What Will ‘Weather Whiplash’ Mean for California? – the New York Times

Coast Guard Air Station Astoria crew deploys to Russian River during Northern California floods (by by Petty Officer 3rd Class Taylor Bacon CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 via Flickr).

California is built upon the great gamble of irrigation. Left alone, much of the land in the Western United States would be inhospitable to teeming cities. But we’re Americans — we couldn’t let the desert stand in our way.

More than a century ago, the United States Bureau of Land Reclamation began taming the water in the West…