Chronicles of the #CaliforniaDrought

Traveling to southern California last week, we stopped so I could take some pictures of a typical California landscape, rolling hills dotted with oaks. This area near Santa Barbara doesn’t have many oaks. This is looking to the east. The other side has the mountains that flank the coast, and those have oak trees.

Here is a picture of the coastal mountains, which are right across the freeway from the above shot.

You can see very different vegetation. The coastal mountains get water from the fog. A little bit inland, and it dries out. The more inland you go, well, the drier it is.

Of course, when you arrive in La Jolla, which is in San Diego County, it looks like this. Water, water, everywhere, and desalination, too.

I have some links to share. The first is a very interesting interactive government link on climate change that lets you look at predictions in any region in the USA.

http://nca2014.globalchange.gov/

The next one was curated by @concretecamping and is what we are all hoping for.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-07-14/california-get-relief-drought-el-ni%C3%B1o-rescue

In deference to one of my blog followers, El Niño does not always produce more rain. (El Niño is a warm tide along the western coast. The last big one produced a huge amount of rain, enough that our family all went out to watch the water crest one of our big dams.)