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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.
... 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.
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?
Surely there is a technological fix for this?
If I look outside the window of my little office in Santa Clara, the patch has already been applied. It has been raining all day!
I'm not a complete idiot... Some parts are missing.
Desal...
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?
... 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
There is, it's just expensive.
they've got a lot to do with the mismanagement of the existing water.
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.
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.
It may be raining but there's a long way to go before the drought is truly over. Most importantly you need a good snow pack in the Sierras this winter to end the drought.
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.
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.
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)....
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.
Sure, over-use is a problem, but there's also less precipitation than is normal.
See the scary map here:
http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/
The weekly update for California says:
Locally heavy precipitation fell across portions of the state this past week. Amounts ranged from 1-6 inches (liquid equivalent) across a large portion of northern California, and parts of the central and southern coastal areas. Up to 3 inches of precipitation (liquid equivalent) was reported in the southern Sierras. However, snow pack remains well below-normal in many areas due to the relatively mild temperatures associated with these storm systems. In addition, much more precipitation is needed to replenish lost reservoir storage. There are still deficits in the conservation pool of millions of acre-feet in the Shasta and Oroville reservoirs north of Sacramento. Oroville reservoir gained about 100,000 acre-feet of storage in the recent storm, returning to one million acre-feet in storage capacity. The capacity of this reservoir is 3.5 million acre-feet, with a flood reserve space of 750,000 acre-feet. Well to the south, last week’s storm produced several inches of rain for San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Ventura, and Los Angeles Counties. However, this was not enough to generate runoff in natural streams and therefore did not provide any benefit to surface reservoirs. Since the start of the Water Year (October 1), almost all precipitation gauges in the area are still running below normal. No revisions were made to the California drought depiction this week. With the anticipation of another significant precipitation event in the short-term, alterations could be required next week, pending resulting impacts.
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.
It flows to the bay not to most of the reservoirs, and not to the Sierras where most of the snowpack provides water for the summer, and not to replenish the ground water (which has been being sucked out for the last century).
May be OT, but it seems insane to me to use the lossy chain of wind to electricity to pump when we could be pumping groundwater with those windmills that are now a lot better than the ones we used to pump with.
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.
Apply some of that massive Silicon Valley brainpower to developing large-scale desalination instead of the next batch of faddish social media apps.
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.
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.
Are you aware that CALTECH is in California? (and it's not just this ranking who says this, any real scientist knows that Caltech is better than MIT and the Ivy League colleges, regarding science). http://www.timeshighereducatio...
Like a giant shaft? That doesn't sound very efficent. Would also restrict wind turbines to along the water line.
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.
If we could cut out the cotton grown in the south valley, we could probably get away with the vegetables.
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.
Sure there is - 1.1 trillion people carrying ten gallons of water each to California. Or, each of the ~400 million Americans carrying 27,000 gallons. Plenty of places in the world suffering from too much water - the challenge is only in moving it around cheaply enough that someone is willing to pay for it. Hell, they want to build a pipeline across the country to move oil that only costs about $2/gallon, and water is far safer and less viscous - you could probably move it at half the price, if that.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
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?!
and you live in a desert where all the water is purloined from resources that appear to have a finite or severely limited lifetime.
Great going Cal
Also: AZ, NV, NM
Dumb asses...
By my calculation at 47 cents per 100 gallons (which is retail in CA), it would cost about $51 billion to end the drought.
The low end of desalination is $1/cubic meter which would cost about 41 billion while the high end of desalination is about
$2/cubic meter which would cost about 80 billion. I believe those numbers are drinking water too so you could probably
take some shortcuts if all you're doing is filling up a reserve.
40-80 billion is a big number but is fairly managable if depreciated over the life of the desalination plants of say 20 years.
If things get desperate enough, desalination plants are more than capable of providing the water. The main problem
with desalination plants is that they are a risky investment. If the drought ever does end then you are basically
priced out of the market and you have these big expensive desalination plants collecting dust until the next drought.
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?
It's less than a dollar a day per person, problem solved. Truth is no one wants to solve the water problem.
Whoosh!
Yet where would you build such a plant. The CA coast is filled with NIMBYS who wouldn't allow it.
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.
The main problem with desalination plants is that they are a risky investment. If the drought ever does end then you are basically priced out of the market
Not just risky in CA - impossible. Because everyone knows the drought *will* end in less than 20 years, so if there is enough rainwater to cover usage the plants will be shutdown and not profitable. The technological solution will be something that has a relatively low initial capital investment but a possibly high recurring cost.
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.
> 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.
Since California is near an ocean, there is a technological fix for that. Only problem is it would cost a lot of money : roughly between 22 to 44 billion dollars (between 579$ to 1157$ per person living in California).
well if you can buy water for drinking for less than a dollar when the minimum wage is way more than a dollar/day, then there really isn't a problem as such.
any fix right now would be a farming subsidy, it seems.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I just tweeted out your idea to see if we can get it trending.
You are welcome on my lawn.
The concept of a Desal plant in CA has been abandoned because of the community push back. Instead recycled water plants are being built instead to treat effluent and return it to the reservoirs.
There are also cheaper and easier to run than desal plants and honestly make the most sense.
Why do desal? Reuse the water that is coming from the waste water treatment plants. Instead of dumping that in the river to flow out ot sea put it through a second plant and return it to the reservoir. You solve your water problems and you solve the problem of nitrogen rich water flowing into the ocean.
Desals have to combat the corrosion problems you get from dealing with salt. Much easier to deal with non-salt water.
That's empathize, not emphasize, of course.
Better fix: create money to create better technological solutions. Why should we sacrifice human lives to the great god Mammon? Does money serve us, or do we serve money?
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.
Sure, over-use is a problem, but there's also less precipitation than is normal.
That there will be years and even decades of less precipitation than normal is normal. Droughts happen. Floods happen. Hurricanes happen.
People planning for what's out of the ordinary happens less often. It's much easier to pretend it won't happen and then find someone or something to blame.
desalination plants are likely to have some serious issues with CA in general.
1) They arent very pretty, and will HAVE to be on the coast. This makes NIMBYism a very real problem for any project that works with desalinators.
2) CA has some insane environmental effluent rules. Desalination plants dont just wave magic wands at the salt. In addition to concentrating fresh water, they also concentrate salt. This is usually in the form of very briny water if RO desalination is used, and in the form of crude, non-food grade salt id evaporation plants are used. Both are dangerous contaminants that need to be disposed ofl and in large quantities. Simply dumping the salt back into the ocean wont work-- it will kill local marine life.
3) Desalinators will present a major power consumption drain on CA's already overtaxed power and light infrastructure.
4) Logistics and civic planning to have the water pipeleines from the desalinators routed to where the croplands in the valleys impacted by the drought need the water most is not going to be a trivial matter. Expect political BS to delay, delay, delay as everyone tries to get the biggest slice of the water produced, or get consessions for allowing transport.
Technologically the plant designs are almost identical. Both are a reverse osmosis design using pressurised water driven up against a membrane. Modern desal plants are actually quite energy efficient, just not as efficient as AWT plants. And the only reason AWT plants are more efficient is that the input water actually has less impurities than salt water.
The other benefit of AWT plants is you get high nutrient biosolids from it that you can then use as fertiliser. Note this is ONLY the case if the AWT sits down stream from a standard waste water plant. If it doesn't and you do an all in 1 process the solids are contaminated with nasty stuff from the medicines we consume which means it is restricted in its use.
This drought cycle maps almost exactly to the 76 to 78 drought followed by one of the wettest years in history. Wet pattern continues until 82-83.
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
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.
[data needed]. i don't know how much water falls in a rain storm. so I can't compare the water from the rain to the trillions of whatevers it says in the summary are needed.
second thought, maybe I can do this. the greater los angeles area is maybe 60 miles tall and 120 miles wide. 7200 square miles * 3 inches of rain = 0.35 cubic miles of water. that doesn't seem like much.
whatever, we're all going to shrivel up and die. ashes to ashes.
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.
more simple than that. guess what the two hugest sinks that suck down water? one, rice (yes, growing rice in the central valley). Two, growing parsley to ship to china to feed to chinese cows as hay. wtffff??
we have enough water to grow rice and parsley to feed chinese cows, but i can't flush my toilet due to city regulations. way to go CA!
oh tahnk goodnes you saved us all. what elsee is in ur crystal ball.
+1 Funny
who prays for Satan? Who in 18 centuries has had the humanity to pray for the 1 sinner that needed it most? ~Mark Twain
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.
The long term fix is control of human population growth.
Absolutely, we need to decrease population growth - in the entire world, including California.
Back in the 1960s and 1970s, environmentalists were very much concerned about population growth. Speakers and books warned about the "population explosion".
But today, you don't hear many warnings about overpopulation. I don't know why. The only reason I can think of is that most population growth (through births and immigration) is from non-Caucasians. Environmentalists don't want to be racists or seem to be racists, so they don't warn about population growth like they used to.
And that's bad. We need those warnings. An increase in population increases demand for food, water and energy. And more housing, businesses and streets put pressure on farmers to sell their land to developers (shrinking our food supply). The southern part of the San Francisco Bay area used to have lots of farms. Now those farms are almost all gone.
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. The rainfall has averaged 22" a year with a standard deviation of 8". Even if this season doesn't fill the reservoirs, next season will.
"Who are you?" "No one of consequence." "I must know." "Get used to disappointment."
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.
What is a "Space Nutter"? Is that supposed to like insult and silence fans of space-related research and exploration? It just sounds like an ad-hominem troll post, and not even relevant to the topic.
My other UID is three digits.
What was exceptional about this drought was the temperature. It had record warmth that dried out the soil more than in the past.
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.
It's easy to know and actually reported in the weather news. They give you the rainfall in inches per square foot (or in liters per square meter), and if you know the area affected by rain, you can calculate the volume of the rain.
This problem has long been resolved. Nuclear desalination of seawater could allow the entire state to irrigate using the Pacific ocean, if they can rouse themselves out of their purple haze and think clearly. You can desalinate tons of seawater per minute and the only side effect is all the electricity you want. Of course the Ca. govt. shut down its only nuclear reactor. Some states are so stupid they just need to go away for good and California is one of them.
RO desal plants have to use tremendous amounts of electricity and are very expensive to build. Nuclear plants can desalinate tons of water per minute and get you all the electricity to use for anything you want, carbon free. I guess that guarantees Calif. won't use it because it would solve the problem and if that happens then you can't hold something over the people's head telling them you need more taxes, fees, etc.
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.
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.
Seriously, putting the idea out on social media would be the last thing we want. It would attract Hollywood and Greens, who would automatically come out against it because science, chemicals, energy.
"There is no drought"
And you idiots modded this guy insightful?
Even without all the ag and all the people, cali would STILL be in a drought.
The state water supply comes from the snowpack in the mountains, as the snowpack melts.
It normally gets replenished in winter.
The past few years ahve seen very little snowfall, leading to no replenishment of the snowpack.
Which means less and less water running into the water systems each year.
Ergo: DROUGHT.
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
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.
Yes! We really do have a Saltwater Nutter Troll! I thought I was just making that up in that earlier thread about colonizing the ocean.
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.
Instead recycled water plants are being built instead to treat effluent and return it to the reservoirs.
How'd they make that happen on the West Coast, where people are so paranoid that they drain entire reservoirs simply because someone peed in them?
Who all all I had to do to destroy New York City's water supply was drive half an hour and take a piss. I hope the terrorists haven't figured this out, they'll be in the Catskills drinking beer in no time.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
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.
Sure. Just move SoCal to Wisconsin.
SoCal is a scub/desert/swamp. That's just the way it is. Pouring water on a desert to make it anything else is the same as pouring sand on a beach to combat erosion. It looks good for a season, but nature prevails next year. You ultimately end up with exactly what nature put there to begin with.
It's all hype. This is not a "problem," it's called geography. You can't "correct" SoCal's location and geography with any technology now extant.
except i don't know the area affected by rain, and I also only know my local weather not state wide.
There is. Free/Cheap energy in the form of fusion, or very cheap solar panels.
With that, you could desalinate sea water.
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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.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Yawn. I've worked and studied at both. Have you *compered*
Given the poor spelling, I assume you worked as a janitor and you studied urinal cake dissipation?
Apart from poor spelling, the dude doesn't have an idea that Caltech main strenght is PURE SCIENCE, not technology (APPLIED science). Besides, MIT is several times the size of Caltech (tiny in comparisons to other universities, so, raw volumen of papers and citations wouldn't be fair).
I seriously doubt anyone from MIT or Caltech would ignore these basic facts, so perhaps you're closer to the truth with your joke .
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
Are you joking, or are you really this obtuse? Bill Gates, for example, is one of many people concerned about this, and has talked at great length about uncontrolled population growth being bad for everything, not just the environment. It has nothing to do with racism - it has everything to do with you not paying attention to this particular field, and the discussions, studies, and findings which have come from it. That your mind instantly leaps to "racism" and guessing the motives of environmentalists is rather telling of how you see the world, and your place in it. Ouch.
Quick hint: The more developed a country, the lower the birthrate. To stop the population from exploding, the world should help less-developed countries develop. Access to education, healthcare, and security means population growth slows down massively.
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.
Apply some of that massive Silicon Valley brainpower to developing large-scale desalination instead of the next batch of faddish social media apps.
Because most of the brain power in Silicon Valley is geared towards coding software and developing computers and this will require things like mechanical engineers and physicists. There's no app or computer that would fix this problem, and you are essentially asking electricians to fix a plumbing problem. There are already parts of the world with smart people working on such problems and it is hardly an unexplored field and while lots of money could probably make modest progress, if they had money for that solution, they could already implement it.
The main problem with desalination plants is that they are a risky investment. If the drought ever does end then you are basically priced out of the market and you have these big expensive desalination plants collecting dust until the next drought.
Build desalination plants on barges. Move them to the most profitable locations as needed.
I agree that helping countries develop helps slow the birthrate. My point is that slowing the birthrate helps countries develop, also. Culture (ex: "Ten or 15 more sons will be a healthy sign.") and lack of birth control also contribute to big families.
And yes, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has helped women get birth control. Family planning is an important topic for Melinda Gates. I'm not saying people aren't emphasizing the need at all for birth control these days. But there was much more emphasis on it in the 1960s and 1970s. These days, how many warnings do you hear in the news, about population increase?
Regarding fear of seeming to be a racist, do a Google on "population control racism" (without the quotes). You'll see lots of articles, in which people claim that population control equals racism. Ex: the MotherJones has an article titled "Why Is Population Control Such a Radioactive Topic?". This article says, "Rinku Sen is a leading racial justice advocate, the publisher of ColorLines magazine, and president of the Applied Research Center: The reason people get so upset about population control is because historically reproduction has been controlled without the consent of the controlled person or community—usually with a deep racial or class dimension."
Certainly not everyone believes population control == racism. The government of China, with its one-child policy, is certainly not racist against Asians. But unfortunately, many people do think control == racism.
"Some states are so stupid they just need to go away for good and California is one of them."
I agree. Once we disrupt the 8th largest economy in the world, all that excess production can be re-distributed to other places, improving more people's lives. The people there can then vote with their shoes and find other places to live. Roll out the welcome wagon--Californians, here they come!
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
Dude, you totally took the air out of his "Space Nutter" rant. He was just getting going. Good job.
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
Did you actually ready the article?!? It clearly stated that 11 trillion gallons is 42 cubic kilometers or if you can't do the math 42 trillion liters.
That still doesn't actually mean anything, since we rarely state rainfall in such terms. And -where- rain falls is just as important as how much, and how much of it is snow is equally as important! You could dump 11 trillion gallons on the Northern Californian coast, that won't do anything for the drought situation in the state if it all just flows down into the ocean. The state's water supply throughout the year comes from three major sources: 1) reservoirs filled during the rainy months, then continuously refilled through the spring and early summer by melting snow, 2) The snow pack which melts to feed rivers and reservoirs, 3) a groundwater reserve that has been drained and takes decades or longer to refill.
Underground natural aquifers take time to replenish. A burst of rain, even well-placed, won't do a lot to help there -- it will take years of rain and years of no longer overdrawing from the aquifers like California currently does.
They've been stealing water from the colorado river for years.
Yep, build a city in a dessert and then act surprised when you run out of water.
Is that not Nevada's entire MO? Build cities in the desert, living off the Colorado?
And you realize a sizable portion of the Colorado flows through California? It forms the state's southeastern border.
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.
A nuclear powered de-salination plant and pumping station. But good luck getting that built in Ca.
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.
Ah yes, another person who for some reason believes that -copyright law-, of all things, is the most important issue of our times.
Common colloquial for "add another 50% to your total." It means one and half times, but apparently enough people are so bad at fractions that "half again as large" is somehow clearer.
Not really. A modern RO plant will produce 1m3 of water for 3-3.5 kw/h of electricity.
As for nuclear plants desalinating water - all the systems I am aware of are the combination of the power plant and the desal plant in 1 complex. It is still two different systems so the only advantage is avoiding electrical transmission loss over having a nuclear plant somewhere else.
If you want to get that detailed, money is irrelevant. It will take a lot of stuff and a lot of people for a long time to build the desalinization plants. If we didn't build the plants, we could use the stuff to do other things, and the people could do other things, and these other things are also worth building. The role of money here is to facilitate doing things, assign priorities, and generally keep track of economic stuff on an abstract level. It's useful for specifying how much it would take to do something. However, it's an abstract measure, creating more money doesn't make more stuff or labor, and the artificial scarcity is the only reason it's useful at all.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
I will add to point 2.
The Gold Coast Desal plant is a 125ML RO plant and the brine is returned to the ocean. Testing has shown that you can't detect the increased salt content when more than 20m from the outlet pipe.
The biggest problem with people who think it will increase salinity of the oceans is their inability to grasp the scale of the ocean vs what is removed.
There was a lot to be concerned about back then, since the world population was growing rapidly. Currently, it isn't. Over my lifetime, the world population has more than doubled, but nobody expects another doubling. As economies develop, population growth goes to approximately zero. The best thing we can do to limit population is not to force-sterilize hundreds of millions of women but rather to help their standard of living and promote something akin to equality between the sexes.
The reason non-Caucasians are doing the population growth is that their economies have lagged. Once their fertility rates hit Western standards, they will still grow for a time for demographic reasons (their population will be skewed towards the young), but they'll hit steady state just like everybody else. The reason fewer people are concerned is that it appears to have become a non-problem for the long run, not because they don't want to be accused of racism.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
[data needed].
second thought, maybe I can do this. the greater los angeles area is maybe 60 miles tall and 120 miles wide. 7200 square miles * 3 inches of rain = 0.35 cubic miles of water. that doesn't seem like much.
which is 385bn Gallons, so only 29 showers like that and the drought is all over...
Draining off the top half meter of Lake Superior will do the job.
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The highest expression of the Democrat party is the rapist wallowing in the human excrement of "Occupy Wall Street".
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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.