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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.
Those wetlands you're disparaging are flood control systems. Those wetlands keep the rain from flowing straight out into the ocean; part of the reason we're in this mess now is that we've spent the last 100 years plowing them into the ground and pouring concrete over them (see: LA river).
Surely there is a technological fix for this?
Stop growing vegetables in an arid valley and replant the massive amount of fallow land in wetter parts of the country.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
There is no drought. There's just overpopulation and pumping water hundreds of miles to farm in a desert. Their #1 electricity use is pumping water for those farms.
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
Apply some of that massive Silicon Valley brainpower to developing large-scale desalination instead of the next batch of faddish social media apps.
Certainly, flat-rate water has been a major factor in wastage of water in California. We only got water meters installed here in Sacramento about 4 years ago, which has resulted in a tripling of our water rates - and quadrupling of the pay to the bureaucrats who get sinecures on the various water boards.
But California is a boom-and-bust state when it comes to water. We have 3-5 year drought periods that alternate with floods, such as the floods of 1986 and 1997. If this actually turns into an El Nino year (the forecasts for this are mixed, but generally unreliable either way) this may be another flood year. Folsom Lake and Lake Shasta were at historic lows 3 weeks ago, and have been at least partially refilled since December 1. And it's raining right now, with more rain predicted to continue through Friday.
The Fed created some $4 trillion to bail out banks. Off-balance sheet, they created another $16 trillion to bail out foreign banks. We can create money to solve a lot of problems. The artificial scarcity of money is imposed and political, not a necessity.
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.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
oh tahnk goodnes you saved us all. what elsee is in ur crystal ball.
What was exceptional about this drought was the temperature. It had record warmth that dried out the soil more than in the past.
Fuck, this. Residential use - and even most commercial use - is completely inconsequential. California sadly has a bunch of assholes who think farming water-intensive crops in a desert is a great idea.
Meanwhile the infrastructure blows. Even when it rains, there's no real collection - ain't got nowhere to store it.
Frankly, there is no massive, critical, die, tonight-at-11-doooooom drought. There is an extinction-level stupid mismanagement problem, though.
Point 1 is an issue today with the small reverse-osmosis plants that several coastal cities have already built. The argument, however, runs: "R-O is expensive and we don't get much water for the size of the plant, so why put up with the ugliness?" But what if the minds of SV could come up with a technology that was ten or a hundred times more efficient than R-O, and a realistic source for city-sized volumes of water? Think of there being a square-cube law for ugliness.
Point 2 is typical swill from "environmentalists" who know nothing about science and have no real appreciation for large-scale systems. Desalination plants to not create salt; they just temporarily separate it from the water. After the water is used by humans, it makes its way back to the sea and is reunited with the salt. In fact, desalination gives us the option of leaving the salt inland, REDUCING the amount of salt in the ocean. Salt has innumerable industrial uses, and has been a prized item in commerce for millennia. Furthermore, being able to build really large desal plants would make it easier to extract all sorts of usable minerals from the concentrated brine at the output. Move enough water, and it becomes practical to do such things as extract uranium from the sea to power the plant.
Point 3: Here in Arizona, we would be glad to add more reactors to our nuclear complex in Phoenix to send more power to California. We're already making a fortune from Californians who refuse to generate their own energy.
Point 4: Yes, NIMBYism and Luddism killed the California bullet train, which all the liberals wanted until the moment construction actually started. But water is an even more vital need than transportation. Watch for thirsty farmers to start shooting lawyers while the whole nation applauds.
I've looked at the San Francisco annul rainfall for the past 150 years, and this drought was no more severe than the last few in the early 90s and late 70s, among other droughts.
You're forgetting how weather reporting has become as sensationalized as every other aspect of journalism. Cheat sheet to modern TV meteorology:
1) Every unusually cold spell is the result of a polar vortex.
2) Every severe weather event is the result of anthropologic climate change.
3) The only proper way to cover a tropical cyclone is to have a guy standing on a sea wall in a rain coat. Bonus points if you can barely understand him due to the effects of wind on his microphone.
4) Buzzwords poorly understood by the broader population (this includes most meteorologists and practically all of the ones on television) must be thrown in to consume airtime. See Item #1 and add "El Niño" and "La Niña" to the list.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
This. If there weren't a drought, they'd have to come up with some other means of artificially forcing ascetic behavior on everyone. That's what environmentalists do these days—keep the public's attention on them by taking things away from everyone. See also light bulbs, plastic bags, electricity conservation, etc., most of which don't actually have the results they're hoping for.
For example, any power conservation (including bulb bans) results first and foremost in a reduction of the most expensive power—baseline nuclear and/or spending towards future renewable power—not the cheapest, dirtiest power. If anything, the best way to get cleaner power is to use a lot more power to force them to build more clean power plants, then cut back usage to earlier levels and demand that they shut down coal plants through legislation. Cutting consumption first provides little to no benefit.
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