California has suffered through both severe droughts that fueled horrific wildfires and some of the wettest years on record, causing landslides and billions in damage. How it confronts this new reality will offer lessons for the rest of the country.
In the early 2010s, California endured a very severe drought that killed millions of trees and fueled horrific wildfires. That was followed by a total reversal in 2017, the state’s second-wettest year on record, which caused landslides, evacuations and $1 billion in damage to roads and highways.
Sound familiar? Six years later, Californians have lived through yet another cycle of lengthy drought followed by record-breaking destructive rains. Dozens of atmospheric rivers over the winter removed all of the state from drought conditions.The transformation from drought to deluge and back again can feel so complete that it’s easy to forget what conditions were like just a few years before, or how long we’ve been lurching between the two.
In an article for The New York Times Magazine’s California issue, Brooke Jarvis examined how these climate swings have shaped the Golden State. She also covered how scientists think we should prepare for a future in which California’s precipitation extremes are even more extreme. Though the state’s average precipitation has stayed fairly steady, less of the water now falls as snow because of climate change. That’s a problem, Jarvis explained, because California has relied on its snowpack as a natural reservoir that melts well after the wet season ends. Now, more time passes between rainy periods, so droughts become increasingly severe. And the storms themselves are more sudden and intense, and therefore more likely to cause floods, burst levees and overflow reservoirs.
How California confronts this new reality — by preparing for megafloods, improving groundwater storage and shifting away from water-intensive crops, for example — will offer lessons for the rest of the country.“This is the reality that’s waiting for so many other parts of the world,” Jarvis said. California is “sort of a harbinger,” she said. “The rest of us will be facing more and more of these hard decisions.
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