Are We Doomed by Climate Change?

Fast-thinking innovation is needed to prevent ‘wetter wets, drier dries, hotter hots’ from threatening the state’s crops, species and economy... That farmers are growing such water-intensive crops in such arid places is the result of misguided 20th century engineering, says Jon Rosenfield, a senior scientist with Baykeeper, an environmental watchdog group in Oakland. Rosenfield says dams and other storage and conveyance infrastructure created an illusion of water security and reliability. “We’ve tried to impose predictability on a system that’s inherently very variable,” he says.