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Extreme heat, drought will permanently scar California and its social fabric
- M0r13n 4y agoI am curios how much the excess consumption of water influences the low water levels. I do not get the feeling that the inhabitants of California are particularly saving any water. I guess that there is big potential to save water.
- hamandcheese 4y agoIf by inhabitants you mean ordinary residents, well, the vast majority of all water used is used for agriculture.
- pempem 4y agoIn LA watering of non-trees is down to 16min max a week? OFC beverly hills isnt complying but they are technically their own city
- bcrosby95 4y agoIn my water district we can run sprinklers for 8 minutes per week. Not that I'm complaining.
- cobeywilliamson 4y ago
- tonymet 4y agoHousing crisis, water crisis , yet the state is still growing. Seems like a management mistake.
- thghtihadanacct 4y agoAridification? I thought the place started out as a desert.
- treeman79 4y agoSsshhh. You’ll expose the incompetence of our leaders at managing infrastructure.
- smegsicle 4y agore-aridification
- DowsingSpoon 4y agoWell, you were wrong. Much of the area is California chaparral and woodlands, not deserts. The Mojave and Sonoran deserts are at the far South end of the state.
- xvedejas 4y agoIt depends what your criteria are, but most of the LA basin would not be considered to have a "desert" climate, instead a Mediterranean climate. A good amount is intermediate and considered "semi-arid". To get to a proper desert climate, you do have to go just outside the urban area, over the mountains into the rain shadow where you'll find the Mojave desert. The border between "Mediterranean" and "Semi-Arid" is (according to Köppen) set by a threshold of precipitation based on potential evapotranspiration, which depends on things like average temperature. Once you have that threshold, precipitation at below 50% is considered "Desert", 50-100% is considered "Semi-Arid", and beyond would be other classifications (like Mediterranean in the LA case). Maybe this sounds arbitrary but it shows that most of LA gets at least double the rainfall that a desert would, according to the most common climate classification scheme.
- thghtihadanacct 4y agoMy criteria is a lot different from even others in Cali. I live in a water exempt area because we doing it right ;) However, we just got enough fog this past year to keep our res full. We gonna be screwed soon and when we reach that point we will then build a giant desal ... which ive hated the idea but respect the necessity. Salty Halibut anyone?
- pvaldes 4y ago
- agomez314 4y agoentire regions being deserted is not a new thing (see mayan civilization). it's possible we'll see the cities of southern California (San Diego, Los Angeles) as remnants of an ancient culture in a few hundred years, left intact by the scorching heat and desert.
- azinman2 4y agoMajority of water usage is agriculture
- kpopguru 4y agoAnd what about places like phoenix and Vegas?
- d4mi3n 4y agoCan't speak to Pheonix, but Las Vegas and the surrounding counties have a history of being very good about stewardship of their water supplies. There's a ton of documentaries on the topic if you go digging around the search engines or YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3z_z0Wsk-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B3z_z0Wsk-I
- idontwantthis 4y agoWhat about the disappearance of Lake Mead?
- bequanna 4y agoThis has to do with (bad) estimates being based on a particularly wet period that occurred around the time of original dam construction.
- bequanna 4y agoPresumably their water sources are more sustainable. Or, at least much more sustainable than LA or Central Valley.
- 4y ago
- burlesona 4y agoCalifornia is next to the ocean, so if we really wanted to secure the water supply we have technological answers available. Nuclear desalination has been used at scale across the globe for decades, and it's not hard to imagine a less centralized solution powered by solar or wind. https://www.iaea.org/topics/non-electric-applications/nuclear-desalination https://www.iaea.org/topics/non-electric-applications/nuclea...
- Victerius 4y agoThe state needs to start overruling the local NIMBYs and build the desal plants the rest of the state needs. And the regulators need to chill out: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
- bragr 4y agoIt's not really the NIMBYs, it's the Coastal Commission which has a singular mission to protect the coasts no matter the larger big picture issues that keeps killing desal plants. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coastal_Commission https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Coastal_Commissio...
- nullc 4y ago> keeps killing desal plants. and diablo canyon nuclear plant, too. Desal could be run in a less energy efficient manner that reduced the salinity of the discharge water, but my understanding is that as far as the coastal commission is concerned no amount is acceptable.
- Gibbon1 4y agoMy thought about that is the coastal commission needs to think hard because decisions like that are likely to result in their power being curtailed.
- tomc1985 4y agoSan Diego got its desal plant in the husk of an old coal plant, and it has been the GREATEST thing. We are much closer to water independence than anyone else in the state and not having to listen about constant drought nagging has been FANTASTIC
- mistrial9 4y agoLos Angeles area with 13 million inhabitants, is the economic powerhouse of California overall. Gov. Arnold S. famously had staff meetings in LA, less so in the official capital city of Sacramento (gold era). San Diego county is unique to the area as a border to Mexico. San Diego County is largely separate from the others with heavy Federal presence. The multi-county region including LA County there is known as SCAG [0]. Since SCAG will have a hard time buying their way out of this long-term, self-inflicted quandary, they do indeed have reason to fret. https://scag.ca.gov/ https://scag.ca.gov/
- biztos 4y agoGovernor Schwarzenegger was from LA (after being from Austria of course), still lives there (West Side I believe), and had/has most of his network there. I agree that LA is vastly more important than Sacramento but I doubt that was the reason for holding meetings there. When I am elected Governator, I will make my staff drive up Highway 49 and they will thank me for it.
- myroon5 4y agoCalifornia is one of the most extreme states in terms of how far the capital is from most of the population: https://vividmaps.com/the-distance-of-states-capitals-from-their-centers-of-population-and-geographical-centers/ https://vividmaps.com/the-distance-of-states-capitals-from-t... There are also discussions about more remote capitals being less accountable
- exhilaration 4y agoI'm curious about why SCAG has failed to plan for this disaster while the much smaller San Diego county has managed to get a desalination plant up and running https://nyti.ms/3yuTUz4 https://nyti.ms/3yuTUz4 From what I can tell this is the only desal plant on the West Coast which seems crazy.
- cagey 4y ago"The project to build a desalination plant in San Diego County, California commenced in 1993 after five years of drought."[1] "Before 2008, San Diego County historically had been a Republican stronghold."[2] [1] first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsbad_Desalination_Plant#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_%22Bud%22_Lewis_Carlsba... [2] first sentence of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Diego_County https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_of_San_Diego_County
- daniel-cussen 4y agoYeah and landlords posing as NIMBY's blocking new developments their tenants could threaten to move into.
- Barrera 4y ago> While some of what that means for California remains to be seen, parts of the process have already begun, including the steady decline of the Colorado River. Lake Mead, the nation’s largest reservoir which is located along that river, is now only 150 feet from dipping below its lowest intake valve, officials announced this month. How much time will it take for a 150-foot drop at current rates of loss? I haven't been able to find an estimate of the rate of loss in the last couple of years. I also imagine that the rate of drop could be non-linear.
- nathanaldensr 4y agoRegarding Lake Mead, it's worse than that: It's now less than 100 feet away from the 950 ft mark. It's already officially considered "inactive pool."
- Fatnino 4y agoIt's probable that the lake gets narrower the lower it is. Assuming a steady removal of n acre feet (a common measure of water volume in reservoirs), the rate at which the water level elevation drops will accelerate as less acreage of surface gets compensated for by more feet dropping. Anecdotally, the water level is dropping fast enough that you come back 2 days later and it's plainly apparent to the eye without looking too closely. So its dropping some significant number of inches per day, and only accelerating.
- AnimalMuppet 4y agoFor back-of-the-envelope calculations, you could model a lake as an inverted pyramid. Each foot of higher surface results in more surface area, both north-south and east-west. So the surface area of the lake is quadratic in elevation above the lowest point, and the volume is cubic in elevation above the lowest point. That's just back of the envelope. I'm sure there are geographical studies of Lake Mead that have accurate numbers.
- olivermarks 4y agoPutting aside the fact the state has infrastructure designed for 20 million people (current population double that) water management was designed to have a five year buffer for cyclical drought years which has recently has been catastrophically mismanaged. I wish the LA Times would focus on that and the reality that if the state continues to grow, water pipelines from the northern states and Canada will need to be constructed.
- irrational 4y agoYou are not taking our water. You will need to move North.
- olivermarks 4y agoI agree. This is where the endless affordable housing and immigration political movements fail. People need to live where adequate resources are.
- draw_down 4y agoI have a friend who grew up and has lived in socal for most of their life. When I mentioned the reporting on extreme drought for this year, they just responded “oh they say that every year”. So I wonder how reflective that is of the mentality of area residents, even if superficially it could appear otherwise.
- imperialdrive 4y agoI've observed much of same. (Not sure why you got downvoted.)
- bsenftner 4y agoI just SoCal 2 years ago after living there for 33 years. The mythic California of sun and fun is looooooooong gone.
- nullc 4y agoThere is a tremendous amount of wolf crying-- particularly calling for straw-ban-grade ineffective residential water use reductions (esp as agriculture is 80% of the water use). Disbelief is the long term effect of all the crying wolf.
- marcosdumay 4y agoI don't even live on the US, and I remember articles predicting aquifer lose and water shortages in California since I was a child. The point is, those articles tend to come with date targets. The people saying "they always said it and it never happened" are either stupid ones that don't care about the "by 2030" right next to the prediction, or ones that get their news from the first group.
- formerkrogemp 4y agoHydrologists have been saying this sort of thing to anyone who would listen for decades. Various government reports and publications such as the IPCC reports have been predicting this what feels like a lifetime. The slow moving train might move at 2 mph, but it can still squash you if you don't move out of the way.
- jrd79 4y agoModern technology makes it possible to build cities in arid environments, but it doesn't make it wise.
- datavirtue 4y agoModern tech also makes it possible to turn arid environments into forests. I would start there. When you do that water starts to collect/accumulate and the area gets cooler. On 99° days of unbearable heat and sun I can stroll under trees and be nice and cool in the 70°s. I do it all the time.
- jrd79 4y agoDo you have an example of this being done on a large scale? Sincere question. I've just never heard of it being done.
- yazaddaruvala 4y agohttps://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/regajha/auroville-india-environment-pollution-follow-this https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/regajha/auroville-india... "Auroville has successfully reforested 5,000 acres of land and turned barrenness into a lush forest that acts as a massive pair of lungs for the region — so much so that the temperature within Auroville is measurably 3 degrees lower than in surrounding villages."
- tempsy 4y agoThis is partially why I think the risk of homeownership is largely being understated. You may have entire communities that become uninsurable even long before an actual natural disaster occurs, and it becomes very difficult to cash out refinance or sell.
- bsenftner 4y agoNow imagine the economic hit when all the trillions of CA real estate investments drop like it is 1929? That may as well be an asteroid hitting the global financial world.
- wollsmoth 4y agoI think it's already happening in New Orleans. At least that was the impression I got when visiting. I think it can be difficult to insure a business or home affordably in the area. Seemed like a lot of storefronts were just empty. Perhaps I just went at a bad time of year (late nov).
- rr888 4y ago> Seemed like a lot of storefronts were just empty. This is just normal everywhere in 2022 :)
- wollsmoth 4y agolol, true!
- jriot 4y agoWhat year did you go? If it was last year then New Orleans was still recovering from Ida.
- wollsmoth 4y agoYeah it was. I wonder if I went back now if it'd be in full swing.
- 4y ago
- Managor 4y agoMassive amounts of monocropping contribute to the drought. Embrace ruminant agriculture. https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI https://youtu.be/q7pI7IYaJLI
- beambot 4y agoQuick Google stats: There are 13M households in California. Average household consumes 0.5-1.0 acre-feet of water per year. It costs $419 per acre-foot for desalination. California has a discretionary budget surplus of $49B. Thus: It would cost $2.7B-$5.4B per year to provide desalination-based water to all Californians. With the current budget surplus, we could provide 100% of California's living water needs for 10-20+ years exclusively from desalination. We should be building now.
- jaredklewis 4y agoWell California’s most recently completed desalinization plant took 9 years to get permitted. That’s not the time to build, just the time to get a permit, so I wouldn’t hold your breath on California building any more desalinization plants
- yellowapple 4y agoAnd that doesn't even begin to factor in the revenue opportunities from scaling up desalination further for export to neighboring states (most of which are even more arid than California). I've said it before and I'll say it again: California food and (desalinated) water in exchange for Nevada electricity (be it solar, geothermal, or nuclear) would mutually benefit both states and produce one hell of an economic juggernaut.
- thehappypm 4y agoPumping water from the California coast to Nevada is not a good idea. You’re basically describing a hydro plant, in reverse, carrying expensive water.
- s0rce 4y agoNot really much different than pumping Owen's valley water to LA...
- nomel 4y agoA quick google search says Owen's valley is at 4k feet, while LA is at 300. I assume that reversing that would be incredibly expensive, considering the 570,000 acre-feet/year that flows is 1.5 trillion lbs of water. So, I think it depends on where it's being pumped from/to.
- chriscjcj 4y agoIn this California native and resident's opinion, California's "social fabric" has been deteriorating for a long, long time. Just add this to a long list of problems this state is completely incapable of mitigating.
- noah_buddy 4y agoI grew up in California and I’ve seen just about everything from my youth turn over in the last ten years from tech transplants and TikTok stars. My old neighborhood is now majority yuppies in condos. Money is a destructive and constructive force, California has made the deal with the devil.
- MAGZine 4y agocalifornia has always been a place of immigration and gold seekers. san francisco was literally a goldrush city and a port. it was always a place of money and economy.
- judojava 4y agoHighly recommend reading Cadillac Desert https://marisolj.weebly.com/book-report-cadilac-desert.html https://marisolj.weebly.com/book-report-cadilac-desert.html Problem is very old and very predictable and not limited to CA.
- sschueller 4y agoEveryone keeps saying desalination is the solution but doesn't desalination cause an enormous amount of waste output (hyper saline slurry)? It seems like creating a new problem to solve another.
- Gibbon1 4y agoThe one the coastal commission blocked was going to mix it with treated sewage to reduce the salinity.
- phaistra 4y agoThere is always going to be some negative externality to anything humans do. No free lunch in any endeavor. You can find new uses for waste products or reprocess it to something less harmful. The "water crisis" in California is an entirely political problem.
- schainks 4y agoIt just so happens that a HN startup can use the brine from desalination for carbon capture: https://www.heimdalccu.com/ https://www.heimdalccu.com/
- yazaddaruvala 4y agoThere are already salt flats in Utah that are basically "hyper saline slurry". Death valley (https://www.nps.gov/places/badwater-basin.htm https://www.nps.gov/places/badwater-basin.htm) in California wouldn't be particularly worse if we dumped "hyper saline slurry" into it. We could also barrel it and put it into the ground. There is also always the refinement approach to create 1. table salt (possibly even paying industries like restaurants, commercial cooking, etc to take it); 2. lithium mining. This slurry might also turn into an asset at scale. Maybe for building roads. Maybe for concrete. Maybe for bricks. We will not really know until we have the surplus, and economic incentive to research it.
- cgreerrun 4y agoCollecting fog electrostatically is 2x more efficient than desalination. It works by ionizing the droplets in the air and collecting them on wire meshes: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aao5323 https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aao5323. The technique also doesn't produce tons of salt waste that you have to dispose of. It's a potential solution for towns/cities next to the ocean. Desalination is cheap enough already if we get desperate. It won't be cost or technical feasibility that prevents us from solving the drought problem.
- scoofy 4y agothis is really interesting, i live in the bay area, are there any consumer product for this, or is it typically only economically feasible at scale?
- cgreerrun 4y agoI'm not aware of a consumer product. The authors of the paper started this company: https://www.infinite-cooling.com/ https://www.infinite-cooling.com/. It looks like it's targeting industrial processes (cooling towers) where the collection efficiency is really high. Makes sense, why do B2C when you can do B2B w/ million dollar contracts... I'm personally looking into making something that can continually top up something like a 500 gallon water tank every night (when humidity is high) on a residential property. These tanks are prevalent in the drought-stricken, coastal community I live in. You need about 2200 gallons/person/month, of which only 15 gallons/person/month is used for drinking water. So if you can continually collect water throughout the month and have the space for a tank (about the size of a truck bed) then it should be possible to supply most of your water usage off the grid and in a way that isn't draining reservoirs.
- danaris 4y agoThe difference with this is it reduces the water available to fall further downwind, and could thus cause other issues: it's effectively zero-sum on moisture, while desalinating ocean water is positive-sum (though, yes, it has a waste issue).
- exabrial 4y agoHere's an alternative idea: stop growing crap in the desert. The number #1 water usage in Cali is agriculture. I think we could survive without baby spinach during the winter.
- kylehotchkiss 4y agoDon't worry, there's enough spare old jets around we can just fly single food items around the globe now. Make it somebody else's problem! https://simpleflying.com/bakkafrost-faroe-islands-boeing-757/ https://simpleflying.com/bakkafrost-faroe-islands-boeing-757...
- ChrisMarshallNY 4y agoThe Wayback link (non-paywalled): https://web.archive.org/web/20220630183629/https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2022-06-30/aridification-kills-civilizations-is-california-next https://web.archive.org/web/20220630183629/https://www.latim...
- anm89 4y agohttps://archive.ph/K2X6F https://archive.ph/K2X6F
- njarboe 4y agoCalifornia does not approve of the building of desalination plants, unfortunately. A $1.4 billion dollar plan from a private company to build one in the L.A. basin was rejected in May of this year[1]. Private capital is available to help with this problem, but the people/government of California won't allow it. [1] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-rejects-plan-desalination-plant-2022-05-13/ https://www.reuters.com/world/us/california-regulator-reject...
- FollowingTheDao 4y agoIt's cute so many of you all think there is a solution to this...