Good morning! 

His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama will speak to the Legislature today about ethical leadership, the environment and compassion.

His address starts at 1 p.m. and can be streamed here.

In other news:

• One of the most surprising stories from the primary election earlier this month is that Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Vista, is in the race of his 15-year career. While he’s expected to retain his seat against an underfunded and unknown candidate, “who knows” is the only way to describe this presidential cycle. The San Diego Union-Tribune has more. 
• “Two weeks after lawmakers rejected the proposal, an effort to create new overtime pay rules for California farmworkers has reappeared in the Legislature,” writes the Los Angeles Times. The Times also looks at where the budget, passed last week, addressed and failed to address certain issues. 

• “The El Niño-fueled storms that coated the Sierra with nearly normal snow this winter brought blasts of hope to drought-weary California,” but “after the flurries stopped and the seasons changed, the melt-off from the high country has been swift and disappointingly scant,” reports SF Gate. 

• “Did bullet train officials ignore warning about need for taxpayer money,” asks the Los Angeles Times.

Assembly:

• Joint session with Dalai Lama at 1 p.m. Multiple committee hearings. 

Senate: 

• Joint session with Dalai Lama at 1 p.m. Several committee hearings. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

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New followers: @LauraLiterally @civilmeasure

“It’s already a less dire situation, given the precipitation we have received so far this winter. But it would have to rain almost every day — storm after storm after storm — in March for there to be no drought rules this summer,” Max Gomberg, a top official with the State Water Resources Control Board, told the San Jose Mercury-News.

A Los Angeles-based National Weather Service official, however, wasn’t ready to give El Nino much credit for providing relief. Meteorologist David Sweet told the Los Angeles Times that downtown L.A. had actually received only about half the normal 10 inches of rain it would typically get from Oct. 1 to the end of February. This contradicts the expectations of weather authorities, the Times noted:

“Though experts predicted that the Pacific warming phenomenon known as El Niño could bring consecutive downpours to Southern California between January and March — now some say as late as April — nothing of the sort has occurred since the first week of the year.”

Dry south benefits from heavy rains in north

Nevertheless, this dry period isn’t as bad news for the region as it might seem because the giant Metropolitan Water District of Southern California gets 30 percent of its water from Northern California via the State Water Project’s 444-mile-long aqueduct. As of Feb. 22, the Sierra Nevada snowpack, which feeds the state water system, was 94 percent of normal.

Meanwhile, a Monterey-based National Weather Service forecaster thinks El Nino could have a March rally.

“There was a lot of hopeful anticipation that we were going to end the drought this winter, and that we’ll be able to wash our cars and water our lawns,” Bob Benjamin told the Mercury-News. “People are saying what happened to the floods? I bought all these sandbags. But remember: the winter is not over. There is still a good potential for us to reach or exceed our normal rainfall this year.”

Stanford climate scientist Daniel Swain, writing for KQED earlier this month, isn’t so sure. Swain says this El Nino has been much different than past events:

Northern California and the Pacific Northwest have gotten soaked, while Southern California has been left pretty dry (with a few notable exceptions). While a veritable “parade of storms” has indeed inundated the northern reaches of the state with very heavy precipitation … even leading to some minor flooding at times, many of California’s most populous cities haven’t witnessed an especially remarkable winter to date. … [T]his isn’t quite the blockbuster year that many had hoped for (especially in the south).

The result is likely to be another year of pressure from water officials to keep showers short, let lawns go brown and wash vehicles less often.

The latest measurement …  showed that the “snowpack is growing quite nicely.”

 

Frank Gehrke, chief of the California Cooperative Snow Surveys Program for the California Department of Water Resources, said the measurement was 130 percent of average at Phillips Station off Highway 50 near Sierra-at-Tahoe Road. He says the storms are making a difference in building snowpack so far this winter.

 

“These are not major storms, but they are making a difference in terms of snowpack accumulation,” Gehrke says. Gehrke says “this snow is not going anywhere” and will be important for “reservoir recovery.”

 

Both the depth and water content at Phillips Tuesday were the highest since 2005, when a depth of 77.1 inches and water content of 29.9 inches were recorded, according to the DWR.

While the snowpack is the most crucial measurement, since the water it provides lasts for months to come and helps communities statewide, the drought news was also good on many other fronts. Here’s one example:

San Francisco recorded an impressive 6.94 inches of rain during the month, far above the 4.5 inches it averages in January and the most the city has seen in any January since 2008 … . The total, in fact, is more than the city received over the past five Januarys combined. (Don’t forget: San Francisco saw no rain for the first time in 165 years of record-keeping in January of last year.)

That’s from the San Francisco Chronicle.

Water officials: Too early to ease tough rules

But as the Sacramento Bee reported, state officials object to any complacency on the drought front:

California’s drought regulators agreed Tuesday to extend water conservation mandates through the end of October. The decision came in spite of increasing evidence that El Niño is delivering better-than-average precipitation, including an encouraging measurement of the Sierra Nevada snowpack recorded just hours earlier.

 

The new regulations adopted by the State Water Resources Control Board mean urban Californians will have to reduce their water usage between March and October by about 23.4 percent compared with the baseline year of 2013.

 

That represents a slight easing of the existing mandates expiring this month, which require a savings rate of 25 percent compared to 2013. Sacramentans will be among the main beneficiaries of the relaxed rules, as the state board voted to ease requirements for hot inland communities where it takes more water to keep trees and lawns alive.

Nevertheless, as CalWatchdog reported on Jan. 19, state officials have already acted to ease conservation rules announced by Gov. Jerry Brown a year ago. Bureaucrats appear to be trying to strike a balance — acknowledging good news on the water supply front without discouraging conservation efforts that have been strikingly successful at times.

Since then, it’s come to appear that the Brown administration’s rhetoric is tougher than its actual policies. Late last week, state regulators announced that they were considering significantly relaxing the rules for some water districts.

The proposed changes to California’s emergency drought regulation reward water districts for investing in new local supplies and allow for adjustments to savings goals based on a district’s climate and population growth.

 

Friday’s proposal also allows water providers to reduce their “conservation standards” by as much as 8 percentage points.

That’s from The Los Angeles Times’ coverage. It comes on top of a previous plan announced a month ago that allowed some water districts to get credits of 4 percentage points for their positive actions; it also gave districts credits of up to 7 percent for adding new supplies, a big plus for districts like the San Diego County Water Authority, which finished building the Northern Hemisphere’s biggest desalination plant last year, a $1 billion project on the Carlsbad coast.

“Godzilla El Nino” may be coming to pass

The two rounds of changes easing up reductions might solely be seen as about fairness to better-run districts that diversified supplies and promoted conservation before it became mandatory. But there’s a chance they also reflect increasing confidence that the El Nino storms that began in recent weeks are just a harbinger of what a NASA climatologist suggested in August could be a “Godzilla El Nino.” Previous fears that Northern California wouldn’t benefit from storms nearly as much as Southern California appear to be easing. This is from Friday’s San Jose Mercury-News:

El Niño conditions may have peaked in the Pacific Ocean, federal scientists said Thursday, but powerful weather systems — like a new series of storms on track to soak the greater Bay Area over the next five days — have only just begun and will likely continue at least through May.

 

“This is the time of year when El Niño acts the most reliably,” said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the climate prediction center for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in College Park, Maryland. “So we would certainly expect the impacts to continue well through the rest of the winter and into the early part of the spring.”

 

There is a 96 percent chance that El Niño conditions will remain through March, scientists at NOAA and Columbia University reported Thursday, and a 62 percent probability they will continue through May.

 

Simply put, that means the likelihood of regular storms across California and heavy snow in the Sierra Nevada will continue to be greater this year than in regular years, offering hope that 2016 may finally be the year that the state’s four-year drought — now starting its fifth year — is broken.

‘Exceptional’ drought conditions over in Northern California

The U.S. Drought Monitor website, run by scientists at the University of Nebraska, said Northern California had received enough rain that it no longer qualified as being in an “exceptional” drought condition. But the website’s Jan. 14 report also had words of caution:

In California, even with the rain and snow received over the last several weeks, many areas are still running below normal for precipitation and snow for the current water year. Wells, reservoirs, ground water, and soil moisture are all recovering slowly, which is to be expected after three-plus years of drought. Precipitation in northern California eased some of the exceptional drought. The consensus from California experts is that recovery will be slow, and many more storm events are needed through the rest of winter to really put a dent in the drought.

Stepping up water collection has emerged as a priority in Southern California, drawing much of its water from outside sources, including Northern California and the Colorado River, as the Washington Post observed. “The State Water Resources Control Board plans to allocate $200 million for such projects,” the paper noted. “And Los Angeles plans to capture 20 billion more gallons than the 10 billion it collects during normal years.”

“In Los Angeles, the city gutted a 16-foot-wide concrete street median and replaced it with vegetation that captures rain over 111 acres. The $3.4 million project is designed to collect enough water to fill more than 27 Olympic-size swimming pools a year.”

More than one drought

But the larger picture regarding El Niño has become much more complex. California’s vast size, varying climates and competing consumption needs have conspired with the imprecise definition of drought to leave many communities unsure of how much more rain they’ll need to turn the corner.

“Ask water managers in different parts of California when they expect they might shake free of the worst drought in a generation — and whether a wet El Niño winter could be their savior — and you’re likely to get a lot of answers,” according to the San Francisco Chronicle. “Those answers depend on where people live and what source of precious water they’re tapping.” Analysts told the Chronicle much will hinge on the remaining two to three months of the state’s rainy season, which could keep snowpack levels high enough for many areas to begin banking on lasting relief.

A stark turnaround recently witnessed at Folsom Lake, fed by river water swelled by the snows, has fueled those hopes. Folsom, the state’s ninth-largest reservoir and the Sacramento area’s primary source of drinking water, had shriveled down “to a mere 135,561 acre feet” early this December, as the Chronicle noted in a separate report. Then came El Niño. “With the recent rains, Folsom’s water level has risen 28.5 feet and the reservoir is now holding 246,497 acre feet of water,” the paper added.

Still, according to the U.S Drought Monitor, the Golden State has remained parched. “In California, moderate drought covers 97 percent of the state, with 87 percent in severe, 69 percent in extreme and nearly 45 percent in exceptional drought,” Capital Public Radio reported. Because of the cutoff date for the data it used to tally those numbers, however, that harsh analysis “does not include the recent storms that have brought rain and snow to the state.”

Tapping the desert

Experts have long acknowledged the limits of rainwater in resolving California’s drought challenges. But one ambitious workaround — tapping into groundwater locked below the Mojave Desert — has finally picked up steam. Two years ago, the Cadiz company, led by Scott Slater, sought to “tap an aquifer beneath 34,000 acres of the eastern Mojave and sell the water to suburbs and subdivisions in the Los Angeles Basin,” as Bloomberg Business then reported. “Several politicians, ranchers and environmentalists call Cadiz’s proposal ludicrous,” the site noted. But Slater, it went on, had already obtained “the necessary permit to pump from San Bernardino County, where the aquifer is located. He also has six utilities in the Los Angeles area eager to buy the desert water.”

Cadiz hit a major roadblock when the Bureau of Land Management finally weighed in on its schemes last October. “In a long-awaited decision, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management says Cadiz cannot use an existing railroad right-of-way for a new water pipeline that would carry supplies from the project’s proposed well field to the Colorado River Aqueduct,” as the Times reported. “By using the railroad right-of-way, Cadiz had hoped to escape federal environmental review of the 43-mile pipeline, one of the project’s most expensive components.”

But Slater’s support in and around the Southland has not ebbed, and he has redoubled his efforts this year. “Cadiz will have to seek federal approval for the pipeline, which will trigger a long and expensive environmental impact review,” according to the Guardian. “If we can’t get them to follow the law, we’ll do what we need to do, pursue administrative and judicial remedies,” he told the paper.

TULARE, CA (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

California’s struggling infrastructure faced the daunting prospect of too little water underground and too much falling from the sky.

“Four years of drought and heavy reliance on pumping of groundwater have made the land sink faster than ever up and down the Central Valley, requiring repairs to infrastructure that experts say are costing billions of dollars,” the Associated Press reported, citing punishing conditions affecting everything from canals to well casings to “stretches of a riverbed undergoing historic restoration.”

The problem has been ongoing for months. “The sinking is buckling the walls of irrigation canals, damaging pipes, creating giant sink holes and cracking homes,” CBS News noted in August. “California’s farmers are pumping groundwater as fast as they can in order to keep their crops alive during a drought that has left them high and very dry. But when this much water is pumped out of the aquifer below ground, the clay between the pockets of water collapses and the ground starts to deflate like a leaky air mattress.”

Despite an unusually heavy El Niño, years of historically meager snowy seasons led farmers and others to turn to groundwater in lieu of high-altitude runoff. “Years of low snow packs in the Sierra Nevada mountains have forced California to pump water from underground reserves to meet residential and agricultural demand,” The Hill noted, adding that drought conditions push groundwater consumption up from 40 percent of total statewide usage to roughly two thirds during a drought.

California’s continuing dry spell, however, has pushed the imbalance even further, inflicting harm on the state’s sprawling but already derelict waterways. “Overpumping during the current drought has led to damaged water infrastructure around the state,” according to The Hill. “Replacing a bridge in one California irrigation district could cost $2.5 million, and building a new canal elsewhere recently cost $4.5 million.”

Too much too soon

But the collapse, and its attendant costs, have taken on an added urgency as the state faces a powerful new rainy season. In fact, El Niño rains were expected to push those costs even higher, as mudslides and flooding hit weakened structures. “Heavy rains often bring mudflows. But experts warn that the deluges expected this winter with El Niño are likely to be exacerbated by the dry conditions in countless hillside and canyon communities,” the Los Angeles Times reported. “Even a little rain can set off a fast-moving debris flow, sweeping up anything in its way — loose boulders, tree limbs, cars, even homes.”

Officials faced tough tradeoffs between focusing on infrastructure repair and pivoting to emergency construction that would ameliorate the effects of El Niño. “From Ventura County to San Diego County, officials are racing to clean out debris basins, install protective barriers and develop evacuation plans for communities most at risk from an El Niño forecast to be one of the strongest ever recorded,” noted the Times.

Paying for less

Although experts have not calculated the final tab for the state’s subsidence, as the lowering of the ground level is called, estimates run as high as the billions over the long term. “Putting a grand total on damage from subsidence in California is tricky because irrigation districts don’t often single out repairs required by subsidence from general upkeep,” according to the AP. Department of Water Resources spokesman Ted Thomas told the wire service that the sinking of the California Aqueduct alone, which has reached over a foot, cost the state “tens of millions of dollars” over the past 40 years, with officials bracing for a similar expenditure going forward.

In the long run, however, new groundwater legislation has ensured that California farmland will simply be retired. “Groundwater pumping has kept hundreds of farms operating the past four years but continuous groundwater pumping won’t be allowed under the new California Sustainable Groundwater Management Act, which is set to take effect in 2020,” according to Ag Professional. “It will limit how much groundwater can be extracted over the long haul.”

Despite decades spent puzzling over the tall order of improving the state’s massive network of waterways, “those who need water the most, farmers, are in a poor position to take advantage of any deluge,” the New York Times reported. “If El Niño floods pour into the Central Valley, the farmers will inevitably watch millions of gallons of water flow to the sea.” State leaders, the paper noted, have wound up under the gun to determine “how best to save the water that arrives between the drought years, weighing the value of billion-dollar construction projects against smaller and less expensive measures.”

From the ballot box to Gov. Jerry Brown’s office, a whole raft of measures have been pursued from Sacramento. But none of them were poised to make the difference this rainy season. “California voters approved more than $7 billion in new bonds last year to improve water infrastructure, including nearly $3 billion for storage,” as ABC News Fresno observed. But with critics charging that new dams will come up short, “California Governor Jerry Brown is also pushing a controversial proposal for two massive tunnels to move water with fewer environmental issues,” the station added.

Beltway bickering

In Washington, the outlook hasn’t been any clearer. Earlier this month, California members of the House of Representatives angrily gave up on landmark water legislation aimed at benefiting the state. “In a remarkably acrimonious ending to negotiations that once seemed close to bearing fruit, GOP House members acknowledged the bill’s failure while putting the blame squarely on California’s two Democratic senators, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer,” McClatchy reported. “The utter collapse of negotiations means a California water package — that in its latest manifestation spanned 92 pages — will not be slipped into a much larger, must-pass omnibus federal spending package needed to keep the federal government open. If legislative efforts are revived, they will come in the new year.”

Water districts themselves have wound up at the front of the line petitioning for a redress of grievances. Cuts imposed under Gov. Jerry Brown’s watch have led to sharp fiscal challenges for the utilities. “Seven months after state regulators drew up their plan to achieve a statewide reduction in urban water use, Yorba Linda Water District and its counterparts will get their first formal chance to ask for relief,” the Los Angeles Times reported.

“Under the regulations, water districts with a history of high residential use were told to cut back as much as 36 percent, while other less thirsty cities and towns were required to cut as little as 4 percent. The board and its staff took heat at the time for not considering factors such as climate, population growth and water conservation efforts prior to 2013,” the paper added. Yorba Linda and others have planned to resubmit their request for allowances, appealing to changes like the coming rainy season. With a new desalination plant about to come on line, the San Diego Water Authority has raised its hopes for a reprieve.

Grabbing land

But the water districts themselves have come under intense suspicion by farmers, for whom collective memories of California’s “Chinatown”-era water wars have not faded away. But old ghosts did not discourage the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California — America’s largest drinking water distributor — from snapping up a huge tract of land in the Palo Verde Valley, according to the Associated Press. The play, “along the Arizona line, tapped a deep distrust between farm and city that pervades the West over a river that’s a lifeline for seven states and northern Mexico,” the wire noted.

The stretch of land carries outsized significance because of its prime positioning to receive flows from the Colorado River. Desperate to irrigate their crops, Central Valley farmers have been reduced to using groundwater — utilizing a pumping process that has taken a dramatic toil on the ecology of their own land. “According to Jay Famiglietti, a water scientist at NASA’s jet propulsion lab in Pasadena and a professor at UC Irvine, two-thirds of the lost water has been sucked out of aquifers in the Central Valley, causing parts of the valley to sink,” the Guardian observed. “In some parts of the valley, the land has been dropping by almost 2 inches a month, according to NASA satellite measurements.”

Rainwater over rail

Few have held out hope for across-the-board reform in California’s complex water rights law. In a new study, the Public Policy Institute of California claimed that “the growing demand for water makes it imperative to reform the state’s system of allocating this essential resource,” as KQED noted, calling the state’s water rights system “fragmented, inconsistent and lacking in transparency and clear lines of authority.” But the water rights regulations underlying California’s complex system were unlikely to change any time soon; “since making that change would require legislative action, don’t hold your breath,” the network concluded.

In part for that reason, attention has turned to how the state’s current infrastructure budget has been allocated. One target of opportunity has been California’s high-speed rail endeavor. “A few urban Californians will benefit from high-speed rail, but we all pay the price for inadequate water storage. Since our state’s half-finished and aging water infrastructure was built 50 years ago, our population has doubled,” wrote Board of Equalization vice chair George Runner and state Sen. Bob Huff, R-San Dimas.

“Even with the benefit of El Niño, most of the rain we receive this winter won’t be captured and will end up in the ocean. Many cities need expensive projects to meet federal and state mandates to capture, treat and recycle storm water runoff. But neither Congress nor the Legislature appropriated funds to pay for these projects, anticipated to cost billions,” they cautioned.

BY WAYNE LUSVARDI

California’s drought barometer and vocabulary need to be reformed.

The bureaucratic apparatus in California perpetually says the state is in a “drought.” In fact, with snowpack running at 124 percent of normal, the California Department of Water Resources says the state’s hydrological drought is over.

After several years, the U.S. Drought Monitor map finally indicates no part of California is abnormally dry, extending to the parched Colorado River basin. Nevertheless, the 2008 drought proclamation of former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger remains in effect.

As the public keeps complaining in comments left at online newspaper forums that the drought is over, public water officials continue their Bureau-speak that all that rainfall does nothing to reduce the drought.  Even though the public and the water bureaucrats use the same language, it doesn’t mean the same thing.

The reason that the public and the bureaucrats talk past each other is that the public is talking about short-term snowpack and reservoir level, and the water officials are talking about long-term trends.  Contrary to myths perpetuated by environmentalists, in a wet year farmers and cities combined only use about 35 percent of dedicated water supplies, but the environment gets about 65 percent. In a dry year, the percentages reverse.

Thus, anyone can point to whatever yearly data they want to prove drought or deluge. As Mark Twain noted long ago, there are no unbiased people about water in California, just some people who may be apathetic.

In the last five years, the supply of water to farms has be curtailed by as much as 85 percent due to environmental lawsuits resulting in court-ordered cutbacks in shipments through the California Aqueduct.  During roughly the same time period, Southern California has shifted from two-thirds dependence on Colorado River water to two-thirds reliance on the State Water Project via the Sacramento Delta.

The Metropolitan Water District is considering recommending lifting the water restrictions, as reservoirs have refilled their storage. But for how long?  If we have, say, five dry years in succession, we’re back to a drought, which is normal in California. So, to water managers we might as well start conserving now, because the future is uncertain.

New Drought Vocabulary Needed

What we need is a new drought vocabulary in California. It seems that every type of shortage of water in California is called a drought. And logically speaking, if everything is called a drought, nothing is.

Typically, we associate the word drought with a water shortage condition of natural origin. But not every “drought” is a drought. Some water shortages we call drought are thought mostly to be natural, some climatological, some judicial, some demographic and some regulatory. But they all end up being called “drought.” When in doubt, calling everything a drought seems to be the rule.

So a lawsuit-induced drought may be disguised as a natural drought. That’s the situation in California today as a 3-year natural drought condition is covering for a court-ordered shut off of 85 percent of water to Southern California due to an environmental lawsuit to protect the Sacramento Delta smelt fish.

But if the natural drought subsides, what then will we call our water shortage situation? Drought seems a most inappropriate term to call a court-ordered shortage of water due to an environmental lawsuit, when there may be an abundance of water available.

Drought is a near-permanent normal condition in California, especially in Southern California. But even in dry Southern California, enough water flows to the sea in a typical rainy winter week to supply the population for a year.

So what we experience as drought is the lack of water capture and storage (i.e., slippage). What we conventionally call a drought in California is the unpredictable skipping of a peak rainfall year that typically supplies an overflow of water sufficient to fill reservoirs to last a few years for farmers and coastal cities.

In California, much of the landscape has Spanish names derived from the days of the Mexican land grants. Even weather conditions, such as El Niño and La Niña (“Little Boy” and “Little Girl”), are derived from the Spanish language.

So if we are to look for another set of names to nuance all the different types of drought, perhaps we should look to Spanish words.

As stated above, what we conventionally call a drought is the missing of a peak rainfall year to fill up reservoirs and snow pack to last for a few years of normal drought. So we need a word in Spanish that means the lack of a peak wet year.

In Spanish, the word punta means peak.

The prefix “a” means “none,” “lack of,” “without,” “absence of.”

Putting the prefix “a” in front of the Spanish word punta results in the word apunta.

So perhaps what we should call most of our droughts is an apunta or apunta ano, meaning the absence of a peak rainfall year. Use of the word or phrase would take getting accustomed to. But at least it more accurately describes what we call “drought” in California.

Other Terms

Which raises another question: What then do we call other water shortage conditions drought? Other obvious terms come to mind:

Judicial apunta: a court-ordered water shortfall.

Regulatory apunta: a water shortfall caused by some regulatory agency but not the state Legislature.

Legislative apunta: a water shortfall caused mainly by legislation (such as AB 32).

Demographic apunta: a population-induced water shortfall.

El Niño or La Niña apunta: a water shortfall from ocean water temperature in the Pacific Ocean.

Ag apunta: a water shortfall caused mainly by farmers switching to permanent all-year-round crops.

Lago apunta: drought caused by a lack of water storage reservoirs in watersheds

Junta apunta: the humorous sounding but serious term referring to a water shortfall caused by a small group militantly seizing power in a coup or junta (e.g., the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan — an inland sea intentionally shrunk to the status of a lake and wasteland resulting from Soviet central planning in the 1950’s).

Junta punta: a term referring to the aggregation of water caused by centralized planning (e.g., when the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California built the Colorado Aqueduct and spillage resulted in the creation of the Salton Sea in Southwestern California).

UNTA punta: a totally unserious term meaning an accidental spill of water caused by some bureaucratic agency (e.g., the United Nations Transitional Authority or the fictional University of North Tulare Authority).

Better Terminology Needed

All kidding aside, California needs better drought terminology.

Words are often used in bad faith. They are used to obscure human responsibility. As sociologist Peter L. Berger states: “Bad faith is to pretend something is necessary that is in fact voluntary.”

The word “drought” is used to serve as a cover for man-made drought. What is ultimately man-made is made out as caused by nature.

Nuancing better terms for drought in California may be a first step toward better public education about water management, no matter what terms may eventually gain acceptance by the public. But for now the terms “apunta” or “apunta ano” are proposed to begin a dialogue on better drought terminology for eventual adoption by the media and California’s nomenklatura.