Californias Elongated Drought: Warming to a Changing Status-QuoWith the winter of 2014-2015 failing to deliver much of a snowpack to California, Californians entered a fourth year of drought. The measurement on March 3rd of the snowpack was the water equivalent of five inches, or 19% of the average for that date.[endnoteRef:1] The droughts extension ran counter to the conventional wisdom that droughts last three years in California. Such wisdom is problematic not only for its specific content in this case, but also because of the underlying presumption of epistemological infallibility. Ok, Ill unpack this bit of creative verbosity. Without being aware of it, we tend to assume that we cant be wrong about things we have not studied. In fact, we even dismiss the knowledge of those who are learned in a given subject in favor of our own belief that we cant be wrong about what we suppose we know. This tendency of the human brain gets our species in a lot of trouble, yet we as a species are nearly blind to underlying drought. [1: Adam Nagourney, Alarm Rises For a State Withered By Drought, The New York Times, March 18, 2015.]

The full essay is at Californias Elongated Drought.