The Fires & California Drought Downward Spiral: A Scientific Review

[Silhouette]

So before the Owen's Valley was largely drained (used to be Owen's Lake, a HUGE lake east of the Sierra Range), this prior hydrologic cycle existed. But with more and more arid conditions east of the Sierra with Los Angeles siphoning that basin's moisture away to nothing, the weather no longer stalls out as reliably over the top of the Sierras. Net result is diminishing replenishment of moisture over the Summer and the cooler temperatures that brings. And then as temperatures rise at the peaks over Summer, without that stalled cooling effect from evaporation east of the range, the glaciers begin to die.

Used to be there were glaciers everywhere atop the Sierras. I remember as a kid in the 1960s & 70s being cold as hell in the Summer at just about every elevation above 5,000 feet there. Glaciers everywhere. Now its sweltering often in the high country, hardly a glacier to be seen and when you do, they're tiny. Important to note is that the slow and steady melting of glaciers in the Summer was what the CA irrigation/reclamation system relied on. They relied on the precarious cooler weather in Summer to keep the melt slow, steady and reliable.

Getting a lot of snow in Winter is fine nowadays, but it doesn't solve the melting problem in the Summer. If Summer temps are not kept cool enough, no matter what the snowpack is in the Winter, the glaciers die. Each year over a comprehensive timeline, there are fewer glaciers and they are smaller. Glaciers in the high country are key. Preserving them and even getting them to grow is important.

Solution is to make Los Angeles stop. LA needs to do massive solar desalination at its shorelines. With plenty of sea water and plenty of sun, LA can feed her voracious appetite for water. I'm talking about simple evaporative solar thermal and not that labyrinth of expense that is reverse-osmosis.

If California doesn't replenish the Eastern Basin next to the Sierra Range with copious amounts of water in the form of massive lakes, like it used to have, California's Sierra Range will more resemble the Atlas mountains of Morocco very soon; (that's the Western Sahara Desert). California's agriculture will perish. And that's a big deal folks.

So, properly, the Army Corps of Engineers needs to get involved in this crisis. The fires are just the symptoms of a much larger and much more nationwide crisis. You may hate CA, but her agriculture is a big playing card on the world stage and a vital component of our national security. It's time to sit LA down and have a talk.

 

[Silhouette]

The tinder-dry vegetation on the Western Slope of the Sierras is just another symptom of the overall problem. Also drought is weakening trees all over the Sierra Range and has been for decades now on the increase. Replenishing the Eastern Basin is the magic bullet to solving CA's droughts and water issues. You can either take it seriously or not. But to not take it seriously would be a grave, grave error. Massive people dying in these fires is our wake up call. We can still fix this thing if we get right on it.

 

[EvilCat Breath]

We can't have desalination plants. We have a crazy train to pay for.

 

[william the wie]

Until and unless the tax base collapses the state, non-profit and federal idiocy that rules in CA collapses I don't see how any turnaround is possible. The fashionably leftist ideology will block any and all attempts to fix CA until the leftists run away from the disaster they have created.