The Great North American Megadrought

In a few decades, scientists predict that a widespread, severe drought will sweep across western North America -- and it’ll last for decades.

Hosted by: Michael Aranda
----------
Dooblydoo thanks go to the following Patreon supporters -- we couldn't make SciShow without them! Shout out to Christopher Prevoe, Justin Ove, John Szymakowski, Peso255, Ruben Galvao, Fatima Iqbal, Justin Lentz, and David Campos.
----------

Or help support us by becoming our patron on Patreon:
----------
Looking for SciShow elsewhere on the internet?

Sources:

[PSIponies]

"Soil moisture is the amount of moisture in the soil."



Thank you.

[Psillytripper]

brine pollution from desalinization is also a problem. That extracted salt has to be put somewhere and if you dump it back in the ocean as the norm it increases ocean salinity over time.  good video :)

[freesk]

About 10% of water use in California is used by residential and non-agricultural industrial uses.  About 49% of the water flow through the state is maintained for environmental reasons.  About 41% of CA's water usage is for agriculture.  The process is heavily managed by the government.  Milton Friedman said that if the government owned the desert, there would soon be a shortage of sand...

[WigglingWaffles]

you forgot the part of the drought in california where nestle wants to lay claim 25 million gallons of the around 50 million gallons that is left in all the reservoirs

[postmortemspasm]

We had a 10 year drought here in Queensland, Australia from 2000-2010. It was not that bad, honestly...

[filipzacek]

I honestly don't get why this drought is such an issue. How hard can it be for someone to just figure out a way of efficiently and cheaply desalinating vast amounts of ocean water? That would fix the drought issues that we are experiencing...

[mountainmonkey]

Were getting loads of rain here in Georgia. I'll ship some to Cali

[bcrawford]

It would be helpful if you didn't speed up your video, and didn't cut out all the 'normal' pauses between sentences. It is ok to talk at 'normal' speed. But, despite the annoyances, I listened anyway because your content is very very good. Thank you for your work and congratulations on your excellent video content.

[Kasatome]

Meanwhile, here in the northeast US, we are getting tons of rain.  I'd donate some weather if I knew how.

[chaoshadow]

Sooo in the words of Bender Bending Rodriguez " Yup, we're boned"

[MultiWafflemaster]

How far up the coast is this megadrought likely to go?

[garyheiligman]

At 8:26 the units are wrong: 15, 000 kW is a rate but 1, 000, 000 gallons is an amount.  Maybe you meant 15, 000 kilowatt-hours? Sounds a little low... that's about 2/10 of a cent of electricity for each gallon at current rates.

[robbhays]

So how is this megadrought different than the past megadroughts? They're both caused by lack of soil moisture.

[Dutch_Pancake]

does anyone know where the pretty nature picture is from?

[xenathcytrin]

"The drought began in 2012."
See?
Mayans were right all along.

[SummersTimeEntertainment]

Overpeck... Woodhouse...  (huh huh).  I have a serious question; will the drought go away if someone brings a snowball to the senate floor?

[Mallory-Malkovich]

A desalination plant would cost a billion dollars. Wow, that's a lot of money.
Out of curiosity, what was the defense budget this year?

[virglibrsaglove]

I was in Texas when this video was made. We were in the same drought. Ours lasted 7 years. (We were also a few years into it when the video was made.) It got pretty bad. A lot of plants and animals died. Lakefront property was no longer lakefront. It was pretty scary. Then the fires came. After that we had record breaking floods. And this year, 2021, a winter storm like they get in the north that shut Texas down. Weird stuff is going on with the weather there.

[RealTalkWithMitch]

Looks like the real version of "Winter is coming"

[Zaugr]

This, yellowstone, the supposed probable earthquakes, the possible tsunami from the canary islands...
Lol. Yep. America you're screwed!