California’s New Floods Won’t Quench The West’s Mega-Drought

Climate Change runs too deeply for seasonal flooding to change how the story ends.

Today California is getting speared from two directions: flood water is surging over a landscape that has been parched by a continuing drought.

The drought makes California’s land surface more impervious to water. This was illustrated in the “Great Flood of 1861–1862”, caused by weeks-long sequences of winter storms coming after a dry spell. It produced…