You are now in California and the U.S. category.

Don’t be fooled by the increased water levels in our area. Scientists say we are very much still in the drought, so we need to continue to save water — not just for our consumption.

The issue is protecting two endangered fish species, which would reduce water supply for farmers and people in Northern California. The fish – the Winter-run Chinook Salmon and the Delta Smelt – are protected by the Endangered Species Act. This means, by law, federal agencies like the Bureau of Reclamation must try to save them.

John Azevedo stretches the water that helps produce the milk on his dairy farm west of Patterson.

He is experimenting with drip irrigation lines for feed corn that used to be flood-irrigated. The water that chills his milk tanks is reused in nozzles that cool the cows on summer days. Azevedo is one of 16 farmers featured in a new report from Dairy Cares, a statewide industry program that encourages water and energy conservation and other practices.

Ongoing drought conditions have contributed to the 29 million tree deaths in California, a number that is still on the rise. In addition to millions of oak trees in the state being killed off by sudden oak death disease, bark beetles have also played a large role in taking out the timbers.

“The tree mortality that we’re experiencing, it’s really unprecedented,” California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection Director Ken Pimlott said in a video for the California State Association of Counties (CASC). “Unless you get into the Sierra Nevada, and particularly the central and southern Sierras, you don’t necessarily understand the gravity of it.”

The winter El Nino, once described as a “Godzilla” weather pattern threatening to drench the coast with rains and put a dent in the Southland’s years-long drought, is officially over, forecasters announced Thursday.

Officials with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Prediction Center said the El Nino pattern, characterized by warming ocean temperatures, dissipated by the end of May “as indicated by the expansion of near-to-below average surface temperatures across the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean.”

Speaking on May 18 to the Mountain Counties Water Resources Association, Phil Isenberg said, “I have learned the hardest thing in public life to do is change human behavior. It’s a lot easier to pass a law than to get people to like it and to pay attention to it.”

With 50 years of public policy experience, Isenberg knows this all too well; his lesson applies to the trials of implementing water policy in California. Beginning in the early 1970s, Isenberg served on Sacramento City Council, then went on to be mayor and a member of the state assembly.