Free Republic

California farmers struggling with drought say a U.S. Supreme Court decision issued Monday that keeps strict water restrictions in place to protect a tiny, threatened fish has forced them to leave thousands of acres unplanted in the nation’s most fertile agricultural region.The justices rejected appeals from farmers in California's Central Valley and urban water districts who had challenged a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service plan to safeguard the 3-inch-long Delta smelt, a species listed as threatened in 1993 under the federal Endangered Species Act. The smelt only lives in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, the largest estuary on the West Coast...

A new study is asserting a link between climate change and both the intensifying California drought and the polar vortex blamed for the recent harsh winter. […] The new study blames an unusual combination of a strong Western high pressure ridge and deep Great Lakes low pressure trough. And it says that is linked to a recently found precursor to El Niño, the world-weather changing phenomenon. And that precursor itself seems amplified by a build-up of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. …

FIREBAUGH, Calif. (AP) — With California's agricultural heartland entrenched in drought, almond farmers are letting orchards dry up and in some cases making the tough call to have their trees torn out of the ground, leaving behind empty fields.

Washington -- California's drought will be one of the extreme weather events that the American Meteorological Society will examine later this year to determine whether the cause is natural variability or human-caused climate change, a federal official said Tuesday. Scientists have not yet linked the California drought directly to climate change, Thomas Karl, head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center, said Tuesday in announcing the latest study. "I'M SURE THERE'S A WAY, but we haven't done it yet," he said.