I am not referring to democracy nor kings haha. you have missed my points.
Maybe we need your kings. Emperor Mau sure did a good job teaching us farmers how to do things right!
yup, of course. flooding.also washes away valuable top soils, so it is worse than just hardened ground. I dont know about california, but in Taiwan we are turning our sponge of an earth into a stone right quick. so flooding should be expected because that is exactly what we have intentionally constructed to happen. the only thing Taiwan has going for it is a fairly large amount of rain which lightens the load. but soil erosion is laughing matter here! we already see farms bringing in more dirt due to erosion, especially rice farms which are intentionally flooded and eroded 24/7 which is extremely insane.
Flooding - it’s pretty natural
Wildfires - it’s pretty natural.
Erosion - it’s pretty natural
not like this it isnt. but Taiwan doesnt really get meaningful wildfires.
the flooding isnt natural because we have dug large trenches all through the country to divert water. many are concrete. this means that the soil directly unnaturally compacts easier and cracks easier. our deforestation has led to massive soil erosion. if there is ample ground cover and wide soil areas for water to flow slowly and seep in, we avoid both flooding and soil erosion in a very meaningful way. These are not natural, they are designed by humans. Unless we take the human as being natural standpoint, in that case yes it is natural. so is TSMC and taipei 101.
but these disasters are directly caused by humans. not like the global warming debate. this is actually and obviously man made in Taiwan.
I sure didn’t mean to come across as completely ignorant.
Where I’m from there is an expensive war on erosion. It really is natural erosion - river and ocean currents. The battle is to keep the coastal beach from naturally washing away. The beach would be gone and all of the roads, homes, and tourism would be gone as well.
I imagine many mitigations you mentioned are very useful - keeping rivers within their banks, prevent erosion, protect lives, property, and industry.
Do you think we should return everything to its original condition? If so, how far back do you want to go? Go back as far as super continent days or proto-planet days?
Where in Taiwan are you from? it is true that up north water shortages arent as bad due to a more year round rainfall. but even there this is changing.
some simple, easily done, within budget measures that wont affect current livelihoods would be:
Stop the inte.sive pumping.of ground water, unregulated, to the point the elevation of entire townships are sinking (pinging, chunghua/yunlin etc).
in order to supply the water lost via not draining our aquifers, start really making.watersheds and.holding lakes. on massive scale.
Convert water wasting, tip soil eroding crops like rice in the flat lands or pineapple, cabbage etc on mountain slopes. have some logical regulations enforced on that. only the dredging and constructions benefit from our level of landslides, and even they dont really want the top soil sediment that much.
water contamination is another huge arena of problems. stop having.gas stations and.chemical heavy factories in or next to farmland.
we dont need to reinvent the wheel here. a little common sense, on scale, goes a very long way!
by that metric, nuclear war wouldnt even be fucking up the world. dont be silly 
the world will get along quite fine without us. the metric we are obviously using is long term prosperity and sustainability without unneccessary damage to both ourselves and the environment. we have a history of human famine, droughts and so on. this is undeniable, and in this day an age often preventable.
Someone here was first to bring up the water situation in California.
This is a show I listen to weekly. This was recorded late last week.The guest if a former politician but he is from a farming family and knows all about the water system in California. He says the canal system is 100 years old. The planners knew how much water storage they needed to build the system with because of rings of the Sequoia trees, telling the story of the rains over a thousand years. The water storage and canal system were built with advance knowledge of what was required for agriculture and society to thrive despite years of drought.
cheers, I will give it a listen tonight.
unfortunately here no one.consulted the trees nor did their growth spurts predict the evolution of chemical fertilizers and speedy growth rates with new age intensive farming.
pics from today. we cleared a couple.hectares this morning and man was the dry worse than everyone thought.
a very important addition to the list of.soil erosion is farming during.tilling and.with wind. we easily lost 1000kg of top soil today. even if we make a wildly low ball figure of 500kg, imagine that extrapolated after 100 years. it is not good 
I had no idea. I want to know about how much energy these plants require.
Sun Moon Lake in central Taiwan is half-empty amid the ongoing water crisis in the country’s southern region.
Half empty or 55% full!? https://water.taiwanstat.com/
If the plum rains arrive this year it should be fine.
If.
Guy
Haha, nicely said 
Though that’s the same optimism the folks that arent doing their jobs have about our security hehe.
always the same. if/when we get the big rains, we will be saved. honestly, that’s not the way to run a country…but it is true, warm season we do get insane rains usually. and with the soilis being destroyed, we get a lot of soil erosion as well. the algae will benefit anyway 
with the heavy rains, poor soil management and soil erosion, we also end up swallowing the few reservoirs we do have. If only they could spare a couple thousand dump trucks and excavators for a year and start some lakes rather than focusing so much on dredging rivers for gravel. we can do both 
Sun Moon lake half empty is not good for tourism either. Who wants to look at mud?
marketing government projects in the making
good chance to dredge more when things are low.
I only went there once when I’d just arrived in Taiwan and my dad was visiting, but I remember being surprised (in a bad way) by the number of grotty concrete buildings and the Starbucks etc.
I’m not super into looking at mud, but seeing a bit more of it probably wouldn’t have been the lowlight of the experience.
Ah, so a Starbucks has opened since I was last there in 2005 or so. Sounds like they’ve moved upmarket!