It is September in California, year four of a scorching drought. Forest fires are blackening the arid state, from Napa Valley to the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Fly over the High Sierra and about every tenth evergreen below appears dead. Even the high mountain lakes and reservoirs are about empty – and equally void of vacationers who have few places to boat, fish, and ski, and are unsure where the next forest fire will break out and force evacuations on often one-lane winding mountain roads.
Four years of warnings of the consequences of government culpability – from cancelling water projects to releasing millions of acre-feet of precious stored reservoir water in utopian efforts to restore 19th-century salmon runs in the San Joaquin River or to rebound a bait fish population in the San Joaquin-Sacramento River Delta – are no longer written off as shrill.
Only meteorologists offer hope. They reassure that the cause of the drought was never global warming, as the president and governor in demagogic fashion insisted. Rather, periodic fluctuations in oceanic temperatures, especially warming and cooling of the equatorial Pacific Ocean known as El Niño, determine whether northern winter storms skirt or hit California. Preliminary data now suggest that perhaps El Niño is finally back to change storm trajectories and that next year might see the end of the four-year absence of snow and rain.
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