For years, bad things have been happening to California. Is there a reason why the state is being forced to endure crisis after crisis? This week, an unprecedented heat wave is making headlines all over the globe. Over a million California residents experienced high temperatures of at least 110 degrees on Tuesday, and Wednesday was the ninth day in a row when at least some part of the state has been under a heat alert. Of course this comes at the tail end of a summer that has been extremely bitter. The endless heat and endless drought have been absolutely devastating agricultural production, and it seems like the wildfires never stop.
California could really use a break right now, but instead it appears that the current heat wave may stick around for a while…
A record-breaking heat wave has baked the West for days — setting record high temperatures, fueling destructive wildfires and threatening rolling power shutoffs in California — and it could last even longer due to the effects of a strengthening hurricane along Mexico’s Pacific coast.
Of course there have always been heat waves all throughout history, but what we are witnessing right now is not even close to normal.
In recent days, some cities in California have broken old records by over 10 degrees, and the mercury actually reached an all-time record high of 116 degrees in Sacramento…
Sacramento hit 116 degrees Tuesday, the hottest day on record for the state capital, according to the National Weather Service. Records were also broken all over the Bay Area, with some cities shattering previous daily records by more than 10 degrees.
Have you ever experienced 116 degree heat?
That is hot!
In fact, we are being told that this is “the worst September heat wave on record”…
“This will be essentially the worst September heat wave on record, certainly in Northern California and arguably for the state overall,” Swain said. “By some metrics, it might be one of the worst heat waves on record, period, in any month, given its duration and its extreme magnitude, especially in Northern California and especially in the Sacramento region.”
When conditions become this oppressive, people don’t want to go outside at all.
Instead, most just want to stay inside and enjoy the air conditioning.
As a result, there has been an enormous strain on the power grid this week, and rolling blackouts were very narrowly averted on Tuesday…
Californians are being asked to conserve power for the eighth day in a row as the state’s grid operator expects more strain on the energy grid and possibly rotating outages on Wednesday.
Despite record demand on Tuesday, California was able to narrowly avoid rotating outages. The California Office of Emergency Services sent out an emergency alert to people’s phones shortly before 6 p.m.
There was a noticeable drop in energy demand shortly after that alert.
Of course this latest heat wave comes in the midst of the worst multi-year megadrought in the region in 1,200 years. Agricultural production in the state is being hit extremely hard, and it is now being reported “that yields could be down by as much as a third this year”…
It’s not the only region of the world struggling with water shortages. A drought that has been enveloping the southwestern United States since 2000 marks the driest 22-year period of the past 1,200 years, a UCLA-led study found. The American Farm Bureau Federation suggests that yields could be down by as much as a third this year compared with last year because of drought and extreme heat.
Maybe you don’t care about what is happening to California, but you should care.
California normally grows about a third of our vegetables and about two-thirds of our fruits and nuts.
So if you plan to eat next year, what is happening to the state should matter to you.
A couple of of weeks ago, I wrote about the looming tomato shortage that is being caused by the drought. The state of California accounts for approximately 25 percent of all tomato production in the entire world, and a lack of moisture is really hurting tomato farmers in the state this year.
As a result, there will be a lot less spaghetti sauce and pizza sauce to go around in 2023.
The endless drought has also created ideal conditions for wildfires to erupt and thrive.
Over the Labor Day Weekend, more than 4,000 firefighters were working to contain 14 different large wildfires in the state.
Of course dealing with wildfires has basically become a way of life in California these days.
There is one last thing that I wanted to mention in this article. As water levels drop all over the region, things are being revealed that have not been seen in generations.
In fact, in the central part of the state an entire ghost town from the Wild West has now emerged out of the water…
At Lake Isabella, nestled within the southern Sierra Nevada foothills in Central California, the telltale signs of drought are all too visible. The shoreline resembles a giant toilet bowl ring around the lake’s edge, while the detritus of long-forgotten secrets in various stages of decay poke up from the lake’s bottom.
Now at 8% capacity, the man-made lake is revealing the foundations of one of the Wild West’s most infamous towns — and it’s all visible from the shore, or accessible by boat.
Welcome to the re-emergence of Whiskey Flat: one of the wildest, most storied, tragedy-laden places to ever come out of the Old West and the Gold Rush era. A place with a history so familiar, it’s stitched into American folklore. Many of the tropes, tall tales and tragedies of the Old West can be traced to this long-flooded valley.
The state was full of sinister characters in those days, and the same is true in our time.
It is often said that as California goes, so goes the nation.
California always seems to be on the cutting edge of everything that is wrong with this country, and the future of the state is not bright.
But most Californians are just going to keep on living the way that they have been living, and very few of them ever stop to think about the consequences.
Unfortunately for all of them, the clock is ticking and a day of reckoning is fast approaching.
***It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.***
About the Author: My name is Michael and my brand new book entitled “7 Year Apocalypse” is now available on Amazon.com. In addition to my new book I have written five other books that are available on Amazon.com including “Lost Prophecies Of The Future Of America”, “The Beginning Of The End”, “Get Prepared Now”, and “Living A Life That Really Matters”. (#CommissionsEarned) When you purchase any of these books you help to support the work that I am doing, and one way that you can really help is by sending digital copies as gifts through Amazon to family and friends. Time is short, and I need help getting these warnings into the hands of as many people as possible.
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Article cross-posted from End of the American Dream.
Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
“Over the Labor Day Weekend, more than 4,000 firefighters were working to contain 14 different large wildfires in the state.”
They should be forced to all EVs out in the forest. NO DIESEL FOR YOU. Bummer if they loose all their trees. All electric pumps, engines, everything.
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