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California's Hot, Dry Winters Tied To Climate Change
mdsolar sends word that hot dry winters may be the norm in the future for California. "Climate change is one of the most prominent public health issues currently on the CDC's radar. The organization's Climate and Health Program attempts to help state and city health departments to prepare for the health impacts of climate change, which can come in the form of things like temperature extremes, air pollution, allergens, and changes in disease patterns; they can also be felt indirectly through issues like food security. Since 2012, California has been in the midst of a record-setting drought, with extremely warm and dry conditions characterizing the last three years in that state. A new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences concludes that warming caused by humans is responsible for the conditions that have led to this California drought. This study, published by scientists affiliated with the Department of Environmental Earth System Science and the Woods Institute for Environment at Stanford University, used historical statewide data for observed temperature, precipitation, and drought in California. The investigators used the Palmer Hydrological Drought Index (PHDI) and the Palmer Drought Severity Index (PDSI), collected by the National Climatic Data Center, as measures of the severity of wet/dry anomalies. They also used global climate model simulations from the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) to compare historical predictions for anthropogenic and non-anthropogenic historical climates."
Have they considered asking economists about the effects of price controls on water for agricultural uses?
Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one... if you hold down the price of water, people (especially larger users) will use more of it, not less of it...
The party of stupid and the party of evil get together and do something both stupid and evil, then call it bipartisan.
Models compared with reality.
That's because all the wells the farmers are using are still at ~15-20% of historic levels. In a year or two when thats used up too and the shit really hits the fan, it will be time to do something about it. And by do something I mean point fingers.
Any two trending time series will be correlated. These links don't mean anything substantial has been detected. Predict something precise then it is worth paying attention.
http://www.tylervigen.com/
Here I am sitting in shorts and a t-shit while the rest of the country is shoveling snow off of their sidewalks.
It's been great for recreation but about once a week I ride up over the dam that contains the artificial Shasta Lake that is the source of Cali's main waterway, the Sacramento river. It's low. Really low. Worse, the snowpacks that feed it would not even be back to normal without five or six years of what's considered normal precipitation.
Stil, that's not the real problem. The real problem is almost entirely political.
We've been through more water scares than any other state in the nation. Back in the 70s and 80s the population centers have done the water rationing dance and per-person use is quite low compared to what it was. We can't squeeze any more water savings there.
Agriculture uses 75% of the water in california (Yes far more than municipal and industrial COMBINED), and the distribution of such is just plain fucked up. 100 year old water rights agreements let certain farmers suck the water dry in a manner that is neither fair nor efficient. We can grow plenty here with much less water that's currently being used. But we can't because of a fucked-up love triangle between rural farmers, rural politicians, and agreements that were signed more than a century ago - A time when you could drain a lake or divert a river and nobody would blink because water was plentiful and concern for the environment was everyone's last priority.
It gets weirder still.
Turns out much of the water in this state also comes from only recently understood vast underground aquifers.. And they're drying up. Turns our recent legal precedent lets management of underground aquifers trump water rights agreements if said aquifers are affected by water consumption.. So there's an end run around these ancient laws that are causing problems.
1. California is always a semi-desert, with the exception of the northern fifth of the state, which is a rainforest. Adapt or die, b*tc*s. Yes, that means sustainable crop practices.
2. You're not getting any extra power from Oregon or Washington this year, cause our snowpack is around 8 percent of what it normally has been (which will be the norm in 2025 due to global warming, by the way, but is not directly caused by that). So we need our water to sell bottled water to you idiots who fail to realize the fancy water you drink in plastic bottles is just our usual drinking water in Seattle that we let settle a bit so it's "fresh". No cheap electricity for you. Grow a pair and build more solar and wind, cause it's just going to get much much much much worse.
3. As to crop practices, do what British Columbia learned in the 1970s and 1980s. You've had 50 years to adapt. Mix crops (no monoculture), grow crop cover between tree rows (less soil loss, less water loss) which also fixes nitrogen and can kill bad bugs. Cover your dam water canals (hint: try using solar panels, win win) to reduce water evaporation. It's been done in other places in North America for a long time, cheap water is over.
4. Most of your water use and water waste is farming. Most of that is because you insist on growing artificially subsidized water intensive crops that aren't suited for your climate. Stop subsidizing those and let the market self correct that very very bad choice. Adapt.
5. There is no all or nothing artificial choice. Half measures are better than no measures. Small and moderate adaptations now, or even to partial removal of subsidies and misuse have major impacts. Try changing 1/10th of your crops to better methods. I drove thru almost all of Cali this past winter, you really haven't done much, and you could easily adapt without much of a problem, but you have to stop sticking your heads in the sands.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Go ahead, return to sender, but sticking fingers in your ears whilst singing LALALA doesn't make it a good idea to keep using the atmosphere as dumping ground.
Exactly. There's 'inertia' to consider as well.
IE if gasoline is high enough, long enough, lots of people buy fuel efficient vehicles. They don't instantly dispose of them just because oil(and gasoline) prices subsequently drop.
If you 'suddenly' increase the price of water for one year, the farmers will grumble and pay for it. Some will go out of business, but that happens whenever you increase the price of something, or even don't decrease it fast enough. Some farmers just aren't good businessmen.
If you go, okay, now it's $1 per 100k liters(1/2 the price British Columbia recently started charging), while telling them that the price is going to double each year for the next 10 years, they'll start adjusting how they do business.
We know that there are wasteful watering methods that lose over half the water used to evaporation before it hits the plants. We also know there are systems where the only water lost is pretty much confined to the food products you take out of the specialized recycling greenhouses.
The trick is to get the farmers to use a sustainable amount of water. Even just burying seep lines can drop usage by over 75% over daytime spray irrigation.
I don't read AC A human right