Lake Tahoe is in the headlines because the beautiful blue lake in the California Sierras is very low on account of the drought conditions in that state.  However, they've been that low before, and, knowing California's history of droughts, they'll be that low again.  When it comes to California, you just have to ride out the droughts, especially because the environmentalists prevent the state from building any new reservoirs for the growing population.

California is currently experiencing the third, or maybe it's the fourth, drought in my lifetime.  Before this one, I believe that the biggest one was back in the mid-1970s.  That was the one that led to this rhyming slogan, associated with flushing toilets: "When it's brown, flush it down; when it's yellow, let it mellow."  Since then, I've been a water-conserver.  Even now, living in the fecund Southeast, I can't stand to leave a faucet running unnecessarily.

Admittedly, the current drought is a bad one.  Back in 2014, before the media lapsed into complete hysteria and dishonesty about...well, everything, USA Today ran a fact-filled article about California's cyclical drought conditions:

Megadroughts are defined more by their duration than their severity. They are extreme dry spells that can last for a decade or longer, according to research meteorologist Martin Hoerling of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Megadroughts have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.

Most of the USA's droughts of the past century, even the infamous 1930s Dust Bowl that forced migrations of Oklahomans and others from the Plains, "were exceeded in severity and duration multiple times by droughts during the preceding 2,000 years," the National Climate Assessment reported this year.

The difference now, of course, is the Western USA is home to more than 70 million people who weren't here for previous megadroughts. The implications are far more daunting.

Overall, "the nature of the beast is that drought is cyclical, and these long periods of drought have been commonplace in the past," according to Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "We are simply much more vulnerable today than at any time in the past. People can't just pick up and leave to the degree they did in the past."

That's exactly right — and it's why I cannot get too excited about the pictures of a very sad-looking Lake Tahoe in a Daily Mail article giving grim predictions about the lake's current state:

Lake Tahoe's water levels have dropped about half-an-inch below its natural rim as experts warn that another dry winter could put the body of water at risk of becoming 'terminal' - meaning the lake will no longer be able to supply its only outflow, experts say.

In fact, I remember being in Tahoe for the 1976 bicentennial fireworks, when the lake looked just as it does now.  A few years before, the water had lapped close to the road.  This time, you could keep walking and walking from the road to the water and seemingly never get there.  For me, it was kind of awesome, because I've always loved collecting the pebble-sized carnelians and quartz that litter Tahoe beaches.  More beach meant more lovely pebbles.

Rain started to fall by about 1978, and, in 1981–82, California had one of its wettest, wildest winters in my lifetime, filling the lake to the brim.  As the USA Today article said, it's cyclical.  The real problem, always, is a lack of preparedness.

Moreover, it's possible that a wet winter is headed California's way.  This year is supposed to be a second La Niña year, which can sometimes bring massive rainfall.  While there's a lot of waffling about climate change making it impossible to predict La Niña's effect, it seems obvious that what's really going to matter is whether a high-pressure system develops diverting rain away from California.  For California's sake, I hope no such pressure system develops, but Nature likes to keep us guessing.

The Earth's climate is an endlessly dynamic and variable system.  The fact that climatologists, even though they know that a La Niña is on the way, have no way of knowing what pressure systems will do in the next few months tells you everything you need to know about their inability to anticipate the effects of alleged "anthropogenic climate change" in the next decades and centuries.

My advice to Californians is to build more reservoirs or to reduce their population to 1981 levels, which was around the last time that California put any work into its reservoir system.  Maybe that's the impetus behind Governor Newsom's disastrous leftist policies.  Currently, almost half of San Francisco residents plan to leave the city, with many of them presumably heading to a new state that they can then destroy with the same leftist policies.

Image: Lake Tahoe by PLBechly.  CC BY-SA 4.0.

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