Water Concerns Elsewhere Too
Erratic weather patterns are creating some very forward thinking, thankfully. As they say, Necessity is the Mother of Invention. That's fine, so long as we don't just take that for granted.
As a kid growing up in northern California I had no idea that water could become scarce and unavailable; possibly a finite resource. It just was always there. I grew up swimming and fishing in the Russian River in front of my grandmother’s house, but also watching it rise 21’ with a house floating downstream to the sea. Of course, as a kid, you don’t realize a lot of things which can only be learned with time, interest, and attention.
On road trips back in my later years I’ve seen Mount Shasta with virtually no snow on it’s cap and Shasta Lake so low that I could barely see a pickup truck near the bottom at the water’s edge. In mid summer of 2007 the level was down 62’. Subsequent to that I have also seen it in nearly full recovery with the waterline nearly back to the vegetation level. But these variables cannot be counted on. The only certainty is uncertainty.
Excerpt from USA Today - July 2024
“Hundreds of millions of gallons of water in Lake Shasta and other major reservoirs in northern California have been disappearing into thin air.
Considering the region has suffered recently through some of the most extreme heat ever recorded, water evaporating off the lakes in vast quantities hasn't surprised water managers.
On July 3, [2024], 288.8 million gallons of water evaporated off Lake Shasta. And during the first nine days of July, 3,392 cubic-feet per second of water — or about 2.2 billion gallons — turned into vapor and floated away into the atmosphere.”
Boom and Bust cycles in climate happen now as they do with resource development economies. Climate change makes the decisions on the prior, but we humans need to make the decisions on the latter in order for the prior to have a better outcome.
The link to the following video takes us to California where good forward thinking and innovation is trying desperately to make up for decades of mistakes made in water usage and management. Even adults back in the day never realized what I, as that naive kid, never expected to see.
Watch the video here.