For years CA has got worse and worse drought wise - one great year of rain that brought the state back from Exceptional and Extreme drought levels across almost the entire state to still Abnormal or Severe in about 25% of the state is really just a blip.
Like... one year is a data-point, not a pattern, and even if CA gets more rain in the winter it would appear to be getting hotter in the summer which is really not good.
Hasn’t really been the case this year so far.
Plus, again, the rain and weather in winter and spring is record breakingly anomalous this year. So "this year so far" is not really a sane comparison.
The trend overall has been clear. Using this year is like when people say "we had record snowfall in upstate NY this year, so much for global warming, nyuk nyuk". It doesn't follow.
Droughts and heavy rain fit those predictions perfectly.
Politics != Science
Just two years ago the news was all about how the CA drought was all because of carbon emissions and global warming. At least this paper does not do a full flip-flop and claim the recent precipitation is due to GW. It suggests the future may have higher or lower precipitation and large uncertainty - perhaps large variability due to the region being near a transition. Regardless of what its trying to say, it can be viewed through an AGW lens as "we fucked up last time, but here's why and BTW it's still all from CO2."
My take away is just that modeling this stuff is really hard and they aren't there yet.