This megadrought's dry years to come

Reading the tree rings from Montana to northern Mexico, from Pacific beaches to the Colorado Rockies, a team of scientists led by a UCLA researcher has shown that the current long-term drought in the West is the most severe in 1,200 years.

It's not just a dry spell — it's a megadrought.

The rigorous study, aided by NASA, shows all that talk you have heard most of your life, about how the lack of rain in these parts is normal, and about how “we live in a desert anyway” — we don't; we live in a rare Mediterranean climate — is nonsense.

We live in a California and a West that used to be much wetter than it is now. We are living in a period so dry that its likes haven't been seen since Charlemagne was emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. And while, yes, we need to do more to effectively store what water does fall from the sky, you can't store what you don't have. Our state relies on melting snowpack for most of its water, and both the Rockies and the Sierra often see vanishingly small amounts of snowfall these recent winters.

There have been megadroughts before. Twelve hundred years is long in human time, though not in planetary time. But there's a difference here in our industrial age. As the Guardian reports, the work of the team led by climate scientist Park Williams shows the drought “has been intensified by the climate crisis. According to their findings, soil moisture deficits doubled in the last 22 years compared with levels in the 1900s. Human-caused warming accounted for a 42% increase in severity.”

So, should Californians sink into despair, or, worse, bury their heads in the (hot) sand? Not at all. We are going to continue to live here, successfully. We are simply going to adapt. Build the Sites Reservoir in the Sacramento Valley. Redouble efforts to irrigate all landscaping with recycled, purplepipe water. Understand that desalination is going to be (an expensive) part of the picture for coastal communities. Xeriscape your yard. Encourage our cities, counties and water districts to redirect stormwater into berms and swales that will keep it in local underground aquifers. Conserve water inside your home. And, yes, work to mitigate climate change. The dry years will continue. But human ingenuity will help us survive them.