200 Year Droughts in California History

So it seems that California has a long history of these East Pacific High Pressures causing long lasting, multi-century droughts. Article. http://news.msn.com/in-depth/scientists-past-california-droughts-have-lasted-200-years This is particularly interesting because living in the Sierras during drought is a good way to experience really terrible wildfires, which is then followed by landslides when it does rain, and the smoke inhalation isn't any fun.

If we did get into a serious multi-decade drought I'd move out of this place. Pack up and head for the coast, probably. Somewhere it either rained more or desalination was possible. As much as I'd consider a place like Boise or Spokane, those places are hit by drought too, and in the best of times the only jobs they have are lumber mill, motorcycle parts, franchise retail, and agriculture which is impacted by the drought. I suppose I'd look harder at Oregon and Washington state, however the legalization of marijuana worries me about its economic impact causing a surge of manufacturing businesses to flee, and I already know what happens to a place when that happens. You get an economy like here: minimal service jobs, drug abuse on the job, high turnover rates, supervisory abuses, gender bias and sex discrimination, con men and embezzlers everywhere, and falling wages as competition for the remaining jobs drives down wages. Finding places with enough water and geography and laws to support business is very difficult when drought is ruining so much. Any stresses make it all worse and drive up the crime rate, making living there under stressful times a seething cauldron of anger and violence, enough that you become hardened to its frequent appearance. You get Detroit, basically. And all violent cities have two important factors in common. One of those is poverty. And we know what the second one is.

If there were infrastructure investment, what we have for civilization would last a bit longer, but 200 year droughts are hard to plan for. Hard to fix. For some reason, congress is utterly fixated on some silly idea that people won't leave places that are bad and go places that are better. If California is in the early stages of a 200 year drought, something pretty common based on the data they're uncovering from tree rings, and that the last 100 years were the wettest in a millennium.... wow. Can you imagine? California could look a lot more like Baja, and that also means the interior West would be a lot drier too, though they saw lots of lightning and summer rains, what's called Monsoonal Pattern in Arizona, Nevada and the rest of the West. California is mostly skipped by that rain, staying East of the Sierras. Here there are more fires, more reservoirs filled in with silt, more lakes and rivers and aqueducts gone dry. No water for growing crops because cities use far less. With no agriculture, we lose most of the state's revenue, which unlike the article claims is the majority of the money made in the state. Sorry, farming is a $5B/year business that can't be exported by modem to India or China. We do export the food, though, and drought cutting that off, when California farms feed America and Japan and China? Yikes. Not a good thing. Drought could lead to unrest due to famine elsewhere, and that could lead to civil war, and even collapse and a new dark age as the factories supplying the world in China are shut down or burnt down. Not nice for everybody dependent on those parts to keep things running. We might get enough warning to create our own, but we might not. Black Swans exist, after all.

With drought, settling in one place isn't wise. You can move in, rent, see if the rains are more stable despite the drought parching California and the Southwest, and leave if things go bad, legally or water allowances. Despite the asinine and ignorant whining of Victor Davis Hanson in his article on NRO: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/370425/californias-two-droughts-victor-davis-hanson he have built dams everywhere it was safe to do so, and then built dams where it wasn't safe, and nearly built dams that would have killed 50,000 people when they burst, and other dams were stopped before they started because they would have silted up with dirt before they were finished. Unlike him, I've done my research, and I live here. I even know people. The most important things to know about California's climate are:

1. The summer cooling comes from the North wind down the coast pushing the Longshore Drift, aka Alaska Current, which supplies cold water and nutrients to the fish on our coast. This cold water is why we have fog, which keeps coastal temps lower in the hot summers and allows many plants to survive the months without rain.
2. The state's Sierra Nevada Range causes severe rain shadow and catches most of the moisture which heads across them, funneling it back into California's western slope, thus caught in reservoirs and carefully distributed to farms and people.
3. The Sierras have high rates of erosion, meaning that silt and mud end up downstream. When water slows down in reservoirs, the amount of silt that can be carried by that water decreases, dropping the silt into the reservoir and filling it in. In time, all reservoirs become meadows.
4. Wildfires increase the silt washing into rivers and then fill reservoirs faster.
5. A reservoir full of silt holds much less water and can't be easily dredged since turbulence turns the silt back into liquid. It can't be shoveled out when its wet. There's math for this kind of hydrology, but the outcome is the best time to empty a reservoir of silt is when it is dry, and you need trucks and bulldozers etc. This is quite expensive so nobody does it.
6. The infrastructure the above yahoo quoted were built by the survivors of the Great Depression and WW2 veterans, not his generation of Baby Boomers who most just maintained it at 3x the current wages for those same jobs, so small wonder mine isn't leaping to correct this deficit. Low Bidder contracts make such things done by the least skilled and slowest working so it can be done again.
7. California doesn't have normal weather. It gets hit by storms off the coast and those are in the Sierras in merely 4 hours, potentially causing blizzards any time of year. History shows this to be the case. All weather in California is sudden, usually weird, and only rain shadow is decent protection from its extremes. Rain shadow also makes for surprise heat waves and desert, so its not often very nice either. In the dry season, California is a desert with many oases. In the wet season, it can be a swamp with snowy peaks. Many of the reservoirs were built to stop really terrible floods in the springtime thaw, which can happen in a few days all at once. Marysville was famous for flooding, and the main reason hydraulic mining was banned. All that silt and sand washing downstream made the Yuba River flood even worse than usual.
8. There is significant and extensive evidence for the North Wind to stop blowing, the sea to warm up, and hurricanes striking the California Coast all the way to Fort Bragg, well North of San Francisco. Ponder that. Hurricanes. Big strong ones. You think you know what Normal Weather Is?
9. I've personally witnessed two extended 40+ day rains caused by Atmospheric River events from near Hawaii pounding and flooding northern California during my childhood. It was bad enough that owning a rain-suit was considered sensible for all school children, and not catching illness from frequent wetting in the weather was a sign of good fortune. Again, this is common and will happen again.

All the whining about Eastern snowstorms amuses me since I remember my entire childhood seeing those same images on the national news: snow in winter. What a concept!

Yesterday's high temp here in the lower Sierra was 44'F. There was snow yesterday morning, and probably last night. I am expecting more snow in the next hour and again later today. I doubt it will stick, but if it does? Meh. We'll get groceries before then.

And a Message for LA: stop whining about your brownouts. Let your lawn die. That whining will lead to the division of California and your troubles would be just beginning since that opens the doors on water distribution rights contracts, the most cutthroat business since claim jumping in 1849.