From what I hear, an awful lot of Californians are ignoring the drought restrictions in favor of a green lawn and clean cars:
Gov. Jerry Brown, appearing at the site of a wildfire that has charred nearly 70,000 acres in Lake, Yolo and Colusa counties since last week, said Thursday that the ferocity of fires raging across drought-stricken California should serve as a “wake-up call” to climate change skeptics.
“The climate is unstable,” the Democratic governor told reporters after meeting with fire officials and people affected by the fire. “You can imagine, if the drought continues for a year or several years, California could literally burn up.”
Brown, who called a state of emergency last week in response to the fires, has long emphasized ties between climate change and wildfires, with rising temperatures contributing to drier forests. He urged Republican presidential candidates in a letter Wednesday to address climate change in their first debate, on Thursday night, and he told reporters, “My message is real clear: California’s burning. What the hell are you going to do about it?”
The fires are just the start. Next come the floods, orders of magnitude greater than normal, washing away soils. Then the habitat that everyone grew up with never returns. Good times. Thanks Koch brothers.
In southern California, people really are doing a certain amount of cutting back. Not enough, but some. Sadly, though, they’re being stupid about it. A no-watering landscape of wood chips or gravel is going to *increase* runoff when we do get rain. Instead of planting the gorgeous local native plants, which look like they came out of a horticulture breeding program, they’re pretty much paving everything. D.U.M.B.
And, yes, Ron is right. Flooding will be a bigger problem and increased runoff won’t help.