Ceci n’est pas une pipe
Death Valley is not experiencing a drought. Neither is the Mojave, the Sahara, nor the Gobi. A drought is an unusually extended period between the occurrence of a regularly occurring event; an anomaly. For example, when it usually rains on a regular basis, then but doesn’t rain for an unusually long period; that period during which it doesn’t rain is known as a drought. Rain in the desert is an anomaly; the lack thereof is neither an anomaly nor a drought.
Back when, the lack of rain in the Colorado River Basin and the Sierra Nevadas for an extended period of time was an anomaly; a drought. Today, and for the foreseeable future, a lack of rain in the Colorado River Basin and the Sierra Nevadas is not an anomaly; it is a new, worsening, normal.
The unheard of rates of rainfall and subsequent flooding in Germany and Italy are no longer one-thousand-year events. They are more the present-and-future-to-be-expecteds.
The flooding of streets in Miami and Charleston isn’t an anomaly; it is the worsening norm.
For what? For who?
I’m not sure that’s true. Deserts may get by on relatively little rainfall, but there are plants and animals living there. They need water. You can argue that a place like the Mojave or Sahara desert gets so little water that getting less would matter little, but a drier desert places stress on the adjacent regions.There was a time some decades back when the Sahara was growing due to drought and its sands were taking over the Sahel. It was a negative feedback system, and even after the drought ended it took years for the effects to reverse.
There are deserts, and there are deserts. There’s a big difference between, say, Death Valley and the Lut Desert in Iran. There are lots of plants and animals in Death Valley. The Lut has almost no plant life, but there are some insects and lizards. It is hard to do research in the Lut, because Iran, because extreme desert, so for years scientists wondered what those insects and lizards lived on. Their ecology is fueled by dead birds falling out of the sky and a thin layer of salty water underground. Death Valley is the land of milk and honey in comparison.
Kalesburg:
This I read in National Geographic (not a freebies) but was also carried by Smithsonian. About the only place I lived previously which was akin to a Desert landscape was Gitmo, Cuba in the early seventies 2nd Bn. 8th Marines-reinforced. Once you got away from the ocean, the landscape changed. Different story . . . Here is the Smithsonian. Wild Donkeys and Horses Dig Wells That Provide Water for a Host of Desert Species
Kind of cool. If you are ever stuck in the desert, follow the horses,