and imposes substantial water
losses on old-fashioned irrigation systems.
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