Didn't think I'd need to say this, but obviously drones, satellites, etc, did not exist in the 1800s 😂. The image on the thumbnail is a depiction of what California likely would have looked like at the time, created by geographer Mark Clark.
A friendly tip here: Please mix the music at the end less loud, or rather: Your spoken word passage louder. In comparison to most other UA-camrs, your spoken passages are very low in volume, which is why one has to turn up the volume, only to get one's eardrums smashed at the end of the video :) Maybe look into mixing (equalizing and compressing) of vocals or speech.
I am from a town near there called Porterville. A local historian went on about how there used to be a lake and lots of water. He said the area would have such floods that that people could ride in a canoe to Sacramento. I didn't really believe him. A few years later I was watching a youtube who narrates old letter. This one was a Japanese first had account of coming to California and on the video was a very old map of California and there was the lake. Really tragic and it's happened to the aral sea too. I mean, we do make TONS of food but at what cost? People in my hometown were in the NY times because people's houses had no drinking water during the drought. The air quality is absolutely horrible from all the tilling, many of my friends had asthma. The ground water is disappearing, wells in my home town were drying up also.... It's the problem. We need that food to sustain our population but it is terrible for the environment...
Something similar happened to what was once the world's fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea. The rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. You can see abandoned ships in the middle of a desert
@Matthew Chenault Did you even watch the video? California of the 1800s and early 1900s was the wild west. The most unregulated, free-market, libertarian nightmare it can possibly get. Capitalism destroyed the world.
This is especially interesting in light of the recent (March, 2023) floods and heavy rainfall which have partially re-filled what was once Tulare (Too-Larry) Lake. It's predicted that the flooding will remain until the Fall of 2023. I live in Fresno, and it's hard to believe that the arid, mostly bone-dry cotton-growing region around Corcoran (about 40-50 miles south of Fresno) was once lush, abundant with water & home to a vast lake. BTW, Corcoran has a large prison where Charles Manson spent his last decades.
Colorado river no longer makes it to the ocean. A river that used to be able to roll house sized boulders like marbles, reduced to a ghost of it's original glory.
We live just off of hwy 95 where there is access to where the Colorado river used to run. We have gone there with our rock club to pick rocks, agatized coral (gumballs), and fossils.
@@shebamaree9026 Back in the early 1980's it was a visual inspection by the crane operator and whoever was assisting in assembling the boom. Unless there was a consequential shock load, there was no reason to call out the engineers for a detailed inspection.
Visalia native here. This is the story I tell everyone I meet that doesn't know where Tulare Co. is. People from the valley mostly have no idea about how this natural splendor was turned to squalor.
@@brotherlove6216 No, it was marshy, with reeds, grasses, and oak groves. The native people's fished the lakes, wove patterned baskets from the reeds, and ground the acorns from the oaks to make flour, to name a few things. The valley was beautiful and fertile before large scale farming transformed it. Monoculture farming takes a lot out of the land....
Understanding the underground aquifer under the San Joaquin valley and its huge capacity for water storage (more storage capacity than any number of surface dams and lakes could hold) would help restore the wetlands and make ag a partner in its restoration. The Tulare lake was a giant underground aquifer recharger. Aquifer recharging will eventually be the answer to most of the water problems.
Very similar to what happened to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan (then part of the U.S.S.R.). Whole thing drained for cotton farms. Now it's a desert, you can see the old fishing boats in the middle of the sea bed.
You could always keep the lake, throw thousands out of work, cause widespred unemployment, reduce the food supply and increase prices on food. Then you would be happy, huh?
This reminded me of Lake Kankakee that once straddled the Indiana and Illinois state line. It was huge and kept Chicagoans fed with fish, fowl and deer but Indiana wanted it drained to create farmland. The state dredged the river and sent engineers over into Illinois to blow up a limestone ledge that kept the water backed up. They were met with armed fisherman and hunters that threatened to shoot them if they tried, so left and dug more ditches to drain the flat land into the river.
Thanks for sharing that... Ummm There is Blood on the plow in California for Sure...Owen's Lake back in the day when Los Angeles went looking for Water! All out War went down...
It amazes me how cheap politicians are, for a small donation they will frequently do whatever developers want, often spending millions in public money for a few thousands dollars in the right pocket.
@@OuterGalaxyLounge when you want to ban guns and freedom of speech you are anti constitution and anti american. If you like socialism or communism leave to a place that will accept people like you.
@@JW-mr5mh The Boswell Company that destroyed the lake contributes 81 percent of its political PAC money to Republican politicians. But I know you guys don't do your homework.
Live in Fresno in the Central Valley. Working on being a field biologist for the Sierras and working on a PhD. Glad to see a pretty accurate video on the valley and its history. I think you should’ve gone further in to the history of the wetlands of the valley, and how wet this area used to be. There’s insane accounts from explorers on the amount of water, lakes, birds, etc.. As well as this, we used to have large steamboats go across the San Joaquin, which used to be a truly massive river. Sadly, many uneducated people here in the valley believe the solution is more dams and canals which will continue to ruin the state and make our problems worse.
Yeah man, I'm a Fresno native as well and I can say that individuals here are extremely unaware of how their actions affect the environment. It's a shame that because of the agricultural industry using unsustainable farming methods for our particular geographical features that it drastically change the landscape. If only they would have taken the time to analyze the data and farm with the natural geography and ecology, we might still have a good amount of water here through limited diversions of the natural water flow. Possibly similar to the flooding of the nile bringing an expanse of valuable water in and through a limited amount of irrigation channels. But I can see how those things would have made the land a bit less appealing to large agricultural development based on it not being purely economically efficient, and the inability to consistently farm throughout the year. It really is a complete shame and hopefully we can remedy this from now into the next generations.
Allocating water for financial gain was our first mistake. It ruined the entire central valley's ecosystem. It used to be an ocean. They've found megalodon teeth in Bakersfield California and other parts north of it. We could've had a thriving state with massive amounts of water. But no let's dam it up and let it overflow into the ocean.
Would it be accurate to say that the Valley has been drying all these years, then? Went from being under the ocean, then a lake, then wetlands, now a desert?
@@inlonging in a way. The lake only went away due to a catastrophic event as the video discussed, so not particularly the norm. After, that, it was always a wetlands and still would be a wetlands would it not be for human intervention. What exactly happened is that rivers like the San Joaquin would have massive floods during spring due to runoff from the Sierras (which was much great due to the climate being colder and wetter before humans) and make wetlands, flood plains, etc.. Problem for us was that this wasn’t very good for farming. The soil, temperature, and weather were correct, but not the flooding. So, we dammed all of our rivers as we saw that we could play nature and be the gods of this land by controlling it ourselves. This led to a domino or cobra effect and now we’re at where we’re at. The San Joaquin isn’t really a desert, that’s just what people say due to the lack of water. A desert involves lack of diversity, life, and so on. But, the valley is full of life and still has water. However, if we continue to build dams, not letting rivers flow, eradicate lakes, and dig canals, we WILL be a desert. The question is, will we save the valley in time? My personal answer is probably not. Look how bad the fires were this year. No water and super dry conditions due to human activity and construction of dams as well as the introduction of non-native grasses are killing this area, literally. Just this year, there was an ad campaign from Devin Nunes saying “we need to stop letting water just flow into the pacific”, said it’s not supposed to? Rivers flow to the ocean, not to our crops. A lot of people can’t seem to understand this. So, TLDR, what’s happening is not natural at all and wouldn’t happen without the intervention of humans. Look at areas like Florida, their wetlands were protected and still exist. Ours weren’t protected, were abused; and now 95-97% (stat from the California department of fish and wildlife) don’t exist. It’s a sad, sad reality.
I wonder if Lake Corcoran back 700,000 years ago used to be a safe spawn spot for whales. I lived near Northern California when a whale and their baby swam up the river near to the middle of the state. This happened maybe around 2006? I'd imagine their network of information somehow held that spot in their memory. Whale calls are very complex apparently.
Whales don't spawn, they are mammals and their babies are born, not spawned from eggs. They do this in the open sea. They do not seek shelter to birth young. The protection of their pod is what they rely on. I would like some of whatever it is you are smoking though
Maybe we could pump water back in and re-flood the area and the whales could come back to safely spawn? You should get to work on this now. Maybe start a protest/riot. How far detached from reality are you?
@@19bishop56 That does not mean I can not criticize them for stupid decisions. Also it is not like the farmers did it out of the love for humanity, they did it to make money and consolidate power.
Everybody else outside of California: Why are your like this. Californians: ArE yOu JuDgEiNg MuH LyfSitle! Forty-nine States: ua-cam.com/video/2ZIpFytCSVc/v-deo.html
No way Unborn. Farms add humidity to air and increase rain. The water used by these farmers was NOT from this Lake until water was cut off by the goverment in 2010. the underground water had too much salt but they had no choise but to add wells. Farmers made it clear the various trees and plants could only use this underground lake water for at most 4 years. Most only 1 or 2 years. Now many millions of trees are NOW gone. Water still flowing into the ocean rather than onto crops and trees. Farmers did Not cause this. The government did. Now millions of trees no longer providing food or humidity plus more rain. Its more complex but thats what happened.
I wonder if that will become a factor in the plate techtonics of the region. Will it exacerbate movement along fault lines, making them more unstable ?
@@alanrobinson4318 i'm sure it has effected it along with the oil pumping and fracking in the area the amount it takes to trigger a large earthquake is that to an equivalent to a bicycle tire popping.. that is why Geologist like to circle in on earthquake swarms.. sometimes they can trigger a much larger event
@punker4Real My grandfather was a geologist working in Death Valley, a mining engineer. He always said to keep track of all the earthquakes. If they are, more or less, evenly distributed along the fault lines, that's good. That means there's consistent movement and no big one to be expected. If, there's an area of no movement on a fault line, with quakes above and below, a big one should be expected.
Yeah, blame the farmers. Not the tens of millions of coastal city dwellers that the local environment simply cannot handle. CARB won't save them stupid communist fuckups.
I live in Norcal and I always thought the valley looked like a massive lake. it makes sense now. My mind is blown by Tulare lake... I did not know about that.
Tulare Lake is a lake that needs to return. Early accounts of the lake say there were Tule Elk, tons of water fowl, a place where Indians gathered and traded with other tribes across the lake using canoes, and the turtles found along it's shores were used as terrapin soup in the restaurants of San Francisco. And yes, at one time during the really rainy years you can ride a ship from Buena Vista lake, all along the Kern River to Tule Lake and through Fresno Slough into the San Joaquin River and on to San Francisco Bay.
Sure. Let’s bring the lake back. Then we can have less food and fiber and more mosquitos! After all, the narrator said it was an area of marshes and swamps. The BS of blaming the draining of the lake for the subsidence is typical left wing enviormentalist crap. The subsidence has been caused by the diversion of water from the delta mendota canal and California Aquaduct systems that were built to bring Northern California water to the San Joaquin valley and Los Angeles. Instead of that water going to the farmers and cities that paid for the projects, and still pay 100% of the fees whether they receive a drop of water or not, 50% or more has been diverted to “the environment”. That loss of water has caused the farms and cities in the San Joaquin valley to pump from underground.
California really isn't the best place to grow cotton, anyways. Too water-intensive and labor-intensive, on very expensive land. Maybe having a lake and some fish farming would be more profitable, if they need to make money with it.
@@pyrovania Actually, California is an excellent place to grow cotton and many other crops. The long growing season and dry conditions during that growing season (less fungal diseases on crops) result in high yields per acre and superior varieties.
@@lancebwilkins You have a point about Los Angeles, but LA doesn't get its water from Tulare Lake. My question is this: does one man/one company's right to grow cotton in the Lake Tulare lakebed override the rights of other farmers to access a healthy aquifer?
About 6 months ago, I was the lead surveyor on an elevation control survey for land southwest of Corcoran. I was comparing the record elevations of the NGS survey monuments, set in the 50’s with current elevation observations based upon multiple fixed stations around the rim of the valley. I can confirm that there has been over 14 feet of subsidence there. And it got worse the further from town (towards the old lake bed) that you got. A bad situation all around.
@Frank F Kling Prop 13, AB5, San Fran has fallen, reparations, a train to no where (over budget) and now I hear there is a chance police dogs won't be able to chase the bad guys? Yeah, hard pass
@@httr21skins the entire region of the central valley is DEEP red enough to rival the bible belt. the water issues are due to congresspeople, lobbyists, and industries that are historically run by republicans. this isnt to say that the dems arent also to blame because they are. money talks and dems listen to it too. the area focuses on ag issues over environmental issues. the environment should come first before money like the natives did.
Yeah. You can drive by on 41 and see docks right in the middle of corn fields. We were never taught this. When I was 9 we moved from So Cal to Tulare co. I found an old map. Like one of those pull down maps in an attic. It showed a huge lake running up and down the west side of the valley. There was ferry shipping routes from Stockton. Boswell is still one of, if not the biggest land owners in the state, on both sides of the valley.
Californians: “Dude, my city living expenses suck, let’s go to Texas” Also Californians: “Nice place. I don’t like the mayor, though, he no have D. Vote blue no matter who!” Rinse and repeat.
Californians: ooo you have under ground water Austin. Gimme. Also Californians: wHy ArE wE nOt WeLcOmEd! Texans: ua-cam.com/video/2ZIpFytCSVc/v-deo.html
Californians: “I can’t afford to live here because of the insane cost of living.” Also Californians: “I love my governor.” This is my mother who’s saying this.
Central Valley for millions of years was an inland sea about 600 ft. deep and hosted an amazing amount of sea life, including sharks. Go to Sharktooth Hill in Kern County and you can literally collect shark teeth by the bushel, along with the occasional whale skeleton, shark skeleton, other marine life.
I live close to where the lake used to be. My wife’s grandma came out during the dust bowl from Oklahoma, and she remembered fishing the lake with her dad. By the way, people didn’t just build the dams for irrigation purposes: it used to flood terribly around here, and now there’s much less risk. In the 1800s, Sacramento flooded so badly that they had to send the capitol to a different town for two years. A quarter of the livestock in the state died in that one flood. The Central Valley basically turned back into a lake for a while. -A.
Yep, that was in the 1860s and 1870s when it was firsy being settled. They raised Sacramento by a lot and built levees to prevent it from happening again.
Tbh idk what would better, weather the floods still existed or not. Obviously there would be infrastructure damage similar to what happens in the south and over the east coast. But then again, drought would likely be much less of a problem, or not even an issue at all, in California.
Less flooding risk, way more risk overall. These massive shallow lakes are ripe to have levees added to increase their capacity, because the depth is only 3 feet on average, you can achieve a 400% increase in capacity with a levee just 12 feet tall. Using levees ameliorates the flood risk while allowing the surface area to remain. Aquifers get recharged and local evaporation allows rainwater to recirculate as more rain. instead, you now have a desert with water running through irrigations channels with almost no chance for evaporation, being sprayed onto parched soil, again, no chance for evaporation. This is a series of decisions that failed to consider the wellbeing of the entire are.
I heard about when my brother, cousin and I went to Lake Tahoe. Stopped by of a rest area and the ranger there said all the water was diverted to LA. We passed by, thinking we'll see the lake. Nothing but dry there. While desalination may have some issues, is worth pursuing at least! Come on, LA, SanDiego! Stop hogging all the water!
The rape of the Owens Valley is absolutely horrific. I have family that lives out there and talking to the old people that can remember when everything was green vs now in shocking.
So basically this Tulare lake in California is like lake Texcoco in Mexico City. They drained it and now use ground water for drinking and farming and that is causing the city to sink.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.) Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging. The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
More or less. They build dams on the rivers that feed the lake. Sooo, basically they moved the lake into the mountains. Because farmers are draining the ground water around the lake, and the ground water is no longer being recharged by the lake. The ground is sinking.
I lived in Corcoran most of my life and during that time Tulare lake came back in 1969-1970, 1981-1982 and the last time in 1997-1998 during flood years. We have been over due for a flood year now for over 10 years and all of California is drying up and our politicians have nothing to address it other then impose rationing.
Yes. That sentenced resonated with me. Seems like if you have a lot of money, you can’t help yourself but to sway the public purse for your own personal gain.
This wins the Comment and replies of the year award! I can see you on the podium: I would like to thank our brains for doing the thinking, and our perception of reality which shows us the truth. I was going to leave comment above but can't top this.You nailed it.
Its always interesting and sad at the same time, how places like California have the money, resources, intelligence and manpower to fix lots of their water issues (and other issues) but choose not to because a few people lobby against it.
The problem are the idiots running the state. Water priority goes to them first. If you follow the river that goes to Gavin Nuisance property. The rivers are FULL. The river by my property is LOW. The river connects to his river.
This was very well researched and animated, I appreciate the effort. Not a lot of people, even in the Central Valley, understand the anthropological history that has resulted in the current environment there.
2021: Is it time to realize this is a really bad place to grow water intensive crops like cotton? Especially when there is a lot of land in the southeast US which can easily support crops like this.
Cotton is such a cheap commodity it won't even pay for the fuel to haul it on a semi. It takes a huge amount of water to grow and they still grow lots of it around Corcoran and West of Bakersfield.
@@rondye9398 ...Which begs my question, why grow it there? Because of the infrastructure and farm already built. Cotton plants are also very hard on the soil, needing constant refurbishment to keep the plants viable. ... Cotton is best grown in large fields, small parcels are not cost effective but economies of scale, especially with an established farm make it profitable.
@@WTH1812 Profitable? Is that before or after government subsidies? There are areas outside of TUCSON, AZ, as well, GROWING COTTON!!! Where the “h” is the water for THESE fields coming from?!?
@@kkrolf2782 ... Colorado River, possibly also underground aquifers (similar to the Ogallala which is on the east side pf the Rockies and sits under parts of CO WY NE KS OK TX and NM and is being drawn down watering crops in those States. Actor Eddie Albert of "Green Acres" fame spent decades spreading the word about aquifer depletion but was mostly ignored in favor of short term profits) ... this is a map of US watersheds showing where AZ's surface water comes from ... www.google.com/search?q=southwest+us+watersheds+map&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS824US824&hl=en-US&ei=XuHaYNO8Efy4qtsP3Lye2AE&oq=southwest+us+watersheds&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAEYADIFCCEQoAE6BwguEEMQkwI6BAguEEM6BAgAEEM6CAguELEDEIMBOggIABCxAxCDAToLCC4QsQMQxwEQowI6CwguEMcBEK8BEJECOgUIABCRAjoICC4QxwEQrwE6BQgAEMkDOgoILhCxAxCDARBDOgIIADoFCAAQsQM6AgguOgUILhCTAjoGCAAQFhAeOgUIIRCrAjoHCCEQChCgAVDI9AhYjdYJYKHmCWgAcAB4AIAB2gGIAYgRkgEGMTkuMS4zmAEAoAEBsAEAwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#imgrc=ZkNiRfrbEcHuHM ... this is a map of US aquifers ... www.google.com/search?q=us+aquifers+map&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS824US824&oq=us+aquifers&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2j0i22i30j0i390l2.7702j0j4&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#imgrc=MTY--YjX0oRUnM
@@WTH1812 Water rights and political protection of farmers. If farmers had to pay a fair price for the water they use, then insanely water intensive crops would not be profitably farmed in what is now a desert. Note: I have nothing against farmers at all. They should grow crops that make sense for the local geography and the limited water availability in the desert that is most of California.
My grandma and her family lived near the lake and it was still there until the early 1950s. The real death nail was the construction of the Terminus Dam which created Lake Kaweah but impeded the Tule Lake's main tributary. One of the biggest reasons for the construction of Terminus Dam was to protect the city of Visalia and the outlying communities from floods. Hasn't been a major flood here in Visalia since 1954 because of the dam.
THANK YOU 💙. I was at Lake Kaweah two weeks ago. And coming back I happened to look to the side and seen the dam. So for some reason I googled the area and not only seen how the dam was made, but how the dam cut off added to the dead Oak trees that are planted in a pattern like they were growing alongside of a river.
My dad was born in Wasco. He called it Tule lake which was largely already dry when he was a kid although during the spring months it was wet enough to have a large number of tule plants. He also said the famous “valley fog” did not exist until later when agricultural dust and smog increased giving cold, post winter storm moisture something to cling to.
I know of a couple of natural swales around Shafter/Wasco that stay wet all year round and still grow patches of Tule reeds. I even grabbed some rhizome for my parents duck pond a few years ago and they are still going.
Interesting that this came up in my recommendations... now that the lake is trying to get refilled from our massive amount of precipitation this winter! I'm not tracking it very closely, but since Tulare Lake has been gone so long, I don't think people were prepared for its sudden return.
You should do videos on Lake Bonneville and Lake Missoula. Both of these lakes were suddenly drained after the catastrophic collapse of a mountain in Utah and the sudden and rapid melting of glaciers in Montana. Bonneville was the size of Lake Michigan, leaving behind the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Yuba Lake, and Sevier Lake. Lake Missoula left behind Lake Coeur d’Alene, Pend Orielle, Hayden Lake, Spirit Lake, Flathead Lake and others in northern ID and western MT. The emptying of these lakes carved out much of the west, leaving large valleys and gorges in their wake throughout UT, ID, MT, WA, and OR.
That is fascinating stuff. I would also like to see that. I have a feeling it will be a research project all by itself. Maybe there are existing papers that can be consulted.
Yes it's a critical story to understand wrt #sealevelrise which is inherently catastrophic. Stupid reporting and bad science lull people into believing in lies like "one metre of sea level rise by 2100" which they then invent stupid policies to "manage". In fact there is no such scenario. Either it's about 30cm or 2, 3, 7 or even 50+ meters depending how many individual ice sheets collapse in Greenland and Antarctica. One meter is a meaningless aggregate.
Watching this after all the rain we've had the past few weeks, please see where the lake is at after all this rainfall. Read an article saying it might be possible to see it revived. Anyway, this video is a great watch.
This is daily occurance in India. Here developers and people regularly encroach on lakes and rivers and use that land for real estate development. They gets money by doing this but common people suffers due to greed of few..
The Indus River is one of the cradles of civilization. India and Pakistan share the water. An agreement signed in 1962 divided the water so that India gets a fixed allotment of water and the left overs go to Pakistan. As the amount of water entering the river from the Himalayas diminishes, India still gets it's allotment, but Pakistan now uses every drop...... none usually reaches the Indian Ocean anymore. The Indus delta was one of the most fertile areas in the region. Storms are now washing away all that rich soil and food production is diminishing rapidly. Also, Pakistan isn't getting enough water for living or industry. They also have one of the highest population rate increases in the world. This won't end well. Both Pakistan and India are nuclear armed nations.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.) Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging. The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
I heard that years ago that the remains of a large boat was found in the middle of what is now the dry lake bed. It was a head scratcher because no one remembered that there used to be a large lake (Tulare Lake) in the Central Valley.
I grew up in Tulare.. there was flooding in 1969 (I think) that refilled, partially, Tulare Lake. It was an awesome sight! They used wrecked cars along the banks to shore up levees.
@@ricecakeboii94 Oh yeah, California was fucked from the start with how farmers from the Midwest and South completely fucked up a natural water way for us. Now they rule California and our waterways. Climate change just makes the conditions they put us in way worse for us.
Funnily, the exact opposite thing happened in the Imperial valley. A below sea-level desert was turned into a lake (Salton Sea) because of irrigation practices XD
@@X1GenKaneShiroX Google literally when I logged in one day said "You're name is not acceptable change it" or something along those lines and I had to enter a new one to log into my account. What's dumb is it was literally just my generic username of "ssssaa2" before. I even got called out by my favorite youtuber by the name of ssssaa2 before but now it's not the same name.
I believe that the timeline of the Tule Lakes disappearance was a bit off. It may have began drying up in the 1930s as farms encroached on the deltas along its shores. However, it was still around during the 1940s and is part of the reason for Lemore Naval Air Station's development. The Navy used the lake as a safe location to train floatplane crews because the calm water and usually light winds made it easier for them to learn the basics before attempting to land on the ocean with large swells and stronger winds. The lake truly died after Terminus Dam(now called the Kaweah Dam) and the Success Dam in the mid 50s. There is a minuscule part of the lake preserved, but it only covers 1 to 10 acres.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley while providing hydroelectric power. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.) Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging. The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley. We (California) set up a system to stabilize the water supply, keeping the valley green, safe, and productive. These dams create green energy, prevent flooding in cities built on floodplains, and provide water in drought years. Then some people with short memories came in and screwed it all up by diverting more and more of the Tulare lake water off of the Tulare Lake Basin and into the San Joaquin River. California needs to stop using the valley's aquifer recharge water to dilute the polluted waters in the Delta and Bay aria. Instead, California should require cities that are creating that pollution to better treat their waste water before dumping it into the Bay or Delta.
@@jameslferrell5272 Tulare lake was gone way before 30 years ago. Farming to this day uses 40% of California's water supply, Nature 50% and Urban 10%. If you are upset about how much water there is, well you are getting less because of climate change and your neighbors growing water intensive crops for overseas export, mega farms taking more water with wasteful irrigation techniques. Look to your neighbors first. Before settlers from Spain, Mexico, and later the US arrived nature got nearly 100% of the water. What you've seen over the last 30 years was getting us to the point where nature could have that 50% and since farming is the most water intensive, they saw the most reductions. Speaking of pollution. It isn't the cities producing the bulk of it. Farms are the largest source of water pollution in California. All that fertilizer and pesticide run off is the source. I wouldn't say no to reducing city pollution, but you need to own up to the reality that the biggest problem is farm pollution. Which would be worse with the flood irrigation you are proposing. I would argue that preserving some ecology that keeps several industries such as salmon fisheries alive is a GOOD thing.
Imagine the same 100+ degree temps, but also with absolute humidity and stagnant water. There is a reason the Spanish explorers called it "La caldera del Diablo". Granted, people did live and thrive around the swamps before it was drained and colonized, but I don't think many of us would have a good time there.
Lakes have no rights, and are not animate creatures. They don't "deserve" anything. Taken to its logical end, the idea than the environment deserved to be preserved forever in a virginal state unsullied by human activity would require the wiping out of most of the world's population. Water is a resource. It is necessary for sustaining human life. In order to ensure that this resource goes where it is needed most, we created a market for it. Those possessed of it have been allowed to sell it at whatever price the market would bear. Seems like agriculture and cities were willing to pay the highest price. To some degree those unhappy with having to bid for water went to the California legislature and got laws enacted to have the government allocate the water rather than the market. In the long run, we are all dead, so the market works best in the allcation of a resource for the present needs of people. Is this causing long-term and possibly harmful changes to California's central valley? Obviously, yes. Most resources get consumed and are not renewable. Using them, as we must to sustain life, means they will one day run out. As they become scarcer and scarcer, those bidding upon them will have to pay more for them. They will once again go to the legislature demanding price controls "or our way of life will disappear". Fuck them. When water is no longer cheap enough to support agricultural in the central valley, agribusiness will move elsewhere, and a lot of small towns in the central valley will become ghost towns like the old mining towns in the mountains. The only certainly in life is change. Anybody wanting to continue to live in the central valley will have to figure out a solution. It's really more their problem than anybody else's, except when their solution is, for an example, a trillion dollar taxpayer funded gigantic aqueduct from the Columbia River down to the central valley.
Tule Lake last appeared in 1969 and 1970. Those were high water years. The excess water partially filled the lake. My father took us somewhere south of Hanford and Lemoore to look a vacant lot, he had inherited . It was under 10+' of water dikes 20' prevented us from seeing it. They were all gone in the bottom of the mid-'70's drought. And cotton of was growing everywhere.
So I was recently hired to shoot the drone footage for a commercial for a 7k acre ranch called Black Oaks Ranch near Bakersfield. It overlooked the valley, specifically Bakersfield and was just south of where the kern river would have fed into the two other lakes. The terrain I shot had so much evidence of previously large amounts of water regularly moving through the area and into the valley. At one point we came across some Native American ruins in an area that had clear evidence of running water and was now a seasonal creek. I thought to myself. Clearly generations lived here and thrived there.... So what happened to them? How did they survive here with seasonal water? There were springs near by, but I am positive that at the time the Native Americans lived there, water flowed all year round. This video gives some validation to that. If Bakersfield was a lake and the land was far more lush due to the raging Kern River, Kern Lake and higher ground water content then there is no doubt to me that micro climates existed and fed the area where I was filming. I made a video and posted it documenting my portion of the job. I am so pumped to watch it again and look for visual confirmation of the extinct lakes. The guy that owns the property installed a bunch of solar panels that pump water up out of the ground and back to the surface in an effort to keep the ground more lush and accessible. If only Doc could invent that time machine, I would love to go back 3 or 4 hundred years to see what it used to be.
Bakersfield native, everything this man says is true. Bakersfield also used to be a swamp many many years ago. Buena vista lake and many waters around kern county has died down to nothing. It’s very depressing to see.
J.G. Boswell profited from building the dams. He also created a stable water supply for the valley, green power, and did it all with positive impact to the environment as wildlife was less effected in drought seasons. Best of all, the water still was used to flood the Tulare lake basin, replenishing the valley's underground aquifers and rivers. The problems started later when we forgot that it was Tulare lakes water and started to divert most of it to the San Joaquín River. The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.) Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging. The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley. We set up a system to stabilize the water supply, keeping the valley green, safe, and productive. These dams create green energy, prevent flooding in cities built on floodplains, and provide water in drought years. Then some people with short memories came in and screwed it all up by diverting more and more of the Tulare lake water off of the Tulare Lake Basin and into the San Joaquin River. California needs to stop using the valley's aquifer recharge water to dilute the polluted waters in the Delta and Bay aria. Instead, CA should require cities that are creating that pollution to better treat their waste water before dumping it into the Bay or Delta.
Totally false left wing propaganda. Shame on you. The Resnicks are wonderful people who run a number of very good businesses, employing thousands, treating their employees well, and giving to charity in a major, major way. Its sad that if you do good in the world, little creeps try to smear you. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick#:~:text=Since%201973%2C%20he%20has%20been,reside%20in%20Beverly%20Hills%2C%20California.
@@tomthx5804 ehhhhh they have been in a few shady things. Not saying that what the op said is true because I can't find anything on it but some of the controversies are interesting and should not be discounted And where did the 'left wing propaganda' come from? Not everything is political
Going through? Seriously? It's been desert. That's part of the problem; millions of people trying to live in an already arid zone, and drawing away what little water there is. The bulk of California was already a desert long before the first Californios first arrived, and when the later 49ers arrived, and certainly when some fools thought that Hollywoodland would be an ideal location for movie studios. California is the wet dream that was never wet, and should never have been made into the tremendous deal it is today. California is one of the worst potential ecological disasters-in-waiting, and it's one whose fault lies solely on humans, especially the excessive abundance of idiots that want to live there, because it's "cool"...
@Belwonsenor Simpkriss You don't have to be a California hater to foresee massive problems coming to the state as the aquifers are drained. There isn't enough water in the Colorado to make up for that. Essentially, southern California is living on borrowed time, until the next real drought of the sort that has happened often in the past.
The same thing has happened (& I believe is still happening) in the Arizona desert. Pumping of the aquifers underneath has caused the ground elevation to sink.
The same JG Boswell that is responsible for virtually killing the last of the lake... Also bought thousands of desert acres west of Phoenix and converted them to Cotton fields...
@@crusincamry Benicia used to be the State Capitol! Sometimes I take a long sea voyage in my cabin cruiser from the Glen Cove Marina to the Benicia Marina and walk to town for dinner. It burns a whole quart of diesel fuel on that trip.
Draining lakes is a practice as old as ancient Rome: emperors Claudius and Hadrian undertook to mostly drain Fucine Lake. It wasn't initially to get farmland, it was to bring water to Rome and get rid of marshes that were the source of regular outbreaks of malaria, but once the water level went down it didn't take long before it was farmed.
Water from the lake is no longer evaporating and turning into rain water to keep plant life from drying out. So yea, while not the sole reason, it is a reason why everything is so dry now.
FOREST FIRES ARE CAUSED FROM THE STATES MISMANAGEMENT OF THE FORESTRY! THATS WHY YOU SEE SO MANY THERE,THEY NEVER CLEAR THE UNDERBRUSH UNTIL ITS TOO LATE!
Yes, of course it does, although I feel your question is rhetorical. Oregon is drying up as well. You take the groundwater away and everything dries up. Installing water cisterns to collect rainwater in areas that get rain would be a start.
@@muchosmasfrijoles - Think again. Some places might sink more or less evenly. Most DON'T. Example, Mexico city, in average, sunk more than 9 meters! The resulting mess obliged to spend millions on top of millions on sewage system alone!
Carter, the lake is/was called Tule Lake. The "Tulare" nomenclature applies to Tulare County; "Tulare" is from the Spanish "Los Tulares", which "The (Tule) Reeds". Tule Lake was vast; a large variety of wildlife once ranged there, including the now-extinct California Grizzly.
Current historians, scientists, and geographers know this lake as Tulare Lake; Tule Lake is in Siskiyou County. It was home to thousands of migratory birds- Mark Twain wrote about their abundance.
The a goodly portion of the freshwater run off through the Gay Bay could be diverted to the Central Valley easily enough and it would solve a LOT of ag/water issues in the Valley. But no...the Snail Darter gets presidence over all the ag. And of course the Snail Darter is not..not a native species either..
I was raised in Corcoran. We had to flood the field every few years to keep the town from flooding. Even so, about every 10-15 years there was still massive flooding. I think the last one was in 96 or 97. Shortly after that, the state diverted most of the water to places like LA and SF.
Thank you for sharing that, people don’t realize, it’s not really most the farmers, but people who live in the big cities who drained it. Why don’t they learn to desalinize the ocean, because that’s where so many people want to live.
@@19bishop56 Very true for Owens Valley, but not for San Joaquin Valley. San Joaquin Valley water goes to mostly large corporate farms as described in the video. SF Bay Area water comes from two rivers directly east of it that flow pretty directly to the SF Bay via the SF Delta.
California and Spain seem to be parallel stories to me. The conversion of native habitat into farmland lessened the water storing capacity of the land, making it more vulnerable to droughts that often come in Mediterranean climates. This only furthers more droughts as with less surface water and plant life there's less evapotranspiration, releasing less moisture locally into the atmosphere, and if the theory of the biotic pump is true, lessening rainfall. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump
Reminds me of another video on You Tube, on how Spain has successfully used new techniques to grow trees in a very arid region. Something similar must be done to restore the lost rivers and lakes in California. The Chinese have also greened a greater part of the extremely dry Gobi Desert.
One of the interesting things about tulare lake is that the reason the lake and the local topographic depression that makes it possible, are there, is that there's a chunk of dense crust that's detaching and falling into the mantle below that part of California. The chunk is still mechanically coupled to the shallower earth's crust there, and so it caused it to subside at the surface as it drags downward. We can see this chunk of crust through geophysical methods and we geologists call it the "isabella anomaly" (anomaly here meaning diversion from expected gravity/density).
@@billwilson3609 probably not, as it sinks further it will become progressively less mechanically attached to that part of the crust, and thus stop exerting a pull downward. It's likely at some point that the mantle will fill in and actually cause some uplift because it will be less dense than the portion of crust it's replacing, and isostatically rebound. Death valley formed for somewhat different reasons, crustal extension and subsidence due to loading of the crust by the mass of the sierra nevada
My dad had to redrill our domestic water well, which was originally 25-30ft deep and had been fine since we bought the Central Valley farm in ‘89, up until a few yrs ago when it dried up, which corresponds to all the surrounding fields of ‘feed’ corn(for cows and other animals), and an apple orchard being razed and replanted with almonds, the new cash crop but extremely water intensive compared to most CV crops, but also the drought and the previous lack of regulations on aquifer water. Basically, anyone could’ve pumped an unlimited supply of groundwater and sell it to whomever needed it, factories and other farms. Therefore, I’d like to start a trend where we could substitute items for less impactful substitutes, such as almond milk. I’d like to recommend Oatmilk, because the texture is similar to milk and much tastier than almond milk, which I find to be too watery, especially as a creamer. Most importantly though, it uses less water #oatmilkbeatsalmondmilk
From what I heard, modern almond agriculture is grafting almonds buds onto maple trees- something like that. They have almonds trees in Europe and they dont need that much water but maple trees use a lot of water. They do this to get almond trees to reach maturity faster. I could be mistaken.
Short answer, San Francisco and Sacramento. Why? It is cheaper to dilute their polluted wastewater with the Tulare lake water than to clean all the pollutants out of their waste water. The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley while providing hydroelectric power. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.) Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging. The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley. We (California) set up a system to stabilize the water supply, keeping the valley green, safe, and productive. These dams create green energy, prevent flooding in cities built on floodplains, and provide water in drought years. Then some people with short memories came in and screwed it all up by diverting more and more of the Tulare lake water off of the Tulare Lake Basin and into the San Joaquin River. California needs to stop using the valley's aquifer recharge water to dilute the polluted waters in the Delta and Bay aria. Instead, California should require cities that are creating that pollution to better treat their waste water before dumping it into the Bay or Delta.
Also, soil subsidation is significantly impacted by the largest oil field in that area, the massive Kern Oilfield. The Kern Oilfield is literally massive, covering 100% of the area surrounding Bakersfield metro and it's surrounding cities.
Did you miss the part of the valley being responsible for clothing and feeding a large part of America? On the flip side, who are the many that are suffering?
@@Bgrosz1 Ha I'd like to see you working in 100 degree weather picking produce while earning a wage to pay rent or bills and I doubt you'll say it's "voluntary". And farm work is often the only source of employment for latinos in that region who often don't have documentation.
@@AlexCab_49 , Why would they leave their home country and do this work? The only answer is this is better than any option they had in their home country. Again, they CHOSE to do this, no one rounded them up and forced them to do it. That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
actually left me saying that WAS interesting but hey Also one thing i found fascinating when i was in college was my class on California history, specifically what the Spanish explorers saw when they crossed the Tejon Pass and saw the valley for the 1st time, they described a place with a biosphere that nearly looked the same as the sierras, with vast conifer forests, surrounded by thick oak woodlands, wetlands, streams rivers ponds, with all kinds of wild life from the small to the big including black brown and grizzly bears, by time California became a state the forests had all but disappeared along with the estimated 3 million native Americans that once called the valley there home, a number that made California home to the highest population of native Americans' too; 5 to 6 million if you wanna include the entire states region
Born and raised in Tulare, and this is the first I’m hearing, that it used to be a lake!!! I knew Bakersfield was once underwater, and actually was part of the ocean at one point. My mom found shark teeth when digging up there. Pretty crazy!
After taking geology, here locally in the Central Valley. You learned how vital Tulare Lake was for the underground water supply. Now that we don't have that and we not only have a lot of ag, but people our underground water will soon be nonexistent. Its time to adapt, not only with our water use in farming, but we need to outreach other states that have excess of water and get it from them.
This made me look up J.G. Boswell and realize how much land his family now owns and how rich they are And thank you for the interesting facts for work at TLC👌
@@justinkasey1058 "Always?" They drained the lake, but they grew high quality cotton for our clothing. They offered employment to many low skilled people. They are not "always" anything. They are people who are as much of heroes and assholes as you or I.
@@jameshudkins2210 philosophically i would agree with your perspective, however my perceived view is that of the history books and my own personal experiences in Los Angeles, all rich people who have created or as some like to refer to it as, "carved out" their own wealth are all lying cheating dirtbag assholes who seek to exploit in every encounter.
We narrowly missed doing the same in Nevada. There was a big push to drain Great Basin National Park and send the water to Las Vegas for golf courses. They made a movie about it called _Drango_ with Johnny Depp.
No wonder why California tend to have plenty of mediterranean climate because there used to be a big body of water in between the two land that is Sierra Nevada mountain range (east) and the coastal California land (west). At 1:30 there’s a big water between the land.
That is not the reason why. It is because it has a western ocean coast in the right latitudinal band, similar to Chile, South Australia, and South Africa.
@@ssssaa2 Lol, how does Google change your name and why did Google change your name? The word Mediterranean derives from (medius, 'middle' + terra, 'land, earth') which is middle of the land or between land and that water is between land in case you didn’t know. The climate of the places with Mediterranean is known for warm to hot, dry summers and mild to cool, wet winters. Winter temperatures are usually between 30 and 65 degrees. Summer months all average above 50 degrees. The warmest month averages about 72 degrees. The cause of this climate is directly related to large bodies of water such as the Mediterranean Sea and ocean currents. During the summer, cold currents keep the climate mild and dry. Ocean currents shift as the seasons change. During the winter the water that was warmed up all summer moves in and keeps the land warm and often brings rain.
@@X1GenKaneShiroX The term "Mediterranean climate" comes from being named after the Mediterranean Sea, not because there is a big body of water between two lands. The term simply refers to a region that has a climate similar to the overall climate of some coastal Mediterranean lands. The Mediterranean Sea is named such because it is between two landmasses, Eurasia and Africa, not the other way around. (Hence, the name being derived from the Latin for middle of the Earth, as the Mediterranean Sea was literally the center of the known World, and smack dab in the middle of Europa and Africa.) There doesn't need to be two landmasses surrounding water, for there to be a Mediterranean type climate, though there does have to be at least one body of water, the right prevailing winds, and the right latitudinal conditions. California hardly has a "cool wet" winter though, so not sure you could call it a Mediterranean climate. Even before the lake disappeared, California had a desert climate. Just because there are bodies of water (including snow!), doesn't preclude a region from being a desert. It's all in the amount of annual precipitation that an area receives. (It's why the Antarctic is a desert.) California is mostly a desert climate. That's what makes it such a shitty choice for people to live in, especially at the overinflated numbers that they already do...
@@marshalofod1413 You can take my words when I say that California have mediterranean climate. You must know that California tends to have a plethora of climates it isn’t really like the eastern states that have one type of climate like Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, or even you know Louisiana. I can pretty much tell you that the western United States have diverse climate and what I mean by diverse climate is that there are more climates than that of just humid subtropical climate that you’re very used to seeing when you live in the southern United States. The 2 states Florida and Texas tends to be a bit different than the other states in the south because in one hand there is Texas with like seven types of different climates with a bit of hot-summer mediterranean scattered around in the heart of Texas. When you head towards the west of Texas towards like the panhandle and the north you will encounter climates such as cold semi-arid, hot semi-arid, hot desert, and a tiny bit of oceanic climate believe it or not. Florida on the other hand is one of the state in the lower 48 to have a climate that is a replicate of the ones in the Central Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Brazil. So simply when you go way south into the southern Florida you will encounter savanna, monsoon, and rainforest climate. Hell some people might not refer southern Florida as the Deep South so in Florida the north you go the more south it gets. Do not take my initial comment too seriously because some people might find it humorous or just basically might find it nice to hear hence why there seems to be 33 likes, yesterday it was like 27 likes. Never said that the thing that are required to have a Mediterranean climate is to have a ginormous body of water inside of the landmass. Of course it is not always true that to have something mediterranean is to have a giant body of water in between and if that was true then the states such as Tamaulipas, Texas, Veracruz, Yucatan, and Alabama would of already been mediterranean because of the Gulf of Mexico being in between those land masses. Some states and areas were just naturally formed to hold the mediterranean climates. California is the only states within the United States to have the most amounts of mediterranean climate including the hot-summer mediterranean climate. California even have the hottest recorded temperature on earth located in around like the hot desert area basically that would be the southern half of California called Death Valley which makes it a pretty unique state that stands out of all the other states. Most people seem to enjoy the weather that California gives and very importantly the tech companies that exists in California. When you head towards Central Valley, the climate then is very warm compared to if you’re in the Sierra Nevada most of it lies behind elevation obviously you know that high elevations means colder weather while low ones means hotter and warmer ones. I would agree with you that California have desert climate though not all or even most of California is really covered in dessert because there are plains which are green and doesn’t seem to be dry at all. Take Silicon Valley for example, there are no signs of it looking like the Sahara Dessert hell even there are forests and woods in it with the water around the Silicon Valley. California again is not entirely a desert state and just said like earlier it does have a diverse type of climate ranging from hot desert to very cold polar. California have over like 10 major climates unlike the eastern states that will only hold up to about 3 max. California have cold-summer mediterranean, warm-summer mediterranean, hot-summer mediterranean, hot semi-arid, cold semi-arid, hot desert, cold desert, warm-summer mediterranean continental, dry-summer subarctic, and tundra which is diverse isn’t it. Some parts of California have super high precipitation especially when you enter the county of Del Norte then expect things to be more wet than Louisiana. California is the most richest, agricultural, and productive state in the United States which wouldn’t shock me to hear that many people tends to live there. Plenty of parts of California tends to receive more than 10 inches of rain a year while some part may receive less than 10 inches of rain a year which mostly depends on what part of California you reside in. Not to forget the ocean can moderate the extremities of the temperature so when you’re near the Pacific Ocean you will face warmer winters and cooler summers. Having body of water in the land is not the only requirement for having a mediterranean climate but having some deserts, dry summers, and wet winters are certainly required. For something to be mediterranean, it will need to be close to the water of some sort. Chile, South Australia, and South Africa all borders a gigantic body of water. The mediterranean areas will be required to have some influences from water, of course there are some exceptions but most of the time mediterranean areas will be close to massive water. Now really, what things exists in mediterranean climate? Here are some below Evergreen trees: such as bay laurel, pine, cypress, and oak Deciduous trees: such as sycamore, oak, and buckeyes Fruit trees such as olive, figs, walnuts, and grapes Shrubs: rosemary, Erica, Banksia, and chamise Sub-shrubs: such as lavender, Halimium, and sagebrush Grasses: grassland types, Themeda triandra, bunchgrasses, sedges, and rushes Herbs: such as Achillea, Dietes, Helichrysum, and Penstemon Wildlife: goats, sheep, rabbits, lynx, jackrabbit, jackals, wild goats, horses, cattle, wild boars, eagles, and bulls. Mediterranean originated from Latin, mid 16th century: from Latin mediterraneus ‘inland’ (from medius ‘middle’ + terra ‘land’) which means something between 2 landmasses. If I know what it really means and its origins then I don’t see a problem twisting the term a bit for people to see. Hopefully you got something useful out of this, take care!
@@X1GenKaneShiroX Look. We are basically in agreement. I understand, now, what you meant. However, your op was not worded well. Perhaps English isn't your first language,as you seem knowledgeable. Yet, your op made it seem as though you meant something else entirely. Nonetheless, you lose a lot of points for being overly pedantic, and coming off as a know it all. All that shit you wrote? I sorta glossed over it. I already know all of it. I'm kind of a nerd, too. *(Plus, if you really want to be pedantic, you are actually wrong about the eastern third of the US being of one basically similar climate. Some states, this is generally true, while most have widely varied climates.)* I drove trucks, around the US, for most of the last quarter century. I have not only read (rather extensively)about the differences in local environments, including climatology and geology, and importantly, topography (important for us truckers), I have actually been there, done that. In point of fact, I am currently in a long process of examining the climate, geology, and other Earth science disciplines connected to the Western US, specifically the Interior West, and most notably, Colorado. Yeah, my nerdiness is focused for a reason, now, but I in general retain a love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge. Point is, you shouldn't assume one knows so much less than you. It's churlish. I get it though, as I used to be much the same. Nevertheless, while I am a nerd, and proudly so, I have learnt to be less pedantic, or come off as a snob. Of course, I am Autistic, so it wasn't an easy journey, but it was worthwhile, as now I understand why people often thought I was a douchebag. Mayhap, you should likewise reconsider your verbose replies, and assumptions of the knowledge of another individual. It is frustrating to not only those of us whom ourselves are knowledgeable, but to almost everyone, because no one likes to be treated as though they are stupid. Intellectual snobbery, whether incidental or intentional, is unbecoming of anyone, but especially of those of us whom are of higher aptitude.
Maybe the people in this valley should seriously consider putting one or two of those lakes *back* before they turn the valley completely into a desert.
That would mean displacing millions of people, drowning almost all the farmland used to grow America's food, and creating an environmental disaster when flooding so much land so fast. It's sad, but artificially creating new lakes are NOT the answer.
@@joshuas.686 why can’t we distribute farms in other states that have plenty of water and rich soil? Doesn’t the east coast have rich soil and a lush climate? Why does california have to be burdened
@@praezey2184 Cause California can make money off of it. No one else really can, extreme access to water in a region that doesn't normally have it is one of the tricks that makes it profitable. Look at desert areas in west texas or new mexico, it's the exact same story as California, just on a smaller scale. The land is crazy fertile, but almost completely dry, so they pump stupid amounts of groundwater and grow cherries in the desert.
@@praezey2184 Portions of the east coast have poor soil. California has abundant sun and non-freezing temperatures over 9 months a year, millions of acres of flat land, and water delivery infrastructure. Good luck getting huge millionaire farming companies to give all that up.
Great video. Sub'd and thumb'd. Born and raised in Salinas. So many different nationalities contributed to the names of the towns it's like Epcot. Carquinez = Car-key-nus Soquel = So-kell
I find this especially interesting in the context of eco-economic decoupling - the idea that humans can do more to save the planet by developing high density agriculture and then leaving vast sections of the world totally alone instead of farming it
Some of you people really make me laugh, LOL. The planet will heal itself as it always has. We're just a blip on the screen. Do you really think any of this matters a few million years from now? Where you're standing right now will probably be under an ocean and the dust from your bones will not exist. Watch George Carlins comedy video on environmentalists, he hits the nail on the head perfectly. There is nothing we can do to "destroy" this planet, LOL.
@@ironcladranchandforge7292 Exactly. Funny how it goes ignored that the entire valley was once one giant lake itself, and that the lands of Nevada were lush. It went away without human intervention or "fossil fuel climate change." Change in climate and environment is inevitable. The only factor is humans themselves, who choose to place themselves in habitats that they don't belong, or refuse to adapt to the inevitable changes to their habitat.
@@ElementofKindness i use the argument that nothing we do truly matters to life as a whole (we could litterally detonate all the nukes together in the Amazon and life would still survive) to argue in favor of reasonable climate change preventative actions. Like sure the earth won't be destroyed, its been a snowball and iceless and hit with asteroids and life persisted, but we didn't, we evolved for the late iceage and should try to keep it that way unless you want living to get alot more expensive. (Doing absolutely nothing about climate change will be the most expensive path as we deal with water shortages and stronger storms compared to finding realistic solutions that minimize changes to the environment away from what we are used to).
Didn't think I'd need to say this, but obviously drones, satellites, etc, did not exist in the 1800s 😂. The image on the thumbnail is a depiction of what California likely would have looked like at the time, created by geographer Mark Clark.
Lmao, neither would I. Just got into my recommendations BTW.
Oh man and I was hoping you had a direct line of communication to E.T.
he's lying, he's a time traveler
I was told they tried to sell off and fill in the SF bay, too.
A friendly tip here: Please mix the music at the end less loud, or rather: Your spoken word passage louder. In comparison to most other UA-camrs, your spoken passages are very low in volume, which is why one has to turn up the volume, only to get one's eardrums smashed at the end of the video :)
Maybe look into mixing (equalizing and compressing) of vocals or speech.
i met this young lady born and raised in tulari, she had never heard of that lake and didn't believe me it once existed, she had to google it,
*Tulare
I am from a town near there called Porterville. A local historian went on about how there used to be a lake and lots of water. He said the area would have such floods that that people could ride in a canoe to Sacramento. I didn't really believe him. A few years later I was watching a youtube who narrates old letter. This one was a Japanese first had account of coming to California and on the video was a very old map of California and there was the lake. Really tragic and it's happened to the aral sea too.
I mean, we do make TONS of food but at what cost? People in my hometown were in the NY times because people's houses had no drinking water during the drought. The air quality is absolutely horrible from all the tilling, many of my friends had asthma. The ground water is disappearing, wells in my home town were drying up also....
It's the problem. We need that food to sustain our population but it is terrible for the environment...
@97RAVINEAVE Plenty talk. The young no longer listen.
young
I'll bet the 1800 satellite photo covinced her.
Something similar happened to what was once the world's fourth largest lake, the Aral Sea. The rivers that fed it were diverted by Soviet irrigation projects. You can see abandoned ships in the middle of a desert
You...
@Austin Martín Hernández a heap of other factors were left out also. Good call.
@Matthew Chenault Good Western propaganda buddy
@Matthew Chenault Did you even watch the video? California of the 1800s and early 1900s was the wild west. The most unregulated, free-market, libertarian nightmare it can possibly get. Capitalism destroyed the world.
@Matthew Chenault communism beats capitalism by a million miles
This is especially interesting in light of the recent (March, 2023) floods and heavy rainfall which have partially re-filled what was once Tulare (Too-Larry) Lake. It's predicted that the flooding will remain until the Fall of 2023. I live in Fresno, and it's hard to believe that the arid, mostly bone-dry cotton-growing region around Corcoran (about 40-50 miles south of Fresno) was once lush, abundant with water & home to a vast lake. BTW, Corcoran has a large prison where Charles Manson spent his last decades.
And they need telling you it's you watering your front yard caused the drought.
...Don't build your Home where a Lake used to be...LOL!
Corcoran has *two* large prisons, right next door to one another. One housed Charles Manson. The other once housed Robert Downey Jr.
I used to live in a small town right next to Corcoran, and I always wondered why you would sometimes find seashells in basically a desert.
I don’t think SEA shells come from lakes 😅
We find see shells all the time in Ohio, but they are 450 million year old sea shells. 🤣
@@Flowshow88 that lake used to be part of the ocean, so call it what you want, marine life flourished there a long time ago.
In the sediments around Las Vegas you’ll find tons of fossilized sea life. Look in the gray to yellowish bands crumbling on the surface.
@@thepain321 okay thanks. I’ll make a note of it
Colorado river no longer makes it to the ocean. A river that used to be able to roll house sized boulders like marbles, reduced to a ghost of it's original glory.
We live just off of hwy 95 where there is access to where the Colorado river used to run. We have gone there with our rock club to pick rocks, agatized coral (gumballs), and fossils.
The Salton Sea was created accidentally in 1905 when irrigation canals were dug west from the CO River to a basin east of San Diego.
@@ApartmentKing66 They tried to make it a, "go to" spot, classy resort area. But, to see it now, it's a cesspool.
Alan Robinson didn't they test booms in that area?
@@shebamaree9026 Back in the early 1980's it was a visual inspection by the crane operator and whoever was assisting in assembling the boom. Unless there was a consequential shock load, there was no reason to call out the engineers for a detailed inspection.
I love how this issue is finally getting coverage. The Tulare Lake is such an important piece of California history.
Visalia native here. This is the story I tell everyone I meet that doesn't know where Tulare Co. is. People from the valley mostly have no idea about how this natural splendor was turned to squalor.
Squalor? Have you seen the former lake bed?? If you want to see squalor, go to Corcoran, Tulare, Alpaugh, Lemoore, Kettleman City....
@@brotherlove6216 That's literally what I'm saying. I went to TW and I frequented Corcoran. I know.
Wow the U.S. literally ruined this land. No wonder it’s so dry! It wasn’t meant to be! 🤮
@@dannyfantom4795 The whole central valley was a desert before man started irrigating it...
@@brotherlove6216 No, it was marshy, with reeds, grasses, and oak groves. The native people's fished the lakes, wove patterned baskets from the reeds, and ground the acorns from the oaks to make flour, to name a few things. The valley was beautiful and fertile before large scale farming transformed it. Monoculture farming takes a lot out of the land....
In French there is an expression : These guys are sawing the branch they are sitting on.
Good expression
Biting the hand which feeds them.
Don't shit where you eat.
Don't fart where you sleep.
Pretty much what politicians do. Except it's us sitting on the limb
Understanding the underground aquifer under the San Joaquin valley and its huge capacity for water storage (more storage capacity than any number of surface dams and lakes could hold) would help restore the wetlands and make ag a partner in its restoration. The Tulare lake was a giant underground aquifer recharger. Aquifer recharging will eventually be the answer to most of the water problems.
Happening right now. You called it 😁
Very similar to what happened to the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan (then part of the U.S.S.R.). Whole thing drained for cotton farms. Now it's a desert, you can see the old fishing boats in the middle of the sea bed.
That's not the only thing there... some abandoned bioweapon labs are also in that area
What countries produce ethical cotton? I would like to purchase ethically sourced cotton.
When I was a kid the Aral Sea was huge and intact. Now it is almost nothing.
I used to live in Tulare and as a kid, and I remember feeling upset about the lake being removed for Agriculture. I still am as an adult, it’s sad.
What’s up man never thought I’d find you on UA-cam!
@@aaronbravo3848 what up homie 💀
@@KitwiSauce nice
Same!
You could always keep the lake, throw thousands out of work, cause widespred unemployment, reduce the food supply and increase prices on food. Then you would be happy, huh?
This reminded me of Lake Kankakee that once straddled the Indiana and Illinois state line. It was huge and kept Chicagoans fed with fish, fowl and deer but Indiana wanted it drained to create farmland. The state dredged the river and sent engineers over into Illinois to blow up a limestone ledge that kept the water backed up. They were met with armed fisherman and hunters that threatened to shoot them if they tried, so left and dug more ditches to drain the flat land into the river.
Thanks for sharing that...
Ummm There is Blood on the plow in California for Sure...Owen's Lake back in the day when Los Angeles went looking for Water! All out War went down...
It amazes me how cheap politicians are, for a small donation they will frequently do whatever developers want, often spending millions in public money for a few thousands dollars in the right pocket.
Its california, they are all corrupt anti constitution politicians.
Not that surprising. Politicians are the agents of the wealthy, their lackeys.
@@JW-mr5mh Here we go again with the simplistic right-wing propaganda.
@@OuterGalaxyLounge when you want to ban guns and freedom of speech you are anti constitution and anti american. If you like socialism or communism leave to a place that will accept people like you.
@@JW-mr5mh The Boswell Company that destroyed the lake contributes 81 percent of its political PAC money to Republican politicians. But I know you guys don't do your homework.
Live in Fresno in the Central Valley. Working on being a field biologist for the Sierras and working on a PhD. Glad to see a pretty accurate video on the valley and its history. I think you should’ve gone further in to the history of the wetlands of the valley, and how wet this area used to be. There’s insane accounts from explorers on the amount of water, lakes, birds, etc.. As well as this, we used to have large steamboats go across the San Joaquin, which used to be a truly massive river. Sadly, many uneducated people here in the valley believe the solution is more dams and canals which will continue to ruin the state and make our problems worse.
How does that ruin the state and make problems worse?
Yeah man, I'm a Fresno native as well and I can say that individuals here are extremely unaware of how their actions affect the environment. It's a shame that because of the agricultural industry using unsustainable farming methods for our particular geographical features that it drastically change the landscape. If only they would have taken the time to analyze the data and farm with the natural geography and ecology, we might still have a good amount of water here through limited diversions of the natural water flow. Possibly similar to the flooding of the nile bringing an expanse of valuable water in and through a limited amount of irrigation channels. But I can see how those things would have made the land a bit less appealing to large agricultural development based on it not being purely economically efficient, and the inability to consistently farm throughout the year. It really is a complete shame and hopefully we can remedy this from now into the next generations.
Allocating water for financial gain was our first mistake. It ruined the entire central valley's ecosystem. It used to be an ocean. They've found megalodon teeth in Bakersfield California and other parts north of it. We could've had a thriving state with massive amounts of water. But no let's dam it up and let it overflow into the ocean.
Would it be accurate to say that the Valley has been drying all these years, then? Went from being under the ocean, then a lake, then wetlands, now a desert?
@@inlonging in a way. The lake only went away due to a catastrophic event as the video discussed, so not particularly the norm. After, that, it was always a wetlands and still would be a wetlands would it not be for human intervention. What exactly happened is that rivers like the San Joaquin would have massive floods during spring due to runoff from the Sierras (which was much great due to the climate being colder and wetter before humans) and make wetlands, flood plains, etc.. Problem for us was that this wasn’t very good for farming. The soil, temperature, and weather were correct, but not the flooding. So, we dammed all of our rivers as we saw that we could play nature and be the gods of this land by controlling it ourselves. This led to a domino or cobra effect and now we’re at where we’re at.
The San Joaquin isn’t really a desert, that’s just what people say due to the lack of water. A desert involves lack of diversity, life, and so on. But, the valley is full of life and still has water. However, if we continue to build dams, not letting rivers flow, eradicate lakes, and dig canals, we WILL be a desert. The question is, will we save the valley in time?
My personal answer is probably not. Look how bad the fires were this year. No water and super dry conditions due to human activity and construction of dams as well as the introduction of non-native grasses are killing this area, literally. Just this year, there was an ad campaign from Devin Nunes saying “we need to stop letting water just flow into the pacific”, said it’s not supposed to? Rivers flow to the ocean, not to our crops. A lot of people can’t seem to understand this.
So, TLDR, what’s happening is not natural at all and wouldn’t happen without the intervention of humans. Look at areas like Florida, their wetlands were protected and still exist. Ours weren’t protected, were abused; and now 95-97% (stat from the California department of fish and wildlife) don’t exist. It’s a sad, sad reality.
I wonder if Lake Corcoran back 700,000 years ago used to be a safe spawn spot for whales. I lived near Northern California when a whale and their baby swam up the river near to the middle of the state. This happened maybe around 2006? I'd imagine their network of information somehow held that spot in their memory. Whale calls are very complex apparently.
Whales don't spawn, they are mammals and their babies are born, not spawned from eggs. They do this in the open sea. They do not seek shelter to birth young. The protection of their pod is what they rely on. I would like some of whatever it is you are smoking though
Maybe we could pump water back in and re-flood the area and the whales could come back to safely spawn? You should get to work on this now. Maybe start a protest/riot. How far detached from reality are you?
Farmers - Drains the massive lake near them
*drought occurs
Farmers - Surprised pikachu face
Be thankful for those farmers, for most of the fruit, nuts, & veggies that exist in your stores across the country are from what they grow.
@@19bishop56 That does not mean I can not criticize them for stupid decisions. Also it is not like the farmers did it out of the love for humanity, they did it to make money and consolidate power.
Everybody else outside of California: Why are your like this.
Californians: ArE yOu JuDgEiNg MuH LyfSitle!
Forty-nine States: ua-cam.com/video/2ZIpFytCSVc/v-deo.html
Dustbowl 2.0 in like 50 years
No way Unborn. Farms add humidity to air and increase rain. The water used by these farmers was NOT from this Lake until water was cut off by the goverment in 2010. the underground water had too much salt but they had no choise but to add wells. Farmers made it clear the various trees and plants could only use this underground lake water for at most 4 years. Most only 1 or 2 years. Now many millions of trees are NOW gone. Water still flowing into the ocean rather than onto crops and trees. Farmers did Not cause this. The government did. Now millions of trees no longer providing food or humidity plus more rain.
Its more complex but thats what happened.
The excessive pumping of ground water for irrigation has probably played the largest role in the sinking of the Valley.
That's what he said
I wonder if that will become a factor in the plate techtonics of the region. Will it exacerbate movement along fault lines, making them more unstable ?
@@alanrobinson4318 i'm sure it has effected it along with the oil pumping and fracking in the area the amount it takes to trigger a large earthquake is that to an equivalent to a bicycle tire popping.. that is why Geologist like to circle in on earthquake swarms.. sometimes they can trigger a much larger event
@punker4Real
My grandfather was a geologist working in Death Valley, a mining engineer. He always said to keep track of all the earthquakes. If they are, more or less, evenly distributed along the fault lines, that's good. That means there's consistent movement and no big one to be expected. If, there's an area of no movement on a fault line, with quakes above and below, a big one should be expected.
Yeah, blame the farmers. Not the tens of millions of coastal city dwellers that the local environment simply cannot handle. CARB won't save them stupid communist fuckups.
I live in Norcal and I always thought the valley looked like a massive lake. it makes sense now. My mind is blown by Tulare lake... I did not know about that.
Tulare Lake is a lake that needs to return. Early accounts of the lake say there were Tule Elk, tons of water fowl, a place where Indians gathered and traded with other tribes across the lake using canoes, and the turtles found along it's shores were used as terrapin soup in the restaurants of San Francisco. And yes, at one time during the really rainy years you can ride a ship from Buena Vista lake, all along the Kern River to Tule Lake and through Fresno Slough into the San Joaquin River and on to San Francisco Bay.
Sure. Let’s bring the lake back. Then we can have less food and fiber and more mosquitos! After all, the narrator said it was an area of marshes and swamps.
The BS of blaming the draining of the lake for the subsidence is typical left wing enviormentalist crap.
The subsidence has been caused by the diversion of water from the delta mendota canal and California Aquaduct systems that were built to bring Northern California water to the San Joaquin valley and Los Angeles.
Instead of that water going to the farmers and cities that paid for the projects, and still pay 100% of the fees whether they receive a drop of water or not, 50% or more has been diverted to “the environment”.
That loss of water has caused the farms and cities in the San Joaquin valley to pump from underground.
California really isn't the best place to grow cotton, anyways. Too water-intensive and labor-intensive, on very expensive land.
Maybe having a lake and some fish farming would be more profitable, if they need to make money with it.
Well, returning the area to a more natural state requires almost all the people who live here now, move. Where do you think they should go?
@@pyrovania Actually, California is an excellent place to grow cotton and many other crops. The long growing season and dry conditions during that growing season (less fungal diseases on crops) result in high yields per acre and superior varieties.
@@lancebwilkins You have a point about Los Angeles, but LA doesn't get its water from Tulare Lake. My question is this: does one man/one company's right to grow cotton in the Lake Tulare lakebed override the rights of other farmers to access a healthy aquifer?
About 6 months ago, I was the lead surveyor on an elevation control survey for land southwest of Corcoran. I was comparing the record elevations of the NGS survey monuments, set in the 50’s with current elevation observations based upon multiple fixed stations around the rim of the valley. I can confirm that there has been over 14 feet of subsidence there. And it got worse the further from town (towards the old lake bed) that you got. A bad situation all around.
Wow, 14 FEET--that's so friggin bad. Where does it end?
@Frank F Kling you brought in politics why? The State is run by progressive crazies so even if he is, he doesn't have any power. 🙄
@Frank F Kling Prop 13, AB5, San Fran has fallen, reparations, a train to no where (over budget) and now I hear there is a chance police dogs won't be able to chase the bad guys? Yeah, hard pass
@Frank F Kling The rot has to start somewhere
@@httr21skins the entire region of the central valley is DEEP red enough to rival the bible belt. the water issues are due to congresspeople, lobbyists, and industries that are historically run by republicans. this isnt to say that the dems arent also to blame because they are. money talks and dems listen to it too. the area focuses on ag issues over environmental issues. the environment should come first before money like the natives did.
Yeah. You can drive by on 41 and see docks right in the middle of corn fields. We were never taught this. When I was 9 we moved from So Cal to Tulare co. I found an old map. Like one of those pull down maps in an attic. It showed a huge lake running up and down the west side of the valley. There was ferry shipping routes from Stockton. Boswell is still one of, if not the biggest land owners in the state, on both sides of the valley.
Californians: "Hey, do we need this lake?"
Also Californians: "Why do we never have water?"
Californians: “Dude, my city living expenses suck, let’s go to Texas”
Also Californians: “Nice place. I don’t like the mayor, though, he no have D. Vote blue no matter who!”
Rinse and repeat.
Californians: ooo you have under ground water Austin. Gimme.
Also Californians: wHy ArE wE nOt WeLcOmEd!
Texans: ua-cam.com/video/2ZIpFytCSVc/v-deo.html
the water recycles from evaporation in the winter to snow in the mountions this CYCLE has failed
Californians: “I can’t afford to live here because of the insane cost of living.”
Also Californians: “I love my governor.”
This is my mother who’s saying this.
@@MrKEMills I’m not surprised, there’s thousands like her. Find a cure 🧠
Great video. I never knew about the lake, let alone that the entire California Central Valley used to be a lake.
Central Valley for millions of years was an inland sea about 600 ft. deep and hosted an amazing amount of sea life, including sharks. Go to Sharktooth Hill in Kern County and you can literally collect shark teeth by the bushel, along with the occasional whale skeleton, shark skeleton, other marine life.
Because of oceans rising due to go al warming it will be a lake again fairly soon but a salt water lake
@@PUNKDUDE1991 How's that Kool-Aid taste?
That’s interesting
@@PUNKDUDE1991 There isn’t any global warming. It’s an excuse to scare people and increase taxes.
I live close to where the lake used to be. My wife’s grandma came out during the dust bowl from Oklahoma, and she remembered fishing the lake with her dad. By the way, people didn’t just build the dams for irrigation purposes: it used to flood terribly around here, and now there’s much less risk. In the 1800s, Sacramento flooded so badly that they had to send the capitol to a different town for two years. A quarter of the livestock in the state died in that one flood. The Central Valley basically turned back into a lake for a while. -A.
Yep, that was in the 1860s and 1870s when it was firsy being settled. They raised Sacramento by a lot and built levees to prevent it from happening again.
Tbh idk what would better, weather the floods still existed or not. Obviously there would be infrastructure damage similar to what happens in the south and over the east coast. But then again, drought would likely be much less of a problem, or not even an issue at all, in California.
Less flooding risk, way more risk overall. These massive shallow lakes are ripe to have levees added to increase their capacity, because the depth is only 3 feet on average, you can achieve a 400% increase in capacity with a levee just 12 feet tall. Using levees ameliorates the flood risk while allowing the surface area to remain. Aquifers get recharged and local evaporation allows rainwater to recirculate as more rain. instead, you now have a desert with water running through irrigations channels with almost no chance for evaporation, being sprayed onto parched soil, again, no chance for evaporation. This is a series of decisions that failed to consider the wellbeing of the entire are.
Read up on Owens Lake also (dried up when Los Angeles diverted its water).
I heard about when my brother, cousin and I went to Lake Tahoe. Stopped by of a rest area and the ranger there said all the water was diverted to LA. We passed by, thinking we'll see the lake. Nothing but dry there.
While desalination may have some issues, is worth pursuing at least! Come on, LA, SanDiego! Stop hogging all the water!
The rape of the Owens Valley is absolutely horrific. I have family that lives out there and talking to the old people that can remember when everything was green vs now in shocking.
I worked on the dust mitigation project for Owens Lake. Drying the lake out was an epic environmental disaster.
This would of been a lake as large as the Bay Area, so as large as all of San Francisco, Oakland, Berkeley, San Jose, Silicon Valley etc. That is huge
@[Redacted] dont remind me. Sometimes, I wish LA DOES get swallowed up like Atlantis.
"City of Angels". Tch, my ass.
So basically this Tulare lake in California is like lake Texcoco in Mexico City. They drained it and now use ground water for drinking and farming and that is causing the city to sink.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.)
Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging.
The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
More or less. They build dams on the rivers that feed the lake. Sooo, basically they moved the lake into the mountains. Because farmers are draining the ground water around the lake, and the ground water is no longer being recharged by the lake. The ground is sinking.
I lived in Corcoran most of my life and during that time Tulare lake came back in 1969-1970, 1981-1982 and the last time in 1997-1998 during flood years. We have been over due for a flood year now for over 10 years and all of California is drying up and our politicians have nothing to address it other then impose rationing.
Worst sentence:
As a business titan he had a lot of sway with state and federal governments.
Pretty much the world's problems in a nutshell.
Unlike all the few innocent harmless proles eating those healthy fruits and vegetables, wearing cotton clothes
The wealthy are unfit to rule.
It's all about the Benjamins, baby!
Yes. That sentenced resonated with me. Seems like if you have a lot of money, you can’t help yourself but to sway the public purse for your own personal gain.
This wins the Comment and replies of the year award! I can see you on the podium: I would like to thank our brains for doing the thinking, and our perception of reality which shows us the truth. I was going to leave comment above but can't top this.You nailed it.
Its always interesting and sad at the same time, how places like California have the money, resources, intelligence and manpower to fix lots of their water issues (and other issues) but choose not to because a few people lobby against it.
Money rules, always has
The problem are the idiots running the state. Water priority goes to them first. If you follow the river that goes to Gavin Nuisance property. The rivers are FULL. The river by my property is LOW.
The river connects to his river.
Ban lobbying?
Human greed has no bottom or top.
@@dinosaurusrex1482 overturn Citizens United
I lived in Corcoran for a while in '87-'88 as a kid. We used to dig up seashells/river shells. I always wondered about that. Awesome video👍.
This was very well researched and animated, I appreciate the effort. Not a lot of people, even in the Central Valley, understand the anthropological history that has resulted in the current environment there.
I lived in Fresno for 30 years and didn't know any of this
2021: Is it time to realize this is a really bad place to grow water intensive crops like cotton? Especially when there is a lot of land in the southeast US which can easily support crops like this.
Cotton is such a cheap commodity it won't even pay for the fuel to haul it on a semi. It takes a huge amount of water to grow and they still grow lots of it around Corcoran and West of Bakersfield.
@@rondye9398 ...Which begs my question, why grow it there? Because of the infrastructure and farm already built. Cotton plants are also very hard on the soil, needing constant refurbishment to keep the plants viable. ... Cotton is best grown in large fields, small parcels are not cost effective but economies of scale, especially with an established farm make it profitable.
@@WTH1812 Profitable? Is that before or after government subsidies? There are areas outside of TUCSON, AZ, as well, GROWING COTTON!!! Where the “h” is the water for THESE fields coming from?!?
@@kkrolf2782 ... Colorado River, possibly also underground aquifers (similar to the Ogallala which is on the east side pf the Rockies and sits under parts of CO WY NE KS OK TX and NM and is being drawn down watering crops in those States. Actor Eddie Albert of "Green Acres" fame spent decades spreading the word about aquifer depletion but was mostly ignored in favor of short term profits) ... this is a map of US watersheds showing where AZ's surface water comes from ... www.google.com/search?q=southwest+us+watersheds+map&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS824US824&hl=en-US&ei=XuHaYNO8Efy4qtsP3Lye2AE&oq=southwest+us+watersheds&gs_lcp=ChNtb2JpbGUtZ3dzLXdpei1zZXJwEAEYADIFCCEQoAE6BwguEEMQkwI6BAguEEM6BAgAEEM6CAguELEDEIMBOggIABCxAxCDAToLCC4QsQMQxwEQowI6CwguEMcBEK8BEJECOgUIABCRAjoICC4QxwEQrwE6BQgAEMkDOgoILhCxAxCDARBDOgIIADoFCAAQsQM6AgguOgUILhCTAjoGCAAQFhAeOgUIIRCrAjoHCCEQChCgAVDI9AhYjdYJYKHmCWgAcAB4AIAB2gGIAYgRkgEGMTkuMS4zmAEAoAEBsAEAwAEB&sclient=mobile-gws-wiz-serp#imgrc=ZkNiRfrbEcHuHM ... this is a map of US aquifers ... www.google.com/search?q=us+aquifers+map&rlz=1CDGOYI_enUS824US824&oq=us+aquifers&aqs=chrome.1.69i57j0l2j0i22i30j0i390l2.7702j0j4&hl=en-US&sourceid=chrome-mobile&ie=UTF-8#imgrc=MTY--YjX0oRUnM
@@WTH1812 Water rights and political protection of farmers. If farmers had to pay a fair price for the water they use, then insanely water intensive crops would not be profitably farmed in what is now a desert.
Note: I have nothing against farmers at all. They should grow crops that make sense for the local geography and the limited water availability in the desert that is most of California.
My grandma and her family lived near the lake and it was still there until the early 1950s. The real death nail was the construction of the Terminus Dam which created Lake Kaweah but impeded the Tule Lake's main tributary. One of the biggest reasons for the construction of Terminus Dam was to protect the city of Visalia and the outlying communities from floods. Hasn't been a major flood here in Visalia since 1954 because of the dam.
THANK YOU 💙. I was at Lake Kaweah two weeks ago. And coming back I happened to look to the side and seen the dam. So for some reason I googled the area and not only seen how the dam was made, but how the dam cut off added to the dead Oak trees that are planted in a pattern like they were growing alongside of a river.
My dad was born in Wasco. He called it Tule lake which was largely already dry when he was a kid although during the spring months it was wet enough to have a large number of tule plants. He also said the famous “valley fog” did not exist until later when agricultural dust and smog increased giving cold, post winter storm moisture something to cling to.
I know of a couple of natural swales around Shafter/Wasco that stay wet all year round and still grow patches of Tule reeds. I even grabbed some rhizome for my parents duck pond a few years ago and they are still going.
What year was your dad born in Wasco?
I feel so uneducated, I grew up in the central valley and I've never heard of Tulare lake before
So that explains why the Central Valley is fertile when it comes to farming.
Yep we were originally mash land
Also due to volcanic activity long ago depositing minerals and nutrients into the soil
40,000 feet of alluvium in the SJ Valley.
Amen Brother Chris, Amen!
@Tyler Durden , the water mostly doesn't go to LA. It irrigates billions of dollars worth of crops and we eat them.
Interesting that this came up in my recommendations... now that the lake is trying to get refilled from our massive amount of precipitation this winter! I'm not tracking it very closely, but since Tulare Lake has been gone so long, I don't think people were prepared for its sudden return.
Thank you.
My great grandfather moved to the valley to farm in the 1910s from north Dakota. Glad to finally see a good synopsis of what occured there.
That’s cool man
its hard to imagine what a massive pacific storm raging over a water filled central valley would dump on the mountains.
great video m8
"OMG WHY IS CALIFORNIA SO DRY NOW"
California: Drains its 9th largest lake.
I remember when Lake Corcoran was draining. I was totally thinking, "Man, we're going to miss that lake!"
ok bill crapper!
Nece
You must be old, dude. By 1899, the lake was dry except for some residual wetlands and occasional floods.
@@brotherlove6216 I'm up there. :) Actually, it was just a joke.
@@brotherlove6216 I thought the video says the drainage wasn't completed until the coming of cotton in the 1920's.
You should do videos on Lake Bonneville and Lake Missoula. Both of these lakes were suddenly drained after the catastrophic collapse of a mountain in Utah and the sudden and rapid melting of glaciers in Montana. Bonneville was the size of Lake Michigan, leaving behind the Great Salt Lake, Utah Lake, Yuba Lake, and Sevier Lake. Lake Missoula left behind Lake Coeur d’Alene, Pend Orielle, Hayden Lake, Spirit Lake, Flathead Lake and others in northern ID and western MT. The emptying of these lakes carved out much of the west, leaving large valleys and gorges in their wake throughout UT, ID, MT, WA, and OR.
Great idea!
That is fascinating stuff. I would also like to see that. I have a feeling it will be a research project all by itself. Maybe there are existing papers that can be consulted.
Yes it's a critical story to understand wrt #sealevelrise which is inherently catastrophic. Stupid reporting and bad science lull people into believing in lies like "one metre of sea level rise by 2100" which they then invent stupid policies to "manage". In fact there is no such scenario. Either it's about 30cm or 2, 3, 7 or even 50+ meters depending how many individual ice sheets collapse in Greenland and Antarctica. One meter is a meaningless aggregate.
@@emagee7864 just search UA-cam there are a number of excellent videos on both of these events.
NY harbor was born under similar circumstances.
Watching this after all the rain we've had the past few weeks, please see where the lake is at after all this rainfall. Read an article saying it might be possible to see it revived. Anyway, this video is a great watch.
Yes the lake is back. Probably only temporarily though.
This is daily occurance in India. Here developers and people regularly encroach on lakes and rivers and use that land for real estate development. They gets money by doing this but common people suffers due to greed of few..
I'm pretty sure it happens the world over.
What's stopping those poor people from doing it and getting rich too? Must be laziness
The Indus River is one of the cradles of civilization. India and Pakistan share the water. An agreement signed in 1962 divided the water so that India gets a fixed allotment of water and the left overs go to Pakistan. As the amount of water entering the river from the Himalayas diminishes, India still gets it's allotment, but Pakistan now uses every drop...... none usually reaches the Indian Ocean anymore. The Indus delta was one of the most fertile areas in the region. Storms are now washing away all that rich soil and food production is diminishing rapidly. Also, Pakistan isn't getting enough water for living or industry. They also have one of the highest population rate increases in the world. This won't end well. Both Pakistan and India are nuclear armed nations.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.)
Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging.
The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
I heard that years ago that the remains of a large boat was found in the middle of what is now the dry lake bed. It was a head scratcher because no one remembered that there used to be a large lake (Tulare Lake) in the Central Valley.
I grew up in Tulare.. there was flooding in 1969 (I think) that refilled, partially, Tulare Lake. It was an awesome sight! They used wrecked cars along the banks to shore up levees.
Thank you for teaching me why we have no water, why it's literally like a desert and why it's so hot now
IT’S NOT GLOBAL WARMING LIKE NEWSOME CLAIMS. IT’S JUST TERRIBLE PEOPLE WHO WANT MONEY.
@@ricecakeboii94 Oh yeah, California was fucked from the start with how farmers from the Midwest and South completely fucked up a natural water way for us. Now they rule California and our waterways. Climate change just makes the conditions they put us in way worse for us.
The country has too many people to feed and clothe.
Always been hot, but never so dry.
@@bdh3949 agreed
Funnily, the exact opposite thing happened in the Imperial valley. A below sea-level desert was turned into a lake (Salton Sea) because of irrigation practices XD
What is the story behind your name changed by Google? Quite a silly name though
@@X1GenKaneShiroX Google literally when I logged in one day said "You're name is not acceptable change it" or something along those lines and I had to enter a new one to log into my account. What's dumb is it was literally just my generic username of
"ssssaa2" before. I even got called out by my favorite youtuber by the name of ssssaa2 before but now it's not the same name.
@@ssssaa2 your name?
not in a good way though. Theres nothing living in the salton sea lmao
@@ciello___8307 Both fish and migratory birds do live there
I believe that the timeline of the Tule Lakes disappearance was a bit off. It may have began drying up in the 1930s as farms encroached on the deltas along its shores. However, it was still around during the 1940s and is part of the reason for Lemore Naval Air Station's development. The Navy used the lake as a safe location to train floatplane crews because the calm water and usually light winds made it easier for them to learn the basics before attempting to land on the ocean with large swells and stronger winds. The lake truly died after Terminus Dam(now called the Kaweah Dam) and the Success Dam in the mid 50s. There is a minuscule part of the lake preserved, but it only covers 1 to 10 acres.
As a central valley native, I would have loved to see the region before the draining of tulare lake
@Sydney Garcia your crazy
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley while providing hydroelectric power. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.)
Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging.
The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
We (California) set up a system to stabilize the water supply, keeping the valley green, safe, and productive. These dams create green energy, prevent flooding in cities built on floodplains, and provide water in drought years. Then some people with short memories came in and screwed it all up by diverting more and more of the Tulare lake water off of the Tulare Lake Basin and into the San Joaquin River. California needs to stop using the valley's aquifer recharge water to dilute the polluted waters in the Delta and Bay aria. Instead, California should require cities that are creating that pollution to better treat their waste water before dumping it into the Bay or Delta.
@@jameslferrell5272 Tulare lake was gone way before 30 years ago. Farming to this day uses 40% of California's water supply, Nature 50% and Urban 10%. If you are upset about how much water there is, well you are getting less because of climate change and your neighbors growing water intensive crops for overseas export, mega farms taking more water with wasteful irrigation techniques. Look to your neighbors first. Before settlers from Spain, Mexico, and later the US arrived nature got nearly 100% of the water. What you've seen over the last 30 years was getting us to the point where nature could have that 50% and since farming is the most water intensive, they saw the most reductions.
Speaking of pollution. It isn't the cities producing the bulk of it. Farms are the largest source of water pollution in California. All that fertilizer and pesticide run off is the source. I wouldn't say no to reducing city pollution, but you need to own up to the reality that the biggest problem is farm pollution. Which would be worse with the flood irrigation you are proposing. I would argue that preserving some ecology that keeps several industries such as salmon fisheries alive is a GOOD thing.
Imagine the same 100+ degree temps, but also with absolute humidity and stagnant water. There is a reason the Spanish explorers called it "La caldera del Diablo". Granted, people did live and thrive around the swamps before it was drained and colonized, but I don't think many of us would have a good time there.
What did Tulare Lake ever do to deserve this :(
It would be cool if we can bring them back
It was native to america, and they cant have that.
It was not white.
Lakes have no rights, and are not animate creatures. They don't "deserve" anything. Taken to its logical end, the idea than the environment deserved to be preserved forever in a virginal state unsullied by human activity would require the wiping out of most of the world's population.
Water is a resource. It is necessary for sustaining human life. In order to ensure that this resource goes where it is needed most, we created a market for it. Those possessed of it have been allowed to sell it at whatever price the market would bear. Seems like agriculture and cities were willing to pay the highest price. To some degree those unhappy with having to bid for water went to the California legislature and got laws enacted to have the government allocate the water rather than the market.
In the long run, we are all dead, so the market works best in the allcation of a resource for the present needs of people. Is this causing long-term and possibly harmful changes to California's central valley? Obviously, yes. Most resources get consumed and are not renewable. Using them, as we must to sustain life, means they will one day run out. As they become scarcer and scarcer, those bidding upon them will have to pay more for them. They will once again go to the legislature demanding price controls "or our way of life will disappear". Fuck them. When water is no longer cheap enough to support agricultural in the central valley, agribusiness will move elsewhere, and a lot of small towns in the central valley will become ghost towns like the old mining towns in the mountains. The only certainly in life is change. Anybody wanting to continue to live in the central valley will have to figure out a solution. It's really more their problem than anybody else's, except when their solution is, for an example, a trillion dollar taxpayer funded gigantic aqueduct from the Columbia River down to the central valley.
@@Yesquire0 Chill it was a jokee
Interesting that I found this video just as news about flooding in the tulare lake region hits.
I grew up in Bakersfield and Fresno from 1953 to 1995 and was totally unaware that this lake has existed. Very interesting video!
Do people in Bakersfield have nice buns?
.
.
I'll show myself out.
From YT name sounds like you might live in Thailand now.
Tule Lake last appeared in 1969 and 1970. Those were high water years. The excess water partially filled the lake. My father took us somewhere south of Hanford and Lemoore to look a vacant lot, he had inherited . It was under 10+' of water dikes 20' prevented us from seeing it. They were all gone in the bottom of the mid-'70's drought. And cotton of was growing everywhere.
So I was recently hired to shoot the drone footage for a commercial for a 7k acre ranch called Black Oaks Ranch near Bakersfield. It overlooked the valley, specifically Bakersfield and was just south of where the kern river would have fed into the two other lakes. The terrain I shot had so much evidence of previously large amounts of water regularly moving through the area and into the valley. At one point we came across some Native American ruins in an area that had clear evidence of running water and was now a seasonal creek. I thought to myself. Clearly generations lived here and thrived there.... So what happened to them? How did they survive here with seasonal water? There were springs near by, but I am positive that at the time the Native Americans lived there, water flowed all year round. This video gives some validation to that. If Bakersfield was a lake and the land was far more lush due to the raging Kern River, Kern Lake and higher ground water content then there is no doubt to me that micro climates existed and fed the area where I was filming. I made a video and posted it documenting my portion of the job. I am so pumped to watch it again and look for visual confirmation of the extinct lakes. The guy that owns the property installed a bunch of solar panels that pump water up out of the ground and back to the surface in an effort to keep the ground more lush and accessible. If only Doc could invent that time machine, I would love to go back 3 or 4 hundred years to see what it used to be.
Every river jn the us has been changed...we have dammed every single water body. It was MUCH different then.
He's restoring the environment while being efficient. I like that. 😎
Bakersfield native, everything this man says is true. Bakersfield also used to be a swamp many many years ago. Buena vista lake and many waters around kern county has died down to nothing. It’s very depressing to see.
Great book about it. The King Of California: J.G. Boswell and the Making of A Secret American Empire
J.G. Boswell profited from building the dams. He also created a stable water supply for the valley, green power, and did it all with positive impact to the environment as wildlife was less effected in drought seasons. Best of all, the water still was used to flood the Tulare lake basin, replenishing the valley's underground aquifers and rivers. The problems started later when we forgot that it was Tulare lakes water and started to divert most of it to the San Joaquín River.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.)
Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging.
The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
We set up a system to stabilize the water supply, keeping the valley green, safe, and productive. These dams create green energy, prevent flooding in cities built on floodplains, and provide water in drought years. Then some people with short memories came in and screwed it all up by diverting more and more of the Tulare lake water off of the Tulare Lake Basin and into the San Joaquin River. California needs to stop using the valley's aquifer recharge water to dilute the polluted waters in the Delta and Bay aria. Instead, CA should require cities that are creating that pollution to better treat their waste water before dumping it into the Bay or Delta.
If you think this is bad you should research Lynda and Stewart Resnick. They are a major part of the problem now.
Yeah, they came to our area, bought huge sections of land, and cut down all the trees. Then left.
@@MrLikeke thats FKN SAD !!!
@@MrLikeke but why would they do that? It makes no sense
Totally false left wing propaganda. Shame on you. The Resnicks are wonderful people who run a number of very good businesses, employing thousands, treating their employees well, and giving to charity in a major, major way. Its sad that if you do good in the world, little creeps try to smear you.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick#:~:text=Since%201973%2C%20he%20has%20been,reside%20in%20Beverly%20Hills%2C%20California.
@@tomthx5804 ehhhhh they have been in a few shady things. Not saying that what the op said is true because I can't find anything on it but some of the controversies are interesting and should not be discounted
And where did the 'left wing propaganda' come from? Not everything is political
This is utterly fascinating. I’ve lived in ca for 20 yrs and had no idea
It's sad that California is going through desertification
Going through? Seriously? It's been desert. That's part of the problem; millions of people trying to live in an already arid zone, and drawing away what little water there is. The bulk of California was already a desert long before the first Californios first arrived, and when the later 49ers arrived, and certainly when some fools thought that Hollywoodland would be an ideal location for movie studios. California is the wet dream that was never wet, and should never have been made into the tremendous deal it is today. California is one of the worst potential ecological disasters-in-waiting, and it's one whose fault lies solely on humans, especially the excessive abundance of idiots that want to live there, because it's "cool"...
It is their own doing, I feel sorry for the wildlife and nature, not those responsible.
@@marshalofod1413 Cali is only a desert because people in the rest of the US use plastic straws and drive pickup trucks!
@@zeroibis I do hope that that is an attempt at sarcasm. If not, well....
@Belwonsenor Simpkriss You don't have to be a California hater to foresee massive problems coming to the state as the aquifers are drained. There isn't enough water in the Colorado to make up for that. Essentially, southern California is living on borrowed time, until the next real drought of the sort that has happened often in the past.
The same thing has happened (& I believe is still happening) in the Arizona desert. Pumping of the aquifers underneath has caused the ground elevation to sink.
pretty much everywhere in the west.
@@electrofan1796 Yeah, they've done the same in the Coachella Valley.
The same JG Boswell that is responsible for virtually killing the last of the lake... Also bought thousands of desert acres west of Phoenix and converted them to Cotton fields...
Grew up in Fresno CA and I've never heard of this in my life. Amazing.
FYI it's phonetically pronounced the "Car-key-nez" Strait
With emphasis on the "key".
That's where my hometown is!
@@crusincamry I'm the Crockett Rocket. Right across from Valley Joe.
@@kimmer6 Benicia!
@@crusincamry Benicia used to be the State Capitol! Sometimes I take a long sea voyage in my cabin cruiser from the Glen Cove Marina to the Benicia Marina and walk to town for dinner. It burns a whole quart of diesel fuel on that trip.
Draining lakes is a practice as old as ancient Rome: emperors Claudius and Hadrian undertook to mostly drain Fucine Lake. It wasn't initially to get farmland, it was to bring water to Rome and get rid of marshes that were the source of regular outbreaks of malaria, but once the water level went down it didn't take long before it was farmed.
TODAY, Tulare lake is BACK. So much for the growing season. Mother Earth reclaims the land.
Does the destruction of this lake and the wetlands and lush forests have a relationship to the wildfire problem in California?
Of course
You Tube: “This claim has been disputed by several officials”
Water from the lake is no longer evaporating and turning into rain water to keep plant life from drying out. So yea, while not the sole reason, it is a reason why everything is so dry now.
FOREST FIRES ARE CAUSED FROM THE STATES MISMANAGEMENT OF THE FORESTRY!
THATS WHY YOU SEE SO MANY THERE,THEY NEVER CLEAR THE UNDERBRUSH UNTIL ITS TOO LATE!
Yes, of course it does, although I feel your question is rhetorical. Oregon is drying up as well. You take the groundwater away and everything dries up. Installing water cisterns to collect rainwater in areas that get rain would be a start.
Tragedy of the Commons at its finest (or worst)
It gets taken by robber barons.
Now the Merle Haggard song " I'll never swim Kern river again" make sense!
28 feet in drop? How the heck do they keep their roadways and pipelines functional?
They also get twisted and warped sometimes. I remember a photos of a town/development that looked like a Dali painting by the time it was abandoned.
Everything drops at the same time. It's still 180 feet above sea level.
@@muchosmasfrijoles - Think again. Some places might sink more or less evenly. Most DON'T.
Example, Mexico city, in average, sunk more than 9 meters! The resulting mess obliged to spend millions on top of millions on sewage system alone!
And the governor wants his high speed train to nowhere to continue development.
Many areas are fine when they sink evenly. Canals have been known to have problems, though.
Carter, the lake is/was called Tule Lake. The "Tulare" nomenclature applies to Tulare County; "Tulare" is from the Spanish "Los Tulares", which "The (Tule) Reeds". Tule Lake was vast; a large variety of wildlife once ranged there, including the now-extinct California Grizzly.
@97RAVINEAVE it was unique, I believe
Current historians, scientists, and geographers know this lake as Tulare Lake; Tule Lake is in Siskiyou County. It was home to thousands of migratory birds- Mark Twain wrote about their abundance.
wow, i just found this video on 3-22-23 because of the levee breaks and corcoran is under water because the old lake bed is now refilling
Fascinating. I’ve lived here my whole life and never knew how Monterey and San Francisco bays were formed.
The a goodly portion of the freshwater run off through the Gay Bay could be diverted to the Central Valley easily enough and it would solve a LOT of ag/water issues in the Valley. But no...the Snail Darter gets presidence over all the ag. And of course the Snail Darter is not..not a native species either..
I was raised in Corcoran.
We had to flood the field every few years to keep the town from flooding. Even so, about every 10-15 years there was still massive flooding.
I think the last one was in 96 or 97.
Shortly after that, the state diverted most of the water to places like LA and SF.
Thank you for sharing that, people don’t realize, it’s not really most the farmers, but people who live in the big cities who drained it. Why don’t they learn to desalinize the ocean, because that’s where so many people want to live.
@@19bishop56 Very true for Owens Valley, but not for San Joaquin Valley. San Joaquin Valley water goes to mostly large corporate farms as described in the video. SF Bay Area water comes from two rivers directly east of it that flow pretty directly to the SF Bay via the SF Delta.
They don’t divert anything from your area to S.F. or LA!
@@19bishop56, they know how to desalinate water. It just takes a lot of power, which they don't have enough of either.
@@Ridingrules10000 Shouldn't take any power at all to do it naturally.
California and Spain seem to be parallel stories to me. The conversion of native habitat into farmland lessened the water storing capacity of the land, making it more vulnerable to droughts that often come in Mediterranean climates. This only furthers more droughts as with less surface water and plant life there's less evapotranspiration, releasing less moisture locally into the atmosphere, and if the theory of the biotic pump is true, lessening rainfall.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biotic_pump
Spain has a massive advantage though. We are gaining forest area. Unlike California. The peak of deforestation in Spain was around the 1800s.
Reminds me of another video on You Tube, on how Spain has successfully used new techniques to grow trees in a very arid region. Something similar must be done to restore the lost rivers and lakes in California. The Chinese have also greened a greater part of the extremely dry Gobi Desert.
Too many people wanting too much stuff. Too many people living outside urban centers. Too many people in arid areas. The problem is obvious.
@@talisikid1618 Too many people.
@@talisikid1618 many of the food from those areas feed the too many mouths in the rest of the country
Visalia native here and its crazy how many people here have no idea the lake even existed... wish I could have seen it and i bet it was beautiful
One of the interesting things about tulare lake is that the reason the lake and the local topographic depression that makes it possible, are there, is that there's a chunk of dense crust that's detaching and falling into the mantle below that part of California. The chunk is still mechanically coupled to the shallower earth's crust there, and so it caused it to subside at the surface as it drags downward. We can see this chunk of crust through geophysical methods and we geologists call it the "isabella anomaly" (anomaly here meaning diversion from expected gravity/density).
Will it become a mini Death Valley?
@@billwilson3609 probably not, as it sinks further it will become progressively less mechanically attached to that part of the crust, and thus stop exerting a pull downward. It's likely at some point that the mantle will fill in and actually cause some uplift because it will be less dense than the portion of crust it's replacing, and isostatically rebound. Death valley formed for somewhat different reasons, crustal extension and subsidence due to loading of the crust by the mass of the sierra nevada
My dad had to redrill our domestic water well, which was originally 25-30ft deep and had been fine since we bought the Central Valley farm in ‘89, up until a few yrs ago when it dried up, which corresponds to all the surrounding fields of ‘feed’ corn(for cows and other animals), and an apple orchard being razed and replanted with almonds, the new cash crop but extremely water intensive compared to most CV crops, but also the drought and the previous lack of regulations on aquifer water. Basically, anyone could’ve pumped an unlimited supply of groundwater and sell it to whomever needed it, factories and other farms. Therefore, I’d like to start a trend where we could substitute items for less impactful substitutes, such as almond milk. I’d like to recommend Oatmilk, because the texture is similar to milk and much tastier than almond milk, which I find to be too watery, especially as a creamer. Most importantly though, it uses less water #oatmilkbeatsalmondmilk
First it was soy milk, then almond milk, and then oat milk. I am waiting for the next milk. It's sure to be better. Have you tried beet milk?
@@thedalillama This post sounds like either a weird 50 year old or an edgy 15 year old. >__>
Oat milk is so delicious, and creamy. I was very skeptical at first. I tried it and have not looked back. Previously, I always drank whole milk.
From what I heard, modern almond agriculture is grafting almonds buds onto maple trees- something like that. They have almonds trees in Europe and they dont need that much water but maple trees use a lot of water. They do this to get almond trees to reach maturity faster. I could be mistaken.
Oat milk is delicious. I don’t drink it straight up but I use it in my coffee and when I make fruit smoothies.
When I was a kid we would go fishing at Tulare Lake, lots of reeds, cattails and growth around the shore line, it was massive.
I live in Kings County which is where Tulare Lake once was. Thank you for telling this story to the world. Subscibed!
God: "Who keeps draining my f**king lakes"
That really grinds my gears
"Jesus Christ!"
Jesus: "what?"
God: screw it you drained my lakes, no water for you.
White ppl lol
Short answer, San Francisco and Sacramento. Why? It is cheaper to dilute their polluted wastewater with the Tulare lake water than to clean all the pollutants out of their waste water.
The Tulare Lake was not drained, it was moved to dams in the mountains. The large, shallow lake (2-6ft deep) was more of a large flood plain that could stay flooded for a few years. The decision to store the water in dams stabilized the water supply in the central valley while providing hydroelectric power. Crops could be flood irrigated with this water, growing crops while continuing to charge underground aquifers. The water the crops used was roughly equal to what would have evaporated from Tulare Lake. (Shaded water looses a lot less to evaporation, LA uses plastic balls to shade their above ground aquifers.)
Over the past 30+ years, as most (about 75%) of this water has been diverted to the San Joaquin River for “environmental” uses, the underground aquifers have suffered from this radical reduction in water. Farms on floodplains can no longer flood irrigate with the Tulare lake water they are allocated, and in some places farms are now using the water in the aquifers that they would normally be recharging.
The Tulare Lake water should stay in the central valley and should not be exported to other arias of California. Exclusively using the Tulare Lake water on flood plains will start to recharge the underground aquifers and help reverse this man made desertification of the central valley.
We (California) set up a system to stabilize the water supply, keeping the valley green, safe, and productive. These dams create green energy, prevent flooding in cities built on floodplains, and provide water in drought years. Then some people with short memories came in and screwed it all up by diverting more and more of the Tulare lake water off of the Tulare Lake Basin and into the San Joaquin River. California needs to stop using the valley's aquifer recharge water to dilute the polluted waters in the Delta and Bay aria. Instead, California should require cities that are creating that pollution to better treat their waste water before dumping it into the Bay or Delta.
Indeed it is very interesting, grew up in CA & I never was educated about this.
Also, soil subsidation is significantly impacted by the largest oil field in that area, the massive Kern Oilfield. The Kern Oilfield is literally massive, covering 100% of the area surrounding Bakersfield metro and it's surrounding cities.
Imagine that....the greed of a few, leads to the suffering of many, nothin new here in the USA!
Did you miss the part of the valley being responsible for clothing and feeding a large part of America? On the flip side, who are the many that are suffering?
@@Bgrosz1 the people working in those very fields
@@AlexCab_49 ,
Why are they suffering?
We don't have slave labor, so the people working those fields are doing so voluntarily.
@@Bgrosz1 Ha I'd like to see you working in 100 degree weather picking produce while earning a wage to pay rent or bills and I doubt you'll say it's "voluntary". And farm work is often the only source of employment for latinos in that region who often don't have documentation.
@@AlexCab_49 ,
Why would they leave their home country and do this work?
The only answer is this is better than any option they had in their home country.
Again, they CHOSE to do this, no one rounded them up and forced them to do it.
That's a good thing, not a bad thing.
Interesting. I didn't know we had satellite photos in the 1800s. Well, I learn something new every day!
actually left me saying that WAS interesting but hey
Also one thing i found fascinating when i was in college was my class on California history, specifically what the Spanish explorers saw when they crossed the Tejon Pass and saw the valley for the 1st time, they described a place with a biosphere that nearly looked the same as the sierras, with vast conifer forests, surrounded by thick oak woodlands, wetlands, streams rivers ponds, with all kinds of wild life from the small to the big including black brown and grizzly bears, by time California became a state the forests had all but disappeared along with the estimated 3 million native Americans that once called the valley there home, a number that made California home to the highest population of native Americans' too; 5 to 6 million if you wanna include the entire states region
And now it’s gone.
Now it's a dystopian hellscape of human excess.
Everyone gangsta til they do this with the great salt lake
Yep, salt water would grow dandy crops.
Sell it to the mormons?
Normie
God that so salty u can float in it we did.Has no value 2 anyone 4 commercial use
@Mike Being mined for it's minerals and destroying the Salt Flats race course.
Born and raised in Tulare, and this is the first I’m hearing, that it used to be a lake!!! I knew Bakersfield was once underwater, and actually was part of the ocean at one point. My mom found shark teeth when digging up there. Pretty crazy!
Squirrels often bring up clamshells and other ocean artifacts. You can find them if you dig through their burrow mounds. ^.^
Shark tooth mtn
I've lived in Tulare for almost 5 years and just found out about this about a year ago. Really interesting history that isn't even taught in the area.
Los Angeles has been draining the valley for a long time. Southern Ca is a desert without our Central Valley water
After taking geology, here locally in the Central Valley. You learned how vital Tulare Lake was for the underground water supply. Now that we don't have that and we not only have a lot of ag, but people our underground water will soon be nonexistent. Its time to adapt, not only with our water use in farming, but we need to outreach other states that have excess of water and get it from them.
This made me look up J.G. Boswell and realize how much land his family now owns and how rich they are
And thank you for the interesting facts for work at TLC👌
It's J.G. Boswell, not Coswell.
@@jameshudkins2210 yeah thx lol I'll fix it rn. Typos when I'm falling asleep are a norm
Why are the rich always such destructive assholes
@@justinkasey1058 "Always?" They drained the lake, but they grew high quality cotton for our clothing. They offered employment to many low skilled people. They are not "always" anything. They are people who are as much of heroes and assholes as you or I.
@@jameshudkins2210 philosophically i would agree with your perspective, however my perceived view is that of the history books and my own personal experiences in Los Angeles, all rich people who have created or as some like to refer to it as, "carved out" their own wealth are all lying cheating dirtbag assholes who seek to exploit in every encounter.
We narrowly missed doing the same in Nevada. There was a big push to drain Great Basin National Park and send the water to Las Vegas for golf courses. They made a movie about it called _Drango_ with Johnny Depp.
Very helpful. It should be shown in all schools. We have to step back.
No wonder why California tend to have plenty of mediterranean climate because there used to be a big body of water in between the two land that is Sierra Nevada mountain range (east) and the coastal California land (west). At 1:30 there’s a big water between the land.
That is not the reason why. It is because it has a western ocean coast in the right latitudinal band, similar to Chile, South Australia, and South Africa.
@@ssssaa2 Lol, how does Google change your name and why did Google change your name? The word Mediterranean derives from (medius, 'middle' + terra, 'land, earth') which is middle of the land or between land and that water is between land in case you didn’t know. The climate of the places with Mediterranean is known for warm to hot, dry summers and mild to cool, wet winters. Winter temperatures are usually between 30 and 65 degrees. Summer months all average above 50 degrees. The warmest month averages about 72 degrees. The cause of this climate is directly related to large bodies of water such as the Mediterranean Sea and ocean currents. During the summer, cold currents keep the climate mild and dry. Ocean currents shift as the seasons change. During the winter the water that was warmed up all summer moves in and keeps the land warm and often brings rain.
@@X1GenKaneShiroX The term "Mediterranean climate" comes from being named after the Mediterranean Sea, not because there is a big body of water between two lands. The term simply refers to a region that has a climate similar to the overall climate of some coastal Mediterranean lands. The Mediterranean Sea is named such because it is between two landmasses, Eurasia and Africa, not the other way around. (Hence, the name being derived from the Latin for middle of the Earth, as the Mediterranean Sea was literally the center of the known World, and smack dab in the middle of Europa and Africa.) There doesn't need to be two landmasses surrounding water, for there to be a Mediterranean type climate, though there does have to be at least one body of water, the right prevailing winds, and the right latitudinal conditions. California hardly has a "cool wet" winter though, so not sure you could call it a Mediterranean climate. Even before the lake disappeared, California had a desert climate. Just because there are bodies of water (including snow!), doesn't preclude a region from being a desert. It's all in the amount of annual precipitation that an area receives. (It's why the Antarctic is a desert.) California is mostly a desert climate. That's what makes it such a shitty choice for people to live in, especially at the overinflated numbers that they already do...
@@marshalofod1413 You can take my words when I say that California have mediterranean climate. You must know that California tends to have a plethora of climates it isn’t really like the eastern states that have one type of climate like Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, or even you know Louisiana. I can pretty much tell you that the western United States have diverse climate and what I mean by diverse climate is that there are more climates than that of just humid subtropical climate that you’re very used to seeing when you live in the southern United States. The 2 states Florida and Texas tends to be a bit different than the other states in the south because in one hand there is Texas with like seven types of different climates with a bit of hot-summer mediterranean scattered around in the heart of Texas. When you head towards the west of Texas towards like the panhandle and the north you will encounter climates such as cold semi-arid, hot semi-arid, hot desert, and a tiny bit of oceanic climate believe it or not. Florida on the other hand is one of the state in the lower 48 to have a climate that is a replicate of the ones in the Central Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Brazil. So simply when you go way south into the southern Florida you will encounter savanna, monsoon, and rainforest climate. Hell some people might not refer southern Florida as the Deep South so in Florida the north you go the more south it gets.
Do not take my initial comment too seriously because some people might find it humorous or just basically might find it nice to hear hence why there seems to be 33 likes, yesterday it was like 27 likes. Never said that the thing that are required to have a Mediterranean climate is to have a ginormous body of water inside of the landmass. Of course it is not always true that to have something mediterranean is to have a giant body of water in between and if that was true then the states such as Tamaulipas, Texas, Veracruz, Yucatan, and Alabama would of already been mediterranean because of the Gulf of Mexico being in between those land masses. Some states and areas were just naturally formed to hold the mediterranean climates. California is the only states within the United States to have the most amounts of mediterranean climate including the hot-summer mediterranean climate. California even have the hottest recorded temperature on earth located in around like the hot desert area basically that would be the southern half of California called Death Valley which makes it a pretty unique state that stands out of all the other states. Most people seem to enjoy the weather that California gives and very importantly the tech companies that exists in California. When you head towards Central Valley, the climate then is very warm compared to if you’re in the Sierra Nevada most of it lies behind elevation obviously you know that high elevations means colder weather while low ones means hotter and warmer ones.
I would agree with you that California have desert climate though not all or even most of California is really covered in dessert because there are plains which are green and doesn’t seem to be dry at all. Take Silicon Valley for example, there are no signs of it looking like the Sahara Dessert hell even there are forests and woods in it with the water around the Silicon Valley. California again is not entirely a desert state and just said like earlier it does have a diverse type of climate ranging from hot desert to very cold polar. California have over like 10 major climates unlike the eastern states that will only hold up to about 3 max. California have cold-summer mediterranean, warm-summer mediterranean, hot-summer mediterranean, hot semi-arid, cold semi-arid, hot desert, cold desert, warm-summer mediterranean continental, dry-summer subarctic, and tundra which is diverse isn’t it. Some parts of California have super high precipitation especially when you enter the county of Del Norte then expect things to be more wet than Louisiana. California is the most richest, agricultural, and productive state in the United States which wouldn’t shock me to hear that many people tends to live there. Plenty of parts of California tends to receive more than 10 inches of rain a year while some part may receive less than 10 inches of rain a year which mostly depends on what part of California you reside in. Not to forget the ocean can moderate the extremities of the temperature so when you’re near the Pacific Ocean you will face warmer winters and cooler summers.
Having body of water in the land is not the only requirement for having a mediterranean climate but having some deserts, dry summers, and wet winters are certainly required. For something to be mediterranean, it will need to be close to the water of some sort. Chile, South Australia, and South Africa all borders a gigantic body of water. The mediterranean areas will be required to have some influences from water, of course there are some exceptions but most of the time mediterranean areas will be close to massive water. Now really, what things exists in mediterranean climate? Here are some below
Evergreen trees: such as bay laurel, pine, cypress, and oak
Deciduous trees: such as sycamore, oak, and buckeyes
Fruit trees such as olive, figs, walnuts, and grapes
Shrubs: rosemary, Erica, Banksia, and chamise
Sub-shrubs: such as lavender, Halimium, and sagebrush
Grasses: grassland types, Themeda triandra, bunchgrasses, sedges, and rushes
Herbs: such as Achillea, Dietes, Helichrysum, and Penstemon
Wildlife: goats, sheep, rabbits, lynx, jackrabbit, jackals, wild goats, horses, cattle, wild boars, eagles, and bulls.
Mediterranean originated from Latin, mid 16th century: from Latin mediterraneus ‘inland’ (from medius ‘middle’ + terra ‘land’) which means something between 2 landmasses. If I know what it really means and its origins then I don’t see a problem twisting the term a bit for people to see. Hopefully you got something useful out of this, take care!
@@X1GenKaneShiroX Look. We are basically in agreement. I understand, now, what you meant. However, your op was not worded well. Perhaps English isn't your first language,as you seem knowledgeable. Yet, your op made it seem as though you meant something else entirely.
Nonetheless, you lose a lot of points for being overly pedantic, and coming off as a know it all. All that shit you wrote? I sorta glossed over it. I already know all of it. I'm kind of a nerd, too. *(Plus, if you really want to be pedantic, you are actually wrong about the eastern third of the US being of one basically similar climate. Some states, this is generally true, while most have widely varied climates.)* I drove trucks, around the US, for most of the last quarter century. I have not only read (rather extensively)about the differences in local environments, including climatology and geology, and importantly, topography (important for us truckers), I have actually been there, done that. In point of fact, I am currently in a long process of examining the climate, geology, and other Earth science disciplines connected to the Western US, specifically the Interior West, and most notably, Colorado. Yeah, my nerdiness is focused for a reason, now, but I in general retain a love of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
Point is, you shouldn't assume one knows so much less than you. It's churlish. I get it though, as I used to be much the same. Nevertheless, while I am a nerd, and proudly so, I have learnt to be less pedantic, or come off as a snob. Of course, I am Autistic, so it wasn't an easy journey, but it was worthwhile, as now I understand why people often thought I was a douchebag. Mayhap, you should likewise reconsider your verbose replies, and assumptions of the knowledge of another individual. It is frustrating to not only those of us whom ourselves are knowledgeable, but to almost everyone, because no one likes to be treated as though they are stupid. Intellectual snobbery, whether incidental or intentional, is unbecoming of anyone, but especially of those of us whom are of higher aptitude.
Maybe the people in this valley should seriously consider putting one or two of those lakes *back* before they turn the valley completely into a desert.
Good luck getting people to agree on flooding/abandoning farmland to attempt to restore a natural environment.
That would mean displacing millions of people, drowning almost all the farmland used to grow America's food, and creating an environmental disaster when flooding so much land so fast. It's sad, but artificially creating new lakes are NOT the answer.
@@joshuas.686 why can’t we distribute farms in other states that have plenty of water and rich soil? Doesn’t the east coast have rich soil and a lush climate? Why does california have to be burdened
@@praezey2184 Cause California can make money off of it. No one else really can, extreme access to water in a region that doesn't normally have it is one of the tricks that makes it profitable. Look at desert areas in west texas or new mexico, it's the exact same story as California, just on a smaller scale. The land is crazy fertile, but almost completely dry, so they pump stupid amounts of groundwater and grow cherries in the desert.
@@praezey2184 Portions of the east coast have poor soil. California has abundant sun and non-freezing temperatures over 9 months a year, millions of acres of flat land, and water delivery infrastructure. Good luck getting huge millionaire farming companies to give all that up.
Great video. Sub'd and thumb'd.
Born and raised in Salinas.
So many different nationalities contributed to the names of the towns it's like Epcot.
Carquinez = Car-key-nus
Soquel = So-kell
Thank you. Two minutes in and heard "car-quin-ess" and just thought "Oh, hell no."
I find this especially interesting in the context of eco-economic decoupling - the idea that humans can do more to save the planet by developing high density agriculture and then leaving vast sections of the world totally alone instead of farming it
Some of you people really make me laugh, LOL. The planet will heal itself as it always has. We're just a blip on the screen. Do you really think any of this matters a few million years from now? Where you're standing right now will probably be under an ocean and the dust from your bones will not exist. Watch George Carlins comedy video on environmentalists, he hits the nail on the head perfectly. There is nothing we can do to "destroy" this planet, LOL.
@@ironcladranchandforge7292 Exactly. Funny how it goes ignored that the entire valley was once one giant lake itself, and that the lands of Nevada were lush. It went away without human intervention or "fossil fuel climate change." Change in climate and environment is inevitable. The only factor is humans themselves, who choose to place themselves in habitats that they don't belong, or refuse to adapt to the inevitable changes to their habitat.
@@ElementofKindness i use the argument that nothing we do truly matters to life as a whole (we could litterally detonate all the nukes together in the Amazon and life would still survive) to argue in favor of reasonable climate change preventative actions. Like sure the earth won't be destroyed, its been a snowball and iceless and hit with asteroids and life persisted, but we didn't, we evolved for the late iceage and should try to keep it that way unless you want living to get alot more expensive. (Doing absolutely nothing about climate change will be the most expensive path as we deal with water shortages and stronger storms compared to finding realistic solutions that minimize changes to the environment away from what we are used to).
Man I love his vids
This was very helpful thank you
What's really fascinating is the satellite images from the 1800s.