Given the historic low temperatures and snowfalls that pummeled the eastern U.S. this winter, it might be easy to overlook how devastating California's winter was as well.
As our “wet” season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows. We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too.
Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America's largest reservoir.
Statewide, we've been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.
As difficult as it may be to face, the simple fact is that California is running out of water — and the problem started before our current drought. NASA data reveal that total water storage in California has been in steady decline since at least 2002, when satellite-based monitoring began, although groundwater depletion has been going on since the early 20th century.
How it will affect those of us NOT in California:
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Weird that so much produce comes from california, looking at the map there's lots of greener looking lands to the east and south that I think are about as warm and probably way wetter.
Those who beat their swords into plowshares will plow for those who did not.
Those lands are being used mostly for grain and soy production, with animal raising in the drier parts.
The advantages of the California Central Valley are:
- there is relatively little cloud cover (so little rain, but lots of sun) that, with the addition of irrigation, results in high productivity.
- very moderate winter weather. Those "greener parts" are only green in summer, in winter they're typically snow covered. The CV can grow crops year round, most of North America can't. No, most of the rest of the country is NOT as warm, for reasons having to do with ocean currents, wind patterns, elevation, and probably a bunch of other stuff I can't recall at 5:30 am.
- proximity to Mexico means a source of very low wage labor. Oh, right, they aren't supposed to employee non-citizens but it's a pretty common practice, legal or not.
Originally the CV was also extremely fertile but thanks to year-round cropping that is no longer the case, yay artificial fertilizers.
Of course, a lot of the produce in the CV could be grown elsewhere, and was before the CV was developed into the present agricultural empire. (Some, not all - there are few other regions in the US that can grow citrus, olives, or avocados). Among the downsides, fruit would become much more seasonal, or we'd have to import more (these days fruit from Chile is pretty common in the off season). Failure of California agriculture would be extremely disruptive to the US for a few years until growers elsewhere take over most of the growing and supply chains are set up for the rest. No one will starve (we can afford to buy fruit from other countries if we have to), but it won't be fun.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
That map paints a picture that's really hard to understand unless you specialize in agriculture. Take tomatoes, for example. Americans consume the crap out of tomatoes. But Florida's production of fresh-market tomatoes is almost the same as California's. The "96%" only aligns to California's production of processing tomatoes. Now, that still affects a lot of products such as tomato paste, but has little to do with what you buy in the produce isle.
Also consider that according to the USDA ERS, the staggering majority of your tomatoes come from Mexico and Canada, so you really aren't losing at the grocery store just yet.
What are your plans if the city institutes literal water-hours not too dissimilar to a naval ship?
Not much. We already conserve water wherever possible. Drip irrigation for our front California-native landscape, water changes for my fishpond and aquarium go into a rain barrel which I then use to water plants in the backyard. We really don't use all that much water.
What are your plans if the city institutes literal water-hours not too dissimilar to a naval ship?
Not much. We already conserve water wherever possible. Drip irrigation for our front California-native landscape, water changes for my fishpond and aquarium go into a rain barrel which I then use to water plants in the backyard. We really don't use all that much water.
However, some of your fellow Californians would be in for a much more drastic change of lifestyle, I suspect.
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However, some of your fellow Californians would be in for a much more drastic change of lifestyle, I suspect.
You mean the ones with large, thirsty bluegrass lawns who water daily at high noon? Yeah...not much sympathy for them. My wife and I specifically chose a native landscape for this reason. I can water the whole thing with maybe a couple gallons a week if need be.
You are not the typical water user, and I think you would be surprised that what you use and any of your neighbors use at home is a pittance compared to industrial users.
I think you would be surprised that what you use and any of your neighbors use at home is a pittance compared to industrial users.
Oh I've seen industrial plants dumping thousands of gallons of water per minute into the LA river...so it's quite a lot. Industry (and farmers too) use a huge amount of water but fight tooth and nail for the right to do so...often blaming the cities / homeowners for taking all the water.
I drive through the Owens Valley and the Central Valley enough to see just how wasteful some of the irrigation methods are. Having homeowners and factories conserve water by rationing is a good idea but it will only work if they can force farmers to do the same. Otherwise, they'll just keep flooding the fields instead of installing sprinklers.
Why not just build a bunch of desalinization plants and get some water from the Pacific? Wouldn't that help?
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Well, not without building more nuclear plants for power - and even the most ardent pro-nuclear person can see a rational reluctance to building nuclear facilities near a major fault line with a history of serious earthquakes.
There's also the problem of where to put all the brine/salt you get from the processing. Salt is common as dirt and dirt cheap, it's not like there's a huge unfilled demand for it.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
A few more winters like this year's and I'm sure a use will be found for it.
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Replace "ginger" with "n*gger," and suddenly it become a lot less funny, doesn't it?
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This is why we need to put the country on a series of hydraulic lifts and just tilt the US to the west, so all that extra water on the east coast comes this way.
Broomstick wrote:Well, not without building more nuclear plants for power - and even the most ardent pro-nuclear person can see a rational reluctance to building nuclear facilities near a major fault line with a history of serious earthquakes.
There's also the problem of where to put all the brine/salt you get from the processing. Salt is common as dirt and dirt cheap, it's not like there's a huge unfilled demand for it.
Nevada along with the nuclear waste when the feds get their shit together.
If we could ship water cost-effectively from one state to another, drought wouldn't be such an issue. The same barriers that prevent us from shipping millions of tons of snow from the midwest to California also prevent shipping brine from California to Nevada.
Brine would be much more concentrated than water, making it much more cost effective to ship. It's something like 3 times the concentration of seawater, so you need to transport a third as much. It's also a much shorter and flatter journey to Nevada than from the mid-west. You'd have to ship the brine into what is now a dry lake (or more likely, as series of dry lakes), to get it to evaporate and turn to salt. Badwater Basin has approximately 150 inches of evaporative potential per year, which, at about 200 square miles gives about 1.6 million acre feet of brine, or about 6 months of water for the CA aqueduct system. Naturally, trying to do so would probably change how much water can evaporate, so you'll probably not get that much... but it'd still help. And that's only one dry lake to evaporate brine into.
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Desalinization doesn't produce salt, it produces brine. Producing salt will require even more energy. On the upside, that's a very old use of solar power but you still need to park the brine under sunlight somewhere.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
I don't see why the brine could not be simply pumped back out to sea. So long as the desalinization plants are spaced far enough part, I don't think it would affect the salinity of the water in the area THAT badly...
The brine is concentrated enough to kill normal sea life pretty much on contact. Where operating desalinization plants do pump their waste out to sea again standard procedure is to dilute it considerably, first.
Remember - this is an industrial process on an industrial scale, the corresponding waste products are a pretty substantial volume of stuff.
Also, as you noted, it's a good idea to space these plants out along a coastline to minimize impact.
A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory.Leonard Nimoy.
Now I did a job. I got nothing but trouble since I did it, not to mention more than a few unkind words as regard to my character so let me make this abundantly clear. I do the job. And then I get paid.- Malcolm Reynolds, Captain of Serenity, which sums up my feelings regarding the lawsuit discussed here.
If a free society cannot help the many who are poor, it cannot save the few who are rich. - John F. Kennedy
Borgholio wrote:I don't see why the brine could not be simply pumped back out to sea. So long as the desalinization plants are spaced far enough part, I don't think it would affect the salinity of the water in the area THAT badly...
In addition to what Broomstick mentioned, brine tends not to mix by itself, instead forming a separate layer in the ocean, especially if it's not injected into the ocean at the shoreline, but rather underwater off shore (don't have the wave action to mix it). And since brine is much denser, it tends to flow downhill and pool, which tends to kill plantlife in the way.
"preemptive killing of cops might not be such a bad idea from a personal saftey[sic] standpoint..." --Keevan Colton
"There's a word for bias you can't see: Yours." -- William Saletan
From what I can tell the outlet pipe of a bog standard desalination plant will kill everything within 50m of the exit pipe, past that the brine has mixed sufficiently to be untraceable. It doesn't strike me as that unreasonable to sacrifice a 50m dome of the sea floor for an essential water supply if you distributed them evenly and avoid delicate areas, you could likely erect netting to stop larger sea animals getting killed.
Also being able to pre dilute your brine with other fresh water (river/industrial waste flow/used cooling water from power stations then you can to a large extent eliminate that - your just left with very small trace elements of chlorine escaping from our pipes.
Get busy living or get busy dying... unless there’s cake.
Broomstick wrote:Desalinization doesn't produce salt, it produces brine. Producing salt will require even more energy. On the upside, that's a very old use of solar power but you still need to park the brine under sunlight somewhere.
Sorry, I thought the evaporation pool part of that was obvious. I understand a desalination plant doesn't pump out table salt.
Yeah...not much sympathy for them. My wife and I specifically chose a native landscape for this reason. I can water the whole thing with maybe a couple gallons a week if need be.
