The news, as it often does, has been bouncing back and forth from extreme to extreme — historic drought, historic snowfall, historic fires, fatal floods and mudslides. That’s the nature of California’s climate. A common saying among water officials is that there’s no average year in California. Of course, when they add up rainfall and snowfall records, there is an average. But that average obscures savage fluctuations between bone-dry years and years of floods and landslides.