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Comment by genericuser314 | Hacker News Reader

Here's a chart of Lake Tahoe water levels since 1900: https://www.usgs.gov/center-news/water-science-lake-tahoe-ba....

That's a chart from 1900 to 2017. It lacks the current data. According to current provisional data, the lake level was lower in 2016 than it is today.

https://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv/?cb_00065=on&for...

Looks like it has reached this level quite a few times, but perhaps more often in recent years.

The 1930s was the Dust Bowl. The 1988-89 drought, while not as severe as the Dust Bowl, was the costliest in terms of economic damage and hit most of NA. As you can see by that chart, it took five or more years to recover from it.

It's also possible to see that the region never really recovered from the 2002 drought. Droughts are getting ever more frequent and the region isn't getting enough time between them to recover.

"Droughts are getting ever more frequent and the region isn't getting enough time between them to recover."

This doesn't seem to be true, it seems that CA has been a uncharacteristacally wet for the last 500 years or so. Before that the drought/wet swings were much wilder with much more severe droughts

https://www.eastbaytimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/07/2014...

http://ocp.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/cook/Cook_etal_...

As long as there hasn't been any significant changes in population or agriculture in the region in the last 500 years it's no big deal

From this chart alone, it appears that the water in the lake (or its sources) is drawn down much faster in modern times during dry years—the slopes of the downturns get steeper and steeper each decade.

Yes, but probably due to increasing development and population increases... It's to be expected, as the region wasn't meant to support all the new people and companies watering their new lawns, cooling data centers, and people taking baths and washing their Ferraris.

Climate change is indeed real, but exaggeration about it's effects only drives profit up, fear often creates apathy and fatigue, rather than encouraging positive change in identifying and adjusting the root causes of the issue.

I expect you're being downvoted because agricultural irrigation is the primary use of water, not residential water use. Residential water use makes up a relatively paltry fraction of total use compared to agricultural.

How much Lake Tahoe water (or feed water) is used for agriculture?

I ask because it's a high alpine lake surrounded by mountains. It has no significant water outflow. I'm not sure there's a path for water from the lake's watershed into agricultural land. Water is lost from the lake to evaporation in enormous amounts and to local uses in much smaller but probably still significant amounts, and that might be about it.

Can't speak for tahoe, but here in Utah, I read that total residential water use accounts for about 2% of the total water use of the state, and individual households it's something like 0.02% ... so really it's like comparing an ounce of piss to the ocean.

Alfalfa farms (of which the governor is an alfalfa farmer) are the worse culprits as it's a water heavy plant, and we're also a top exporter of alfalfa to Asia, so essentially Asia's buying our water from us via alfalfa.. there's plenty of other corporate/industrial culprits, but farms are a huge one here..

I'm specifically asking about Tahoe. Down in the valley below, California uses a LOT of water for agriculture, no question. But I'm not sure ag-use is an issue for Tahoe water.

But OP argues that overpopulation leads to increased water usage. Farming takes more water as more people it has to feed.

The statement was a pretty obvious insertion of humor to lighten the mood. I'll eat the downvotes because I don't want to be serious in a world that believes in punishing people for trying to have a sense of humor. :P

As I recall, the watershed for Lake Tahoe is actually very small, because the surrounding ridges are quite close to the lake. The surface of the lake is the majority of the total collection area for precipitation.

To me, this suggests that evaporative losses may also be a significant portion of the draw-down you see each year, i.e. precipitation and evaporation on the same surface area. A trend towards more rapid reductions in water level may say something about climate shift, with hotter and drier summer conditions?

Perhaps also reduction of watershed area because of development and capturing of waste water? I know there are mitigation efforts around the usual farm and garden runoff (nitrogen etc.) for Tahoe; lack of such mitigation why Clear Lake[0] is a soupy green.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clear_Lake_(California)

I think ClickBait is what is driving the drought, and even other cases of public anxiety more than anything else right now.

It's unfortunate that major news outlets feel the need to capitalize on fear to generate profit now more than ever. The anxiety drives people to flood supermarkets and over-buy goods, which pleases advertisers, and it's a constant cycle of fear that can lead to major safety problems for us all during a real crisis.

Fear mongering is now even present in major news sources, this constant process of sensationalizing issues without proper historical context diminishes the value of rational and trust-worthy news reporting that used to truly solve societal problems in the past... We should hold news outlets accountable for over-sensationalism like how CNN and others are reporting on this drought cycle... :/

Huh? Consumers buying extra toilet paper and bags of flour doesn't affect the amount of snowfall around Lake Tahoe.

The drought has some pretty obvious effects if you live out here in California. A small lake near me that I usually go hiking to with my little kids, Jewel Lake, dried up entirely this summer. That hasn't happened in years. (Well, I've never seen it dry up before, I don't know when the last time was.)

When I was a kid in the Midwest we had snow days sometimes and missed school. We don't have those here because it doesn't snow. But we have had smoke days in the past few years, where the air was too smoky for kids to go to school.

The California drought might seem like some exaggerated mainstream media junk to people on the east coast. But out here in California, drought vs non-drought is just a mundane, practical part of life. We root for it to start raining in the fall because that means fire season is over. We chat about the drought weather with people in town to make small talk the way I chatted about the Red Sox when I lived in Boston. I think you have just categorized this issue wrong - this is the sort of news that is actually relevant to normal peoples' lives.

I can attest to what @lacker has written. In twenty years I've been visiting Jewel lake, I have never seen it completely dry. The stream running in has gone dry. The marsh under the boardwalk is bone dry. The ferns are now kindling. The turtles are gone.

On the fog-ward side of the hill (the wet side; also known as Berkeley) the succulents are dying. Until this year, growing a jade plant (and many other succulents) required no watering. The mist in the air was enough. They're now red and their leaves are shriveled. They are dying from the drought. I see this every day.

The media is not making things up, and they are not sensationalizing this. If anything the media is under-reporting how bad things are.

Like the other replies here, I disagree. I am in coastal Southern California and we enjoy a fair degree of water independence, but even so up until recently drought conditions affected us greatly. I am thankful that my municipality got a desal plant up and running as that has relieved us of a lot of the 'please conserve water' messaging we used to get, which is now gone.

This is also a gentle reminder that the majority of water use here is agricultural, and that a large share of that usage goes to almond production -- which is one of the thirstiest (and most profitable) plants around. If our agribusiness switched to more economical crops the severity of the drought might be greatly lessened.

Just as a footnote... Obviously clickbait doesn't cause droughts, that part was a joke about irresponsible news reporting on the water threshold being sensationalized.

If you look at the graph in OP's post, the lake has reached low levels like this in years prior to now, which is very telling about how much certain news agencies are over-embellishing on how current low levels are dire.

Lets keep sanity and practicality involved in this. I also did state that global warming is real. I do believe it is a real issue, faulty correlations are not real though.

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