Thats a bad way to look at it.

A better way:

The moisture is being sucked out of some places and falling to others. So one area is becoming barren, and another is being flooded. This means a few things:

- It is harder to farm. Can't farm when it is flooded, can't farm when it is barren

- It is harder to keep fixed cities because the climate changes. Imagine having to move NYC every 10 years. It is far worse when people don't have good infrastructure.

- The displacement of people will make the syrian refugee crisis look pale in comparison to what is coming.

- Entire ecologies being destroyed is gonna be an economic hit we can barely comprehend.

- Extreme weather is another effect. Example being freezing temperatures mid-bloom. Or a hot week mid winter. Crops grow and freeze causing entire crop failures.

And fires are only gonna get worse. The fact that right now this tree survived is great. But will it in 10 years?

I don't see how that makes it "a bad way to look at it" I didn't discuss the implications of likely changes in precipitation at all. Just stated what kinds of changes are likely in my opinion.

I also don't think the consequences as easy to predict as you think. For example cross crops may transpire less because of their pores being closed more due to higher CO2 concentrations. That may be good, depending on the crop and location. There will be higher flow in most rivers, and by association most lakes (but offset by higher evaporation) which could be good both for humans and irrigation. I think the answer is complicated and difficult to predict.

Current unsustainable practices with respect to both soil and groundwater depletion will still be unsustainable.

Parts of California are not a great place to grow crops sustainably, at least not the kinds of water and soil intensive crops currently grown. That may increase or decrease on the whole over time due to climate change, it's tough to say with any certainty.

Overly pessimistic. We have irrigation, dams, and drainage, we’re not totally beholden to the natural rainfall cycle anymore for farming. As far as coastal cities go, we should be investing more in sea walls, but I think technology can help solve these problems too as it has so far in Miami and Venice. If it eventually gets too expensive to maintain that will happen gradually, not like a sudden refugee crisis.

we're not too protected either. What percentage of the US's food gets grown in CA? https://www.mercurynews.com/2017/07/27/california-farms-prod....

The solution to California's droughts isn't just dams. You can't build a dam large enough to hold enough water for going multiple years without rainfall and the aquifers, which bank water in the ground were deeply depleted in the last drought.

> The moisture is being sucked out of some places and falling to others.

I would like to learn more about this, can someone post more information?

It’s tempting to believe that climate change just means that some places will get hotter or colder, or that species will move north or south, upslope or downslope, but the reality is that we don’t really know. Much of the work coming out of ecological niche theory shows that ecosystems have many emergent properties and can’t simply be studied at the level of an individual species because those species wouldn’t survive without their symbiotic relationships [1]. What is true at the species level, however, is that each species has a unique and oftentimes non-overlapping adaptation to whatever environment it’s in relative to its peers. That means that as the climate shifts, some species will go north or south, or upslope or downslope, and others will behave differently. The consequence is that many ecosystems will literally be pulled apart, and species which lose their symbiotic relationships will have to either adapt over a short time span or go extinct. Assuming the climate stabilizes, it will take time, probably much longer than humans are comfortable with, for things to reconfigure.

[1] https://www.pnas.org/content/106/Supplement_2/19729

Yes, I don't think that's surprising or seriously contested. Rapid change means species will have to adapt or die, and many will perish. It's not the first time that's happened on Earth, but it is the first time since the end of the last ice age. It's a terrible slow-motion train wreck that seems nearly unstoppable. Humans too will have to adapt, and some number of us could well perish also.

Longer-term I have the controversial opinion that it's a good thing (downvotes incoming!), but that could just be my tendency to look for the silver lining. Being Canadian and knowing that my entire country was buried under kilometres of ice and then scraped clean to bedrock 12,000 years ago, I feel that's a more dangerous long-term risk than global warming and rising oceans. Think of how much food we grow in northern and southern latitudes. That process would maybe have begun in about 1500 years, and one could imagine that stopping that might involve crazy things like digging up buried hydrocarbons and burning it to add CO2 to the atmosphere, or spraying dark pigment over ice and snow to reduce the albedo (rename Greenland to Greyland anyone?)

We've fucked things up pretty badly for the next thousand or more years, there will be mass extincions, mass migrations, maybe even famines and wars. But we also dodged an icy bullet for who knows how long. I take some comfort in that.

This is a good and interesting report, thank you. As you implied, this is about averages, which is useful though incomplete.

"Global Warming"/"Climate Change" is, to state something pretty obvious, about additional energy in an active system. That means, of course, more total heat across the entire system.

However, I think a far more important aspect is how much more active the system as a whole gets. I don't have time to get into it in detail here, but overall that means there will be more and more extremes. More droughts. More floods. More severe winds. More heat waves. More freezing storms. We're already seeing that in action and the rate at which the number of extremes increase will tend to increase as more energy is sent into a somewhat chaotic system.

> However, I think a far more important aspect is how much more active the system as a whole gets. I don't have time to get into it in detail here, but overall that means there will be more and more extremes. More droughts. More floods. More severe winds. More heat waves. More freezing storms.

I don't think there is much evidence to support this relationship. I'd be glad to be proven wrong.

Basically as you add energy to the system things get more extreme. Storms including hurricanes and monsoons. Dry places and times get dryer due to increased evaporation. Wet places and times get wetter (more severe floods). It's a predictable consequence of higher temperatures.

Ah! Thank you

Luckily we dont have to just sit idly and watch it, we can redistribute water intelligently rather than just letting it flood rapidly back to the ocean.

I'm all for avoiding climate change, but also want us to be real that we dont have to play an entirely passive role in adapting to what might be a new normal

Water does not just flood rapidly back to the ocean on its own. It forms rivers, streams, creeks, flood plains, ponds, and lakes.

Humans have built channels and storm drains as well as laid down substantial amounts of non porous ground cover like pavement and concrete.

If you really care about using freshwater resources, start restoring rivers and side channels.

Both can be true. It can be wetter on average, but drier during fire season