In commentary on the article, a photo gallery of nine images, I didn’t get much out of it. Maybe because it didn’t show much actual change (aside from one side by side 5 years apart, and another one days or weeks apart?).
Pretty pictures, not compelling. But, seeing the shipmap post from yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46527161) and the inframap today (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46536866) were more so.
And really CA has plenty of water, but the people fight for the farmers for it, and the farmers win. Agriculture is about 80-90% of total use. All of residential, commercial, industrial, baseball fields, golf courses, residential lawns - all make up 10-20% of water use.
So why the constant "drought"-alerts and admonitions to take shorter showers and flush less often? Because every gallon used in your home takes money out of a farmer's pocket. 1 flush ~= two almonds. A shower is ~5-10 almonds. 5 showers is an avocado. If you don't use it, they will - and if you use it, they can't.
willparks•4w ago
Mesmerizing photos, but hard to draw causal conclusions. Drought in Iraq is pictured directly above flooding in Australia. Maybe this is just the natural cycle of the planet. We don't have data to compare for more than just the last couple generations.
phtrivier•4w ago
https://academic.oup.com/oocc/article/3/1/kgad008/7335889?lo...
burkaman•4w ago
not_wyoming•4w ago
UN - https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/debunking-eight-...
MIT - https://climate.mit.edu/ask-mit/todays-climate-change-simila...
Columbia University - https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2017/04/04/how-we-know-cli...
It's also unclear to me how scientists might not have enough data to validate climate change in the last several hundred years, but they do have enough data to validate the natural cycle hypothesis spanning thousands of years.
I'm not going to engage more deeply here because this post has the smell of trolling to it, but if you're engaging in good faith, there are hundreds of reputable reports refuting the natural cycle hypothesis:
https://www.google.com/search?q=natural+cycle+arguments+on+c...