[winternett]

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... :/

[lacker]

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.

[jyounker]

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.

[nradov]

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

[winternett]

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.

[tomc1985]

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.