After twenty-two years as the champion of gross inanity, Britain's Independent has been challenged by Bloomberg
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Bloomberg: The End of Snow Threatens to Upend 76 Million American Lives
“The snow in the mountains is this incredible gift that created California,” said Spencer Glendon, founder of climate outreach initiative Probable Futures and former director of investment research at Wellington Management. “Nobody would build all of that stuff in a climate that was on the brink of being a desert.”
With the Southwest gripped by its worst drought in 1,200 years, there’s less precipitation of any kind these days across the region, especially the crucial frozen variety with its multi-month staying power. Rain, as desperately as it’s needed, isn’t quite the same: Unless it goes into a lake or reservoir, it won’t be available for weeks or months in the future, the way snowmelt can be. What little winter precipitation does arrive now often lands as rain and runs off, long gone by summer. The West’s mountain snowpacks have shrunk, on average, 23% between 1955 and 2022. By the end of the 21st century, California could lose as much as 79% of its peak snowpack by water volume.
California has “always” been a desert (at least for the past 10-20,000 years ago), and the beautiful state Californians want to preserve is an artificial creation, built by dams, reservoirs and aqueducts. Foreseeing a doubling of the state’s population, the first Governor Brown and the legislature planned an elaborate system of new reservoirs to ensure an increased supply of water. Nothing was ever built. Brown retired, the legislators were replaced by starry-eyed lunatics, and the Earth Day crowd took over. Instead of building new, dams were demolished, and 50% of all runoff was diverted to the ocean to protect snail darters and obscure clams. So the population doubled, then doubled again, while the water supply was halved.
It’s certainly true that the Central Valley won’t be supplying America’s crops much longer: while the amounts fluctuate year to year in response to water supply, the chart below shows that, in dry years, agriculture may get roughly 60% of all available water and “environmental uses” (snail darters) get 30%, that ratio is reversed in wet years; how much is saved in either cycle? Not much, so the farmers will be eliminated. Of course, those individuals who are used to eating food won’t do so well, either, but that has never been a concern of environmentalists.
So maybe California is doomed, though the “scientific” studies proving that it would never snow in England after 1980 give me doubt, as do the discoveries of 5,000-year-old human hunters found in the Swiss Alps as glaciers melt — even the “scientists” admit that these people died while hunting in an ice-free environment, and the glaciers that hid their graves came much, much later. But could the citizens of California slow down the process by increasing the supply of available water? They could, but they won’t. They have blocked every attempt to build desalinization plants on the coast, and every proposal to build new reservoirs. (They have also shut down their nuclear plants, rather than build new ones, which, short term, won’t solve the state’s water woes, but would be far more effective in reducing the CO2 emissions the primitives blame for the shortage in the first place.)
Then what’s the point of hysterical articles like Bloomberg’s’? It whips up fear and prepares the masses for more state-sponsored punishment ahead, but does nothing to address solutions.
