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California drought most severe in 1,200 years, study says
- code_duck 12y agoThankfully, it's been cloudy and raining in LA for a week!
- Ygg2 12y agoWhat do they know? There aren't any written proof from that period. This is all a conspiracy of evil mustache twirling scientists. / sarcasm
- crystaln 12y agoYes, some people just don't get the difference between historical and observational science.
- rtpg 12y agoThis drought seems pretty awful, and water resources in a lot of places in the US seem threatened by issues (either natural or man-made), which makes me wonder: What if we were to build a bunch of desalination plants and just start pumping water into aquifers or something of the sort? Are there major issues with desalination on a large scale?
- schiffern 12y ago>What if we were to build a bunch of desalination plants and just start pumping water into aquifers or something of the sort? If you're talking about conventional fossil fuel desalination, I invite you to do the energy audit on that activity. If you're talking about solar desalination in industrially-manufactured greenhouses, I invite you to do the energy audit on that activity. Don't forget to account for the energy-opportunity cost of land use. I know there's a lot of hype surrounding desalination here, but a centralized energy-sucking plant (owned by the ultra rich naturally) is a counterproductive business-as-usual non-solution. We can get a net-positive energy audit by redesigning our agricultural and storm water management. Right now they're designed with exactly the wrong goal in mind — shunt rainwater to the ocean in big straight hardware as fast as possible. This maximizes runoff instead of infiltration, so we're simultaneously preventing aquifer recharge and necessitating aquifer pumping by drying out the soil. "Keyline" design—a method of cheaply altering landform to soak water—is probably a good start for these new infiltration maximizing strategies, but this is by no means a solved problem. In California, like any desert, the name of the game is minimizing evaporation. This means all of the above, plus shading (e.g. date palms), sunken beds, buried drip irrigation, and dew/rain harvesting strategies like land imprinting. Proper rainwater management is the lazy hacker's desalination. :D
- jaekwon 12y agoYeah I was wondering if our storm-water sewage system is sucking the water out of our lands. But how much does this really matter? There would have to be some analysis of these systems vs land with no such system vs where they are to rain sources etc.
- schiffern 12y agohttp://www.usgs.gov/water/ http://www.usgs.gov/water/ The storm system drains all the "hardware" in an urban or suburban area — roofs, roads, parking lots, and sometimes even constantly mowed grass (which can form subterranean hardpan). Higher runoff rates lead to flow bottlenecks, flooding, and untreated sewage discharge. Still, agricultural land has more catchment.
- mason240 12y agoThe city live in (Maplewood MN) recently built rain gardens in our neighborhood for catching rainwater. They are basically deep pits filled in with gravel with slightly sunken garden on top. The water runoff from the street is diverted into them where most of it is absorbed into the ground. http://www.bwsr.state.mn.us/images/ww-box.jpg http://www.bwsr.state.mn.us/images/ww-box.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-31kb5tVYmJU/Ub9T22Hgy_I/AAAAAAAAAvI/_TMboIzREK0/s1600/merge1.jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-31kb5tVYmJU/Ub9T22Hgy_I/AAAAAAAAAv... http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLZpvg9e-H8/UbY86YdLjzI/AAAAAAAAAn0/gUv7kV1HjCA/s1600/2466+East+7th+St..jpg http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLZpvg9e-H8/UbY86YdLjzI/AAAAAAAAAn...
- badsock 12y agoWhat do you think of Western Australia's desalination efforts? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Seawater_Desalination_Plant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Seawater_Desalination_Pla...
- gilgoomesh 12y agoDesalination can handle drinking water but 90% of water usage is usually for irrigation. It is not cost effective to do that with desalination. As for Australia's 6 or 7 built/planned desalination plants: they are for backup and supplemental purposes only. They can't supply more than about 10% of the largest Australian cities' typical water usage. They would provide emergency water in a catastrophic drought and in low rainfall years can lessen the burden but they are not a replacement for good water catchment management.
- mixmastamyk 12y agoIt's just very expensive.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoUse excess wind power generation.
- PhasmaFelis 12y agoWe'll have to get some excess wind power first.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoThat's actually the biggest problem with wind power; when you have excess power, you can't do anything with it except curtail your production and lock your turbines so they can't spin. http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/01/belgium-plans-to-build-island-to-store-excess-wind-energy http://www.renewableenergyworld.com/rea/news/article/2013/01... To be able to put that power to a good use, while also still realizing revenue (even at a lower per kwh rate) is win-win. Wind power, without subsidies, is already as low as 3-4 cents/kwh. If the rate of install continues, price will continue to decline, and we'll have even more cheap wind available in the US for large-scale projects such as this.
- uptown 12y ago"That's actually the biggest problem with wind power; when you have excess power, you can't do anything with it except curtail your production and lock your turbines so they can't spin." There seems like countless ways a society could use "excess energy". What this article talks about is more like time-shifting the energy it's captured. But if excess energy were a problem, wouldn't you be able to store it in batteries, or apply it towards desalinization or other net positive activities rather than just locking the turbines?
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- declan 12y agoThis is a serious drought, but remember 80% of California's water goes to agriculture. More water is used to grow almonds than for all of residential irrigation. There are more non-farmers than farmers in the state; if the drought continues I expect the next step will be to cut back more on agricultural uses. In terms of desalination, my recollection is that it's a reasonably mature technology now, it's used in many parts of the world that are freshwater-constrained, and San Diego is building a 50M gallon/day desalination plant that will go online in a year or two. But the per-gallon price is largely determined by the price of electricity, and California is rather hostile to new power plants going in. (I don't know enough about the state's aquifers; perhaps others do.) Meanwhile in a few generations we may look back and wonder why we were flooding fields in California half a foot deep with increasingly scarce water to grow rice in an extremely dry climate. Especially when rice grows perfectly well in areas of the world that actually, you know, get rain all year round.
- jqm 12y agoAlmonds are one thing... we actually need those. The sad part is, most of the agricultural water goes to alfalfa. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-planet-thirsty.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/opinion/meat-makes-the-pla...
- mark_l_watson 12y agoA predominately meat diet uses about 10 times the water and energy to produce. Stop the free water subsidies to big agro businesses, and let the free market price of water affect meat prices.
- masterleep 12y agoThat's a fantastic idea, but it's far too practical and sensible for California. It doesn't include any feel-good meddling or opportunities for kickbacks for the powerful and connected.
- lkbm 12y ago> Almonds are one thing... we actually need those. Unless I'm missing something major, we "need" almonds for exactly one reason: they're tasty. That exact same "need" exists for meat. Personally, I'm quite happy eating neither, since I'm not a fan of nuts in general. I recognize some people love almonds, and I'm not running around trying to get them banned, but I definitely think, just as with meat, we need to think of these things as choices, not just plain needs.
- rdtsc 12y ago> Are there major issues with desalination on a large scale? Maybe not too major but what to do with the salt?
- D_Alex 12y agoDesalination plants produce fresh water and salty brine, the brine is put back into the ocean. The effect on water salinity are negligible - in the sense that it will be less than the natural variance of the seawater salinity - beyond a few hundred meters from the brine discharge, even for city-scale desalination plants.
- kabdib 12y agoI read that aquifers, at least the ones in the Midwest (as in Colorado) are essentially "fossil water", and that when you pump it out the rock collapses somewhat, making it impossible to pump replacement water back in.
- toomuchtodo 12y agoDepends on the aquifers. Some are fossil, some are replenishable: https://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/investigations/es1406/es1406page10.cfm https://www.classzone.com/books/earth_science/terc/content/i...
- flavor8 12y agoIn the central valley, some areas have sunk 30+ft over the past century due to aquifers collapsing. http://www.watercalifornia.org/projects/projects_img/enid/fables_large.jpg http://www.watercalifornia.org/projects/projects_img/enid/fa... http://www.capradio.org/articles/2013/11/22/usgs-study-1200-square-miles-of-central-valley-land-is-sinking/ http://www.capradio.org/articles/2013/11/22/usgs-study-1200-...
- sliverstorm 12y agoThe issue with desalination is the tremendous energy input, normally provided by the sun. At least right now, that would probably have to come from coal.
- blisterpeanuts 12y agoTrue, but the Carlsbad desal plant in San Diego is going to build a bunch of solar collectors to offset much of its electricity demand. It's not clear they'll be able to offset all of it, but some is better than nothing, anyway.
- abootstrapper 12y agoFixing our water shortage with energy consuming desalination plants will just continue the global warming negative feedback loop. Better would be to simply change what farmers are growing to conserve water. * Edit: Why the downvotes? Look, solving water shortages with desalination plants, is like trying to fix air pollution with air filtration systems. Unless you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, you're just further contributing to the core problem. And even if you're powering the plant with 100% clean energy, that clean energy could instead be used to displace fossil fuels elsewhere if water was conserved instead of desalinated to continue business as usual. Am I wrong?
- Decade 12y agoMaybe you're getting downvoted because you misused the term "negative feedback loop." As any beginning engineering student knows, a negative feedback loop is a system that tends to return to an equilibrium state when perturbed. A positive feedback loop is a system that magnifies any disturbance until the conditions change, because it's inherently unstable. When you engineer a dynamic system, you typically want it to have a negative feedback loop, so it doesn't blow up or something. In other words, the term "negative feedback" does not have anything to do with the social consequences. Using it this way is painfully stupid.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Dylan16807 12y agoDesalination works great for residential water use. It doesn't help the farmers that want massive amounts of ultra-cheap water. Better farming techniques could help. What would help most of all is if water was properly bought and sold at market rates, so people with major water rights would sell instead of wasting.
- ghshephard 12y agoThere are policy reasons why we don't want water to go to the highest bidder - Food Security is one of the key reasons we give agriculture so much priority on water, even when economically it doesn't seem to make sense.
- Dylan16807 12y agoWould it really affect the amount going toward farming very much? Taking away a few percent of farming use could give other uses huge amounts of water. I could see a scenario where instead of some farmers getting underpriced water, there are more farmers competing to produce food at marginally higher prices, leading more of them to use better irrigation techniques and solving the problem. Subsidies can be applied to the food prices after this point if desired, without the side effects of water shortages.
- ghshephard 12y agoThe issue is farming, though. There is more than enough water supply in California for residential use, which makes up less than 20% of water consumption in California.
- Dylan16807 12y agoThe issue is farming. They waste massive amounts of water because it's cheap. We don't need to give them water priority.
- mhartl 12y agoThis question was tackled a while back by, of all people, John McCarthy (AI pioneer and creator of Lisp). You can find his analysis here: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/arithmetic.html http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/progress/arithmetic.html
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- cynicalkane 12y ago80% of California water goes to agricultural use, who get it at far below market rates thanks to lobbying. California politicians talk a lot about lawn irrigation because they can't criticize the farm lobby and get away with it.
- anigbrowl 12y agoI have friends in the Central Valley, smakc in the middle of farm country. Farmers there mounted a big campaign against the new state water plan, as promoted by the governor and voted onto the ballot by the legislature, where it passed with an overwhelming majority. So enough politicians in key roles are willing to stand up to the farm lobby to make some big changes in long-term policy.
- jqm 12y agoI think it's more than lobbying. I think there are long term contracts in place guaranteeing certain groups certain amounts of water. Inefficient and impractical as it currently is.
- ikawe 12y agoMaybe because the utility of people growing a huge amount of crops in California is way more important to the state than people watering their lawns.
- PhantomGremlin 12y agoI haven't seen anyone mention the drought in Brazil. It's possible that deforestation in the Amazon is at least partially responsible for that[1]: Some scientists have suggested that the recent uptick in deforestation in Brazil may be partly responsible for the drought, since loss of evapotranspiration from trees is known to reduce cloud formation. I know its the other hemisphere, but it's certainly possible that drought, deforestation, and changing weather patterns in South America would also affect us. Yes, no? I'm just spitballing here. [1] http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141024-sao-paulo-brazil-drought-water-environment/ http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141024-sao-p...
- Animats 12y agoIt's bad, but California has the California Water Project, a huge collection of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts built in the 1960s, to store water and move it around. Here's current reservoir status: http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act... Levels were slightly lower in 1977, but the population of California was 16 million people lower then. The California Water Project was designed to store enough water to get through 3 years of drought. We just finished drought year 3. (The water year ends Sep. 30, before rainy season starts.) San Jose has a new sewerage treatment plant so good it can be used to provide drinking water. It just came on line last summer. Right now, it's just being used for irrigation and recharging ground water, but if things get really bad, that backup is available. (http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26160300/california-drought-san-joses-new-high-tech-water http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26160300/california-dr...) So, yes, extensive preparations for this were made a long time ago. Rain so far during this water year, starting Oct. 1, is slightly above normal.
- kingkawn 12y agoדער מענטש טראַכט און גאָט לאַכט.
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- KedarMhaswade 12y agoThank you for this reference! The good measures taken in the past seem to help tremendously. Looking at the drought maps was depressing enough and that was compounded by the fact that the Bay Area does not feel anything like an area that is experiencing one of the worst droughts ever! I have always wondered how we (I live here) could survive all this time with water to spare for swimming pools, 24-hour tap-water supply, many-minute-long daily showers, restaurants full of water supply and wastage. Having been born and brought up at places where there were severe droughts and poor historic water management measures made me extremely cautious while using water, but it seems like that behavior was largely irrelevant here. Whereas I like the comfort provided by California Water Project and pray for enough rainfall this year, I do hope that the approach of Bay Area Californians toward water preservation improves.
- nkurz 12y agoThe author's website: https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/daniel-griffin/home https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/daniel-griffin/home Has a PDF of the study: http://www.tc.umn.edu/~griffin9/pubs/griffin_anchukaitis_2014_GRL_CAdrought.pdf http://www.tc.umn.edu/~griffin9/pubs/griffin_anchukaitis_201...
- leke 12y agoLooks like California could benefit from permaculture.
- Decade 12y agoIn the meanwhile, conservatives have "experts" like Anthony Watts to come and say that not only are we not in a horrible drought[0], but that our recent showers[1] are proof that the alarm over the drought is just part of the global warming conspiracy[2]. So, if you were wondering how conservatives in good conscience can oppose efforts to deal with climate change, here's one of the reasons. They have their own experts from a bizarre alternate universe, where they start with the same data but conclude that everything is opposite. [0]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/worst-drought-in-california-history-not-really/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/worst-drought-in-calif... [1]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/04/the-perfect-storm-californias-record-breaking-december-super-soaker/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/04/the-perfect-storm-cali... [2]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/23/people-starting-to-ask-about-motive-for-massive-ipcc-deception/ http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/23/people-starting-to-ask...
- nkurz 12y agoI like your approach, but let me see if I can get you to question some of your beliefs. First, Watts is actually only the author of your second link, the other two are guest posts by two other authors. I won't try to rehabilitate Watts, as he's likely already too tainted in your mind, but I'll guess that you don't yet have strong opinions about the other two. Please consider how well they fit the image that you have of them based on the articles you read. The first piece was written by Robert Moore (http://www.nrdc.org/about/staff/rob-moore http://www.nrdc.org/about/staff/rob-moore). Personally, having looked at the actual paper, I thought his article was more accurate than most of the media coverage. Moore does not "oppose efforts to deal with climate change". To the contrary, he's an analyst with the National Resources Defense Council (NRDC), which is one of the largest, staunchest and most effective environmental groups in the US, and lists "Curbing Global Warming" on the top of it's list of priorities. If you look at Moore's credentials, I think you'll be positively surprised -- he's legitimately an expert, and unquestionably an environmentalist. The paper uses a very specific definition of "worst drought". It's a reasonable and defensible one (cumulative deficit on the PDSI scale), but it's probably not what most people would guess. As Moore says, the paper does not say that it's the longest dry spell, or the period of least rain. Would you have guessed from the other media coverage that despite the phrase "worst drought", there have been two other years with less rain just in the last 100 years? That there have been longer droughts? I think Moore believes what he says in the piece: "Do these facts mean that we are in good shape re California’s water supply? No! But we shouldn’t be framing the search for a stable California water supply by starting from a wildly incorrect statement that seems focused on creating public panic." He's bothered (as I am) about the level of hyperbole and inaccuracy in the media reports of climate change, and wrote the piece to counter that. Neither he, nor Watts, nor Tim Ball (the author of the third link) believes "that recent showers are proof that the alarm over the drought is just part of the global warming conspiracy". While I fear that some of the kookier commenters at WUWT might believe that (I don't read the site, although I highly recommend Steve McIntyre's climateaudit.org) many of those you demonize care a lot about the environment and climate change, but disagree on the causes and the approach that should be taken to deal with it. For example, try reading this piece on Urban Forests by Tim Ball to see if he matches the pathological business-comes-first stereotype often associated with "climate deniers": http://drtimball.com/2012/importance-of-urban-trees/ http://drtimball.com/2012/importance-of-urban-trees/