For decades, environmentalists have been bemoaning the fact that Lake Tahoe’s waters have been losing their clarity and blaming humans.  The Nevada Division of Environmental Protection:

Between 1968 and 2000, approximately one-third of Lake Tahoe’s unique clarity was lost.

The presumption was that humans must fix the problem that we must have caused:  

To address this issue, NDEP collaborated with the California Lahontan Regional Water Quality Control Board (Lahontan Water Board) to develop the Lake Tahoe Total Maximum Daily Load. the Lake Tahoe TMDL was a robust science-based effort to: better understand the causes of the loss in lake clarity, determine how much pollution needs to be reduced, and develop a workable, cost-effective strategy to reinstate historic clarity. The effort resulted in a TMDL Report that was approved by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in August 2011.​

Yet now we learn via The Reno Gazette Journal:

In 2022, Lake Tahoe was especially blue.

Over the last five months of 2022, scientists measuring the lake’s clarity could see down 80.6 feet. It was the clearest the lake has been since the 1980s, according to a report released by the U.C. Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.

But it is nothing that humans have done that has clarified the waters:

… a report from the Tahoe Environmental Research Center concluded that the change in zooplankton was the largest contributor toward improving the lake’s clarity.

Two notable zooplankton returned this past fall and winter – daphnia and bosmina. They had largely disappeared from Tahoe after invasive mysis shrimp were introduced in the 1960s. The shrimp were so abundant in the lake that a California nonprofit group was studying ways to harvest the shrimp and turn them into dog treats.

In 2021, the mysis shrimp population crashed unexpectedly, and a year later, daphnia and bosmina were thriving.

The waters of Lake Tahoe are clearing up because God made creatures that clean it up. They are not clearing up because of the radical green agenda or because we are being forced to drive flammable, polluting electric cars instead of efficient affordable gasoline powered vehicles.  The Sierra Nevada mountains also had record snowpack that occurred cyclically and naturally. This came after years of warmists enthusiastically predicting that drought was future of California thanks to our CO2 emissions.

Photo credit: Ken Lund CC BY-SA 2.0 license