California's Own Climate Change Feedback Loop

We don’t often talk about the feedback loops that make a warming world even warmer. But as the thermostat on the planet goes up and up, there will be more and more of them. Feedback is when an effect of an input further amplifies the effects of that input. One feedback loop that is sometimes cited in climate change is snowfall. A warmer climate leads to less snow falling on the Earth and the snow that does fall melts more readily in the warmer climate. With less snow on the ground, which reflects sunlight back out into space, the planet warms a bit more than it otherwise would. So the world gets even warmer, which means even less snow, which means further warming, less snow and further warming.

            See where this is going.

Jimi Hendryx: feedback you want

Here in California we are providing an additional feedback loop to our globe warming. In our case, climate change has been a factor in the drought that we are enduring here. The warmer atmosphere means that things evaporate more quickly, so what might have been a fairly normal downturn in the precipitation we receive has turned into a years-long and extremely severe drought.

California's drought: feedback you don't want

Less water in our rivers and streams means that there is less water flowing behind the dams that generate hydroelectric power. So our hydroelectric power stations cannot generate as much electricity as they used to, which means that our electric lights, televisions, and computers are powered by other sources. While much of this power gap is made up by renewable sources, some of that electricity is generated by burning natural gas, which puts carbon into the atmosphere. Less water = less hydroelectric power = more natural gas burned = more CO2 in the air = global warming = less water = less hydroelectric power... OK, you see where this is going.