Courtesy of Mish.
Leaving aside religious debates on global warming, UC Berkeley professor B. Lynn Ingram says California water woes could be just beginning.
As 2013 came to a close, the media dutifully reported that the year had been the driest in California since records began to be kept in the 1840s. UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram didn’t think the news stories captured the seriousness of the situation.
“This could potentially be the driest water year in 500 years,” says Ingram, a professor of earth and planetary science and geography.
“These extremely dry years are very rare,” she says.
But soon, perhaps, they won’t be as rare as they used to be. The state is facing its third drought year in a row, and Ingram wouldn’t be surprised if that dry stretch continues.
The NewsCenter spoke to Ingram about the lessons to be drawn from her research as California heads into what could be its worst drought in half a millennium.
Q: California is in its third dry year in a row. How long could that continue?
A: If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century, like during the Medieval period and the middle Holocene. The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.
The late 1930s to the early 1950s were when a lot of our dams and aqueducts were built, and those were wetter decades. I think there’s an assumption that we’ll go back to that, and that’s not necessarily the case. We might be heading into a drier period now. It’s hard for us to predict, but that’s a possibility, especially with global warming.
Magic Words
With that, Ingram, just mentioned the unmagic words "global warming". Is that a contrary indicator?
Perhaps.
Here is another one: Ingram is the author of The West without Water What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us about Tomorrow….
