cliff is an expert but also famously sort of a "climate contrarian" and his takes are regularly cited by climate skeptics and conservative irritants here in the PNW. just noting his takes don't exist in a vacuum.

I like the map. It's usually on track but sometimes it's quite a bit off. I've seen it say drought when it's been wet --maybe just not as wet as usual. It also doesn't indicate when above average and I do not think it averages precip out when a wet week was extremely wet and the next one dry. It'll say it was dry last week. In other words you could have cumulative average precip but it's only counting last week's precipitation.

It also sounds like that old adage of - All models are wrong but some are useful. Alas, we probably only know how useful they where afterwards.

I worked in weather for TV as a technician and I was lucky enough to work with meteorologists. I thought they were high priests in the church of science, however, I detected a gambling mentality going on.

I was just surprised at how subjective their work was, with differing opinions regarding the big picture depending on whom you asked and what their background was, as in university, whether they had worked for the navy or whether they had worked for the government.

The big surprise of the gambling mentality reminded me of people that dedicate their lives to losing as much money as possible betting on horses. These people know the form, the weather and so much, yet they do their own bets.

It was kind of the same when working out what the weather would be in Springfield tomorrow. Would it just be cloudy or actual rain? That would be a 'bet'.

The next day the observations would come in and the meteorologists would either win or lose their 'bet'. The guy who has been to Springfield and knows the local geography well would have his own reasons for his 'bet', whereas the guy who was more interested in long term storm development would have another rationale for his 'bet'.

Then there would be 'wrong all the time me', able to look at the low level cloud from contrails (which are really huge in some wavelengths on the satellite pictures) to assume rain every day.

Hence climate and weather is highly subjective even if it is highly educated and vastly experienced professionals that are interpreting the data.

This might help you understand what should be the priorities for efficient water utilization (and reducing waste): https://www.construction-physics.com/p/how-does-the-us-use-w...

In California during their droughts restaurants wouldn't give you a glass of water unless you asked for it. Maybe there's some compromise between that and pumping groundwater for datacenter cooling.

Plenty of places are using water faster than the aquifers they use regenerate. I hold no issue with banning using that limited freshwater resource for cooling.