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11 Trillion Gallons of Water Needed To End California Drought
mrflash818 points out a new study which found that California can recover from its lengthy drought with a mere 11 trillion gallons of water. The volume this water would occupy (roughly 42 cubic kilometers) is half again as large as the biggest water reservoir in the U.S. A team of JPL scientists worked this out through the use of NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites. From the article:
GRACE data reveal that, since 2011, the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins decreased in volume by four trillion gallons of water each year (15 cubic kilometers). That's more water than California's 38 million residents use each year for domestic and municipal purposes. About two-thirds of the loss is due to depletion of groundwater beneath California's Central Valley. ... New drought maps show groundwater levels across the U.S. Southwest are in the lowest two to 10 percent since 1949.
computers got better and things once thought impossible are now possible, so what's the problem?
Surely there is a technological fix for this?
... they are creating a nice, warm dessert there, something the planet does obviously not have enough of. Finally the decades of knowingly over-using the available water supply are going to pay off.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
GRACE data reveal that since 2011, farmers raising water-intensive crops in barren desert soil caused the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins to decrease in volume by four trillion gallons of water each year (15 cubic kilometers).
Is that a lot? I mean compared to rainfall over that area.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
I wasn't real thrilled with the linked article. All it did was call out a number with nothing to scale it against.
A real quick search brought up an estimate of three years worth of rain like this would be needed to make up for the drought and also had some other ways of relating what 11 trillion gallons actually means as precipitation received is traditionally measured in inches.
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/wh...
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
California should stop dumping its water into "wetlands" and start thinking about using its resources responsibly.
If you need help, at least take a second to ask for it in measures normal people can understand.
I understand this is a far cry from you usual "superbowl stadiums" and "caligula's fist" measuring units you love so much, but we have no idea what the fuck you're talking about.
They have been taking water from somewhere for a long time, cant they just take more of someone else' water in order to live in a desert?
Hey, the USA is a large and sparsely populated country.... How about you try living in some of the more habitable areas?
and I'll end everyone of you hipsters.
that we not get it all at once please.
"California can recover...". and without it they can't, or won't?
Desal...
Soo-soo sook!
Huh, growing crops in a desert is not such a great idea, isn't it?
I'm a good cook. I'm a fantastic eater. - Steven Brust
...to do the right thing... ...after they've exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill.
So what kind of "Grapes of Wrath" type trajedy do they have to suffer before they get around to forming effective, coherent policies and plans to deal with the issue? How many neighbouring states will get inundated with drought refugees?
Californiana, you chose to live in the desert. We'll keep the water for the time when Cali turns to dust..
... overpopulation? Maybe it's time to address the underlying problem that isn't going to go away even if we continue to ignore it... we are coming closer and closer to not being able to sustain our growing population.
How now brown cow?
Sent from my ENIAC
The San Francisco - Oakland - San Jose MSA area is 27000 km^2. (this MSA covers a large area, from Santa Cruz up to Sonoma)
So, 42 km^3 spread over 27,000 km^2 is around 1.5m of rainfall.
Add in the Sacramento CSA (which extends to Tahoe), and that's another 57,000 km^2 and that takes it down to around half a meter of rain, or around 19" of rain.
That doesn't seem like that much water since SF and Sacramento average over 20" of rain per year, so it sounds like they are saying that even if it only rained from the San Francisco Area through Sacramento to Tahoe, the entire state of California is "only" one year's worth of rain behind.
Begun, the water wars have.
And what is going to happen when California doesn't get 11 trillion gallons of water?
Things go to hell quickly when you start running out of water.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
What does the EPA have to do with lack of rainfall?
Yeah, the EPA is causing the traffic, it's Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton that are causing it to not rain.
Learn to love Alaska
they've got a lot to do with the mismanagement of the existing water.
That area was naturally a desert. It is naturally dry. They've been diverting rivers and watering it so long that they've forgot that the reality is they live in a desert which is naturally dry. It is not natural for that area of California to be wet. Adding 11 Trillion gallons of water to that land is exactly the wrong thing to do.
The Russians beat you @ getting to space...
And now it seems they have scored a second victory!
Whats up you all fixing those dripping tap's huh?
Make something free (or nearly so), and people will use lots of it. CA's water problem is by no means insoluble.
1. Figure out how much water the state can sustainably use.
2. Set a price for water usage. Set a flat price for all users, residential, commercial, industrial. No reason that some users of water should get it more cheaply than others.
3. If usage remains above the level determine in #1, raise the price.
4. Repeat process until usage falls to the level determined in #1.
Of course, this process would likely result in a big chunk of the unsustainable agriculture in CA going under, but so be it - basing a business on the assumption that you'll get continued massive discounts on a key input isn't particularly wise planning, and there's no reason why other CA water users should be forced to subsidize those businesses.
They have been taking water from somewhere for a long time, cant they just take more of someone else' water in order to live in a desert?
Hey, the USA is a large and sparsely populated country.... How about you try living in some of the more habitable areas?
Nobody lives in the California Desert. Well, okay, we do have a decent retirement community out in Palm Springs, but the parts that most people settled on were temperate grasslands, forests, and wetlands (the Central Valley was an inland sea for much of the year before we dammed it all up).
The real problems are:
1) Irresponsible farming by agribusinesses. This one here is the biggie, but is really hard to control because the biggest agribusinesses have so much political clout, both here and in Washington.
2) 150 years of politics. For well over a century, the saying has gone, "Liquor is for drinking; water is for fighting." There are a byzantine set of local, regional, statewide, interstate, and international laws governing how water is used everywhere in the state, most of it based on environmental studies decades or centuries out of date, and none of it changes quickly.
3) Wetland destruction. For a long, long time nobody understood the value of wetlands in water table control, flood prevention, and ecosystem management, and so much of it was filled in and paved over in the last 100 years. This has proven to be a huge mistake, one that will take decades and billions of dollars to fix, and isn't helped by ignorant jackasses who insist that environmental concerns don't exist, that scientists are hucksters, and that God will provide everything we could ever want, forever.
4) Climate change. The theory is nearly 200 years old; the lab-scale proof is over 150 years old; definitive proof it's happening out in the environment is over 50 years old. It's happening, right now, and given politics and the endless prattle of ignorant jackasses it doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down any time soon.
Did you notice what's not on that list? Cities. All of the urban and suburban development in California accounts for less than 10% of the state's annual water usage (the vast, vast majority is used for agriculture), and the number is dropping every year, as more efficiency and water recycling programs come online.
I live in a midwest city and work for the city water utility. We sold 13.8 billion gallons of water to a population of 450,000 people. Extrapolated out to a population of 38 million, that would be 1.48 trillion gallons used by Californians a year.
Like not enough drinking water for everyone? This not at all what is happening. It's unsustainable agriculture, excessive urban landscaping and lastly, perhaps a need to adjust some social norms. People didn't take daily showers through most of human history.
How many farms are covered by your utility? There's a large industrial and agricultural use of water in CA. A town of 500k might not have the same level of industry, and if the water utility is catering to residential use inside the city limit, then the usage would be well below CA's per capita.
Learn to love Alaska
But the most famous Montecito resident of all is Oprah. Ms. Winfrey owns at least two homes here, and last year her water bill almost topped $125,000. This year, it's about half of that, thanks to the dramatic measures she's taken to curb her use of the city water supply. But that doesn't means she's cutting back on water consumption. Noooo. She and many other celebs are now having their water imported.
It doesn't say where the water is coming from, though.
about 4 hours on a typical day in Ireland?
The sprawling Ogallala Aquifer in the Great Plains provides freshwater for roughly one-fifth of the wheat, corn, cattle and cotton in the United States. But key parts of the underwater aquifer are being depleted faster than they can be recharged by rain (see map)....
Ships have been converting sea water to potable water for decades. Hell, the entire city state of Singapore runs off sea water.
Get it together California.
California is already one of the most populated reasons of America for a reason. It is VERY habitable. Check their weather reports and climate data.
Not everybody prefers that climate, people can have their own preferences, but on the whole, it is rightfully considered great place to live. Hence so many already living there.
The problem isn't from people using water for their daily living anyway. Their usage pales in comparison to California's commercial usage.
Which you could prevent, if only you would stop eating their produce.
Did you notice what's not on that list? Cities. All of the urban and suburban development in California accounts for less than 10% of the state's annual water usage (the vast, vast majority is used for agriculture), and the number is dropping every year, as more efficiency and water recycling programs come online.
Sure.. That agricultural usage is completely unrelated to the cities.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Let's exercise how much it might cost to desalinate water
best current tech to desalinate water is about $0.5 per cubic meter
11 trillion gallons ~ 42 cubic km of water or 42 billion cubic meters
thus the sum required is 21 billion dollars.
given that there are reasons to think that cost might be reduced - the solution looks costly but hardly unmanageable
Actually it is..most CA crops are grown for export.
Save it for real people doing real things, California can just fall into the ocean for all I care. It would effectively end the MPAA and RIAA, and the world would be much better off for it.
There may be too many Californians, but please don't solve your California problems of unemployment, crime, high taxes, ridiculous cost of living, etc. by moving to Texas. If you do, as so many have, please leave your failed political ideology in California. You're coming to Texas because here you can get a good paying job that you can't get in California, you can buy a nice house for $100,000, etc. In other words, because the Texas way is working better.
Since you've decided life will be better in Texas, we don't want to hear "we should tax it more like we did in California ", or "in California we set minimum wage high enough that a high school student working at McDonald's can support a family". Here in Texas, where our approach is working, you show up on time and at least become the manager of the McDonald's if you want to make that a career. If you want to do things the California way, pleae stay in California. You might also like Canada. You won't like the Texas way.
New drought maps show groundwater levels across the U.S. Southwest are in the lowest two to 10 percent since 1949.
The remaining bits, in certain areas, will be poisoned by fracking
Suddenly this article makes sense.
http://www.theguardian.com/wor...
The Bush family buys 100,000 acres over one of the World's largest fresh water aquifers.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Actually, the main crop that is quite profitable but requires vast amounts of water is not rice, but nuts, specifically Almonds. Rice isn't a problem because the delta around the Sacramento river normally floods, so it doesn't take a ton of effort to rice farm up there. The issue is irrigating both snowmelt and river water to the central valley to grow almonds and other crops.
How ENTIRELY coincidental is it that the weatherman here in Sacramento, CA reported yesterday that the storms since December 1 have dumped 10 trillion gallons of water on the Golden State!
Granted, only about 10% of that has fallen in catchment areas that feed into our many reservoirs and lakes, and rainfall doesn't percolate into the ground water for years - but this is a STUNNING example of the AlGore Effect.
I'm an agnostic Jew; I'm not certain that God exists. But I _AM_ certain that He has a great sense of humor, and delights in confounding pompous braggarts.
Indeed, their lack of effective regulatory policy is a problem, but the correction for that isn't ignoring the EPA any more than ignoring the LAPD will prevent crime.
Well, other than ignoring the LAPD's protests as you kick them into a semblance of a police force. I suppose the same would work for the EPA and CaDEP and Big Ag and Congress.
Or we could spend 500 million on a desalination plant instead of a vacuum chamber.
The typical family uses an acre-inch of water a month, or an acre-foot per year, whatever that is in gallons.
But residential use is trivial over all - most water use is in power generation, and most of the rest is agricultural. California is one of the few states that actually uses saltwater for power generation, but still: mostly farms.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
With "Quiverfull" types rampant in the "conservative"* side of politics you are just going to be ignored or compared to Chairman Mao. They want a lot of the "right sort" of Americans to outbreed the others and don't care if the total size of the population becomes unsustainable. Their plan if that happens is just to take resources from the "wrong sort" of Americans.
However, since they think success is their birthright we won't be seeing many doctors, engineers, lawyers etc from their large number of children compared with the "wrong sort" who push their kids to succeed, so their political influence may be fleeting.
* Quotes are to denote terms they use to describe themselves and others that I do not agree with. For instance I consider them knee-jerk reactionaries with little understanding of the past and what should be conserved instead of conservatives.
The US has a number of nuclear-powered naval vessels and a large supply of ice in Alaska. Canada or Russia might provide more. Would something like this work for California?
Therefore the cities are completely independent and self-suficient and rely on neither the crops themselves nor the resources obtained in trade for the crops.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
I remember when the assholes in California said that Louisiana should move out of the swamp because of the hurricanes and levies. It looks like it's time you leave behind your families and memories and move someplace where there is water.
Good luck!
To which conservatives would probably reply, '11 trillion according to scientists? What do they know? The market will fix this in no time and come in at half that amount' or some such bullshit.
"To stop the terrorists."
The area of the state of California is 163,696 square miles.
$ units --verbose
Currency exchange rates from www.timegenie.com on 2014-04-02
2866 units, 109 prefixes, 79 nonlinear units
You have: 11 trillion gallons
You want: 163696 in mile^2
11 trillion gallons = 3.8666624 * 163696 in mile^2
11 trillion gallons = (1 / 0.25862097) * 163696 in mile^2
I find '4" over the entire state" to be a little bit more manageable than some unscaled number with a bunch of zeros, but maybe it's just me.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
"Still, according to the U.S. Geological Survey, thermoelectric power generation accounts for only 3.3 percent of net freshwater consumption with over 80 percent going to irrigation."
I'm not sure the use in power is as bad as you assert.
Learn to love Alaska
... and isn't helped by ignorant jackasses who insist that environmental concerns don't exist, that scientists are hucksters, and that God will provide everything we could ever want, forever.
You could have just said "republicans," and we would have understood.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
Yes, good for you. People in cities eat food; maybe even food that is grown nearby (gasp!)
Are you that kid on the playground that argued the meaning of words since you couldn't form intelligible conjecture and argue about a topic?
Anyways, your point is useless, to say the least. The VAST majority is agriculture destined for other states and countries.
This has become increasingly obvious with the new discussions of banning the export of hay, which is ~70% water by weight.
Please, fuck right off with your nonsense about cities and water usage.
Water usage for many agricultural crops (eg. vegetables) in California could be greatly reduced by use of greenhouses.
> Or can they just execute the criminals responsible for it?
> Yeah, that will include Gray Davis
Ken Lay is now dead. Gray Davis yours, and from what I understand you like to emphasize with your criminals, and understand why they became victims/ criminals. We jail em or kill em back , as appropriate.
That's 0.414 gallons per square foot or 0.67 inches (average) over the area of California.
11e12 gallons
163,695 sq mi
I like almonds, but they kind of bind me up, you know? We make almond milk and add some flax oil and then use the almond pulp to make delicious cakes. It's better that way. If you put some ground flax seed in with the almond pulp, it makes you shit like a goose so it all works out.
I think the fact that I know these things is a sign I'm getting old. Oh well.
You are welcome on my lawn.
That's empathize, not emphasize, of course.
The long term fix is control of human population growth.
The "easier" fix is to massively cut back on irrigation, especially from deep aqifer wells, in California. Farmers there have, understandably, switched to more profitable crops. But it's depleted the available aquifers to historic lows, and they'll take decades if not centuries to recover. There are many good references on the problem, including http://www.pnas.org/content/10....
There are ecological measures that can reduce the consumption, but without restrictions on irrigation, the residents and industries along the relevant fertile regions and industrial areas will not take those measures. Technologies such as sewage recycling and breeding less water consuming crops may help, but the fundamental problem is a political and economic one, not a technological one.
Maybe they could START by not throwing so much fresh water into the Pacific!
http://news.heartland.org/newspaper-article/2014/06/05/feinstein-says-environmental-activists-have-never-been-helpful-water--0
http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304547704579565622649474370
(also at http://theperpetualview.wordpress.com/2014/05/27/california-drains-reservoirs-in-the-middle-of-a-drought/)
While it is easy to argue how over extended SoCal (LA, San Diego) is, what about the rest of us in the US still enjoying fresh tomatoes, lettuce, (and pretending to enjoy out-of-season strawberries)etc., this time of the year?
Ghiradeli hasn't been top notch for years. Our weather is most.certainly some of the best in the world. Violent crime rates are virtually identical between Texas and California (https://www.census.gov/statab/ranks/rank21.html). There hasn't been a power crisis in California for over a decade. An active night life is generally considered a virtue. Breast implant rates in the South are extremely high.
Plus if you want to play the beauty angle, we aren't nearly as fat.
It's great you have regional pride but don't be so condesending if your region can't walk your talk.
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You could have just said "republicans," and we would have understood.
Not all Republicans are ignorant jackasses. Some just don't care about anything other than lowering their own taxes at any cost. Some have bought into the delusion of upward mobility that this country still peddles, despite all the mounting evidence that the difference between rungs in the social ladder are greater than any time in the past 100 years. And some are actually very nice people, but continue voting for Republicans for reasons of social inertia or the sunk cost fallacy, effectively rendering them ineffectual sockpuppets for the ignorant jackasses.
Democrats are slightly, slightly better, but really until someone succeeds in removing the massive amounts of outside money necessary to run for national elected office you'll never see anyone in the House or Senate who actually represents the people who supposedly elected them into office.
Economically, the cities in California are almost completely independent of agriculture. The manufactured goods imported through the ports in Oakland and L.A. aren't paid for by farm exports, for the most part, either directly or indirectly.
one acre is about 4000 m^2, a foot is about 0.3 m, so about 1200 m^3
You have 264 gallons per cubic meter, lets say 250 since the acre-foot estimate is about as accurate as Russian maps along the Ukrainian border anyway.
That gives us about 1200/4 * 1000 = 300000 gallons.
Mechanical pumps instead of electrical pumps for the specific (and very frequent) case where intermittant water pumping is needed. Like the farm windmills that used to be all over the place only the new ones give you far more mechanical work per $ than the older multi-blade ones.
Going from wind to electricity to mechanical work seems to be a very lossy step backwards when you could run a pump instead of spinning a generator rotor.
There's probably a political angle keeping farmers from using windmills like graddad used to have only much better for the price. We may have to wait until the Chinese work out there's a potential market and they start selling them to us.
4) Climate change. The theory is nearly 200 years old; the lab-scale proof is over 150 years old; definitive proof it's happening out in the environment is over 50 years old. It's happening, right now, and given politics and the endless prattle of ignorant jackasses it doesn't look like it's going to be slowing down any time soon.
Did you use the double C? Wow extra points for courage!
All the climate deniers will come and say: "Hey look buddy. There is not Climate Change." And if you wimper "but what about the drought". They will say loud and simple: "There is no drought. There is no Climate change and there is no drought. Everything is fine. It's FINE!".
That's too high, most estimates are ~80-100 gallons per person per day, average houshold size is 2.6 so that puts you closer to 100,000 gallons per household per year. I also question how those estimates are so high, my family of 4 averages closer to 50 gallons per day at home based on our water bill and we don't do anything extreme, we take regular baths, wash our clothes by machine wash, run the dishwasher every other day on average, brush our teeth twice a day, etc. The only "conservation" effort we put into water is not watering our lawn, in fact I drilled out the restrictor in my shower head because I HATE low flow showers and I believe I've got an old school high GPF toilet since my house is from 1963 and most things have not been updated in it.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
What is the problem? Remove subsidies to agriculture and let the market solve it.
The market weeding out most of the agriculture in California will go a long way to solve the issue.
You are probably right, in many ways. As far as I can see, it all comes down to the particular, bone-headed attitude and complete disconnect from reality that somehow seem so iconic of America. If I remember correctly, there was once a saying - 'The rain will follow the plough' - that illustrates it well; I mean, how can anybody even get that idea?
And then there are things like placing a large city in the middle of the Nevada Desert, and the farming, that you mention. You see it so often in The States, it's like everything has to be so perversely over the top. I once stayed in a hotel very near to Oracle's tin-foil silos in Redwood City; the area is what one would describe as semi-arid, I suppose, but Oracle in particular was surrounded by a 10 inch thick lawn, carefully manicured and soaking wet from constant irrigation - it just struck me as blind idiocy. Or take the hotel room I was installed in - all alone: a huge, triple size bed, an enormous fridge with two doors and room for a sperm whale, two TVs, etc (not paid for by myself, I haste to say). Or the lunch restaurant I was taken out to - I just ordered a modest sandwich, which turned out to be a huge slab of bread with 2 inches of stuff of and gravy poured over, served on a manhole cover.
The point of this tedious rant is - why? What is the matter with America and Americans? It's like the whole nation is obsessed with wilful, stupid, obscene over-consumption on every level.
in Olympic swimming pools?
The typical family uses an acre-inch of water a month, or an acre-foot per year, whatever that is in gallons.
But residential use is trivial over all - most water use is in power generation, and most of the rest is agricultural. California is one of the few states that actually uses saltwater for power generation, but still: mostly farms.
The farmers can relocate to areas with abundant water supply instead of irrigating their crops with diverted river water which has led to annual forest fires in California for the last several decades.
... perhaps a need to adjust some social norms. People didn't take daily showers through most of human history.
And people generally died by the upper limit of middle-age for the most part which with high infant mortality rates ensured a sustainable population while not adversely impacting the environment in which they lived. Imagine sleeping in the same bed as someone who has a week of body odour? I cannot fathom how men slept with women during their "time of the month." Come to think of it there must be a reason male cum tastes sweet yet female cum is like vinegar and rotten fish.
Part of the problem is that LA routes rainwater to the ocean rather than to cisterns or reservoirs. One reason the rainfall doesn't matter is that LA throws away the rainwater rather than saving it.
The Liberal Hell-hole factor aside - nobody is screaming to fix NV's desert. Moreover CA has deserts, CA has oceans - dig a fucking channel and combine the two or coat the former in solar panels while using the latter to electrolyse the salt away. This isn't a difficult problem and it's 100% CA's problem at that.
Only 11 trillion, Not an issue there is 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water just to the west of CA if they would choose to use it.
Most household water use is irrigation. Water use inside the house is a trivial part of overall national water use - low flow whatsit may save you money, but won't make a difference in the big picture.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
one acre is about 4000 m^2, a foot is about 0.3 m, so about 1200 m^3
You have 264 gallons per cubic meter, lets say 250 since the acre-foot estimate is about as accurate as Russian maps along the Ukrainian border anyway.
That gives us about 1200/4 * 1000 = 300000 gallons.
An acre is a rectangle bounded by a furlong and a chain (things you learn from rock music videos), or 22 * 220 square yards, so an acre-foot is 43560 cubit feet ~= 325850 gallons.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
...that it's not even funny.
Fact is that California has plenty of water most of the time. Occasionally the weather patterns shift a bit, and we miss out on normal rainfall for a year, maybe two. Then it comes back, and we have plenty of water again.
This is just how it is. Making idiotic suggestions about not farming the Central Valley, or ridiculing that "most of California is a desert", so don't live there, etc, etc.. just shows your feeble-mindedness.
Lots of folks live in Tornado Alley, or along the Hurricane coast, and get ridiculous amounts of Federal aid every year. California has much less frequent water problems than those areas have their problems, but nobody seems to be telling those people, hey you live in a stupid place, why don't you move somewhere else.
the market is the reason they grow water intensive crops int he first place.
it has nothing to do with the subsidies, and removing them wouldnt change that.
Versus the equipment to actually perform the desalination?
California has some pretty big wind farms and one of the issues with wind power is its availability when the grid can't accept the power. I wonder how much capacity goes unused and whether it would make sense to direct that power to a desalination facility that could provide a working load for the power in a scalable way that could be quickly and granularly spun up and down inversely to grid demand for that power.
The power the wind farms can generate but isn't absorbable into the grid is kind of free energy in a way and it would seem to make sense to do useful work with it like desal.
This is Georgism in a nutshell.
Money only has real value when someone has more than someone else.
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
The artificially low price of water for agriculture has nothing to do with the crops grown? Are you fucking stupid?
What the fuck does "half again as large" mean?
That brings us back to the population issue. When people didn't take daily showers, there weren't as many of them and they could get farther away from their stinking neighbors.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
> Nobody lives in the California Desert.
Las Vegas would disagree. Technically, that is the northeastern edge of the Mojave Desert.
So that big rainstorm last week (December 12, I think?) didn't provide enough water?
Most of you guys are missing the number 1 waster of water here......steam generators and injection for all of the oil fields.
Humans use WAY to much water and have nothing in place really to fully recycle it, true. Farming, sure, that uses a GRIP of water. But people who live and work here, especially in the oil industry like I do, know how many 100s of millions of barrels or water are injected into the geo formations to loose the heavy oil for production.
I challenge anyone here to even be able to figure out, even just accurately, how many barrels of water are injected to the ground every day. Then whatever number you manage to come up from who knows what sources, double or triple it and you will be close to the real number.
Saying the drought is caused by climate change is a pretty odd thing to say since that area has had periodic droughts since the Indians owned the land.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
you're citing a phrase from 1870.. you know they were still leeching people back then... and it was a decade after origin of species came out right?
We've also been called the consumer of last resort. so you should probably thank us
All the climate deniers will come and say: "Hey look buddy. There is not Climate Change." And if you wimper "but what about the drought". They will say loud and simple: "There is no drought. There is no Climate change and there is no drought. Everything is fine. It's FINE!".
I'm not a climate denier, I look at the data and arguments and I believe AGW is real. However, there is a real risk in going overboard with predictions. The climate deniers would instead say, and they would be right in doing so, that you can't grasp at any regional/local/transitory weather problem and just blame it on global warming. Climatologists don't, and California has had cycles of dry weather and droughts, and wet weather for as long as there have been people in the state.
Ghiradeli hasn't been top notch for years
Compared to most chocolates, Ghirardelli is still excellent quality. No, it's not super-high-end, best-quality chocolate, but it's still the best you'll find in all but the top-end supermarkets for baking purposes.
The real loss for California's chocolate industry was the loss of Scharffen Berger. Now that's a tragedy.
No, it's Bush's fault. His meteorological policies left the western US weather patterns in tatters.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I pretty much agree with all of that
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Now that we finally are looking at the whole system (aquifers too) rather than just surface water, we will be seeing pending droughts in a lot more places than we might think. I am on two planning commissions in Minnesota and we are very aware of the water supplies under ground, the entire state is concerned, and we are the land of 10,000 lakes (or, during flood season, one really big lake"). A new emphasis on sustainability and the ability to estimate water supplies better, coupled with a full "total cost of ownership" for new developments, gives local planners an opportunity to say no to new developments in a way that we did not see during the big boom of the 70's and 80's. Of course, the unintended consequence of careful planning is that we start to see "economic refugees", by which I mean people who move in despite local attempts to remain sustainable.
"There is no god but allah" - well, they got it half right.
The highest expression of the Democrat party is the rapist wallowing in the human excrement of "Occupy Wall Street".
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
Jane's "interest" in that NAS report evaporated after I showed that Jane had been fooled by "Steven Goddard" once again. So let's return to Jane's confusion about basic thermodynamics.
I've already pointed out that Jane's hopelessly confused about the word "net", but that's just one of the mistakes Jane packed into these few sentences.
Jane's also wrong to imply that energy conservation across one choice of boundary could somehow contradict energy conservation across another boundary choice. That's impossible. Many boundary choices are inconvenient but they all have to be consistent. Otherwise, how could we possibly tell which boundary choice was correct?
So Jane can't object to the simple energy conservation equation I derived by claiming that some other boundary choice would somehow contradict my equation. That's completely impossible, and if Jane doesn't understand that point then he should learn about conservation of energy: example (backup), example (backup), example (backup).
As you can tell after reading those introductions, here's how to apply conservation of energy. Draw a boundary around the heat source:
power in = electrical heating power + radiative power in from the chamber walls
power out = radiative power out from the heat source
Since power in = power out through any boundary where nothing inside is changing:
electrical heating power + radiative power in from the chamber walls = radiative power out from the heat source
I put the boundary around the heat source so the boundary is in vacuum. That's because radiation can't travel through opaque solids like the heat source. So the only way to obtain an energy conservation equation with radiative terms is to place the boundary around the heat source.
For example, I calculated the enclosing shell's inner temperature by drawing the boundary within the enclosing shell. This boundary was inside aluminum, so heat transfer through it was by thermal conduction, not radiation. Notice that even this boundary choice leads to a conduction equation where electrical heating power depends on the cooler chamber wall temperature. That's because all boundary choices have to be consistent. They can't contradict each other unless one of them is wrong.
After I asked Jane to explain exactly where his boundary would be drawn, Jane replied:
Sadly, Jane/Lonny Eachus repeatedly chooses the second option. Once again.