California is facing an indisputable fact: We need, in a big way, to get busy finding water alternatives to the long-indispensable Sierra Nevada snowpack.

Yes, we’ve been blessed by recent exceptional snowfall, perhaps a snowy feast after an extended water famine. But year to year, California’s frozen reservoir—the mountain snow whose melt feeds farming and quenches the thirst of Californians—is dwindling and increasingly unreliable as the climate changes.