Manjoo, F. (2023, January 20). What Will ‘Weather Whiplash’ Mean for California? The New York Times. Retrieved January 29, 2023, from https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/20/opinion/california-drought-flooding-climate-change.html 

Climate scientists are predicting that California’s climate will be extremely volatile due to the effects of climate change. The trend in the last decade has shown that California will be extremely dry and then experience immense downpour. Additionally, the rainfall can’t be contained as well as before because much of the downpour has been in the form of water, rather than snow. This is a problem because snow acts like a solid reservoir of water, until it slowly melts in spring, whereas water mostly runs off into the ocean and becomes unusable.

This is yet another article on the California storms, however in this one, the main focus is more on the preparations and strategies that citizens will have to implement to conserve water. Furthermore, it discusses why California lacks the right infrastructure to deal with the extreme climate. California’s infrastructure is mainly suited to the drought and dry years because many don’t think about flooding when they’re in a drought. This leads to a ton of problems when faced with heavy storms, which leads us to agriculture. Most of California’s farms use way more water than is necessary, this combined with insufficient water supplies due to a drought leads to ideas on efficient water use. In the article, it is said that “Farming currently accounts for 80 percent of California’s water use.” and most of this is because the farmers are not planting water efficiently. This fact thus leads me to wonder what California’s water supply would be like if the agricultural industry here grew water-efficient plants.