Take Me to the Atmospheric River, Drop Me in the Reservoired Water

You may have heard sprinkled in with your other calamitous news that bombards you on a daily basis that we folk here in the Golden State have had a bit of a dose of precipitation for the last week or so. Here’s just a couple of headlines from around the country. Record California storm fueled by bomb cyclone, El Niño, climate change; SoCal won’t ‘see the sun for a while’; Monster Storm In California.

The question is, is the weather we got really that abnormal? It’s really not. In 1958, Downtown Los Angeles received 5.88 inches of rain. L.A. got 4.10 inches on Sunday. That’s a lot, but it’s not a record. In fact, since record keeping began in 1877, Sunday was only the 10th wettest day. 

I’m often dismissed as a climate change denier or a climate skeptic. None of that is true. We obviously have a climate, it’s obviously changing, as it always has, and it’s not necessarily a good or bad thing that it is changing. It just is. In fact, if the planet’s climate isn’t changing constantly, that would be a leading indicator that the planet is dead. What I am a denier and skeptic of is the climate change hysteria that animates the so-called scientific experts and the media, who cannot resist the siren song of disaster and doom in order to report agenda over facts.

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Dr. Daniel Swain, who operates Weather West out of the University of California, Los Angeles, is the media’s go-to guru when it comes to weather. And if climate change were Catholicism, Swain would be at least an archbishop, if not a cardinal. Whenever things get wonky here, weather-wise, he pops up in the news. 

Last year, before California received almost 34 inches of rain for the season, or 141% of normal, Dr. Swaim predicted that because of a La Nina effect in the Pacific Ocean, we would be in for one of the droughtiest droughts of all drought time. Except exactly the opposite happened. We had a fairly wet December of 2022. Even with the umbrellas out, Swaim doubled down, claiming that this was an anomaly, that it would be dry, dry, dry as far as the mouth could parch in 2023. We got bombed by snow and rain, so much so that Ellen DeGeneres took to the TikTok’s to claim that a raging river draining water from the hills behind her home, an exquisite display of gravity in action, was a sign that God was angry with Ojai for harming the planet. In short, Swaim was wildly off in his predictions. Yet media loves him because he’s young, he’s cool, and he’s totally immersed in the climate change narrative that the left wants to promote.

This year, he flipped the script. La Nina is old and busted. The new hotness for this year is El Nino. We’re going to be wet, wet, wet. Except by mid-December, we really hadn’t been, and the L.A. Times was a little more than concerned with El Nino’s underperformance – Is El Nino’s Reputation As A Legendary Rainmaker Overblown?

Others in media, when the rain began to fall in earnest in January, began to shift the goal posts. Yes, we’re getting plenty of rain, but we don’t have nearly enough snow, so we’re in a snow drought. A funny thing happened the last week or so. The Sierra snowpack went from 50% of normal to 73% of normal in a week. There’s more rain and snow on the way. And that’s not counting March, which will bring another round or two if the last two years are prologue. The reservoirs, at least the ones we have, are basically full. They were fully topped off at the end of last year’s season, June 30th, and truth be told, didn’t even need this much rain to fall this year to replenish them. Virtually all of the water that fell on California over the last couple days has now safely returned to the Pacific Ocean from whence it came. We apparently don’t need it enough to do anything constructive to retain it for later use.

When I was just a wee lad, way before the creation of the interwebs, we used to have storms like this all the time. They were warm to start, meaning higher snow elevations, because we were being fed tropical moisture from Hawaii that was spun in here by an Alaskan low pressure system pumping it directly into Central and Southern California. We called them Pineapple Expresses in the day. As the storms progressed, however, the snow levels dropped as the storm got colder. But we don’t use that term anymore, because the description indicates that tropical moisture coming in would naturally be warmer, thus no need for panic that the initial lack of snowfall. Instead, we use atmospheric river now, because that sounds much more ominous, much more cataclysmic. And if you throw in ARK, or atmospheric river X 1000, it gives the headlines a “Day After Tomorrow” apocalyptic vibe. But again, depending on the scientist you ask, this is all normal. Or at least it should be. 

Jeff Anderson, a hydrologist for the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, let the cat out of the bag about the normalcy of these types of storms, and why they’re actually necessary. 

In the current El Nino pattern in the Pacific, the Sierra has about a 1 and 3 chance of seeing a big winter, Anderson said. It has about the same odds for a normal winter or a below-average winter, depending on how the storms shift. Anderson said the region needs four more atmospheric rivers by the end of March for a normal snowpack.

 
California has had one for this season. We need four more, just to be average. 

As for rainfall totals, after this week alone, virtually all of the state’s monitoring sites have either surpassed or are a day’s worth of rain away from hitting their season average, which begs the question. Shouldn’t we be building a few new reservoirs in order to collect some of this bounty of normalcy that we’ve seen the last three years? Nah.

The Sites Reservoir in the West Sacramento Valley, the 1980s’ equivalent to today’s high-speed rail project, is still just sitting there, waiting for construction to begin…someday. The proposed 1.5 million acre feet of water storage that would feed Southern California and agricultural interests along the way in Central California has been tied up in environmental and bureaucratic red tape for literally four decades. There have been bond measures passed to pay for it. There have been state initiative passed by citizens of the Golden State to tell the state government to get on with it. And yet, not one shovel has been sunk into the ground, let alone bulldozers or earth movers. At this point, it’s allegedly supposed to begin construction, maybe, in 2030 or 2031. Construction was to begin this year, but alas, this is a state run by incompetent lefties, so we can’t have nice things. They have to be delayed for another decade at least. 

How much water did we graciously just return to the ocean to help cool it down? Around 8 trillion gallons. How much would the new reservoir alone hold if we had the political will to actually build the damn dams on each end of the site? Around 488 billion gallons. Just think if California would have greenlit half a dozen new reservoirs around the state at any point in the last four decades. 500 billion gallons here, 500 billion gallons there, pretty soon, it starts adding up to real water. 

The planet is not dead, God still makes the weather, and the left will never understand how to do anything except deploy fear and alarmism in order to get you to submit to their edicts and their control over your tap. Go ahead. Take a long, hot shower. Hose down your driveway when it’s time to clean up all the debris. Turn the sprinklers on every day this summer and enjoy lush green grass. We clearly have plenty of water, and you couldn’t possibly waste on a per capita basis as many gallons as California has for most of your lifetime.