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Drought and Desertification: How Robots Might Help
Hallie Siegel writes Groundwater levels in California's Central Valley are down to historic lows and reservoirs have been depleted following four consecutive years of severe drought in the state. California is set to introduce water rationing in the coming weeks, and though the new rationing rules will focus on urban areas and not farms for the time being, they serve as a warning bell to farmers who will inevitably need to adapt to the effects of climate change on food production. John Payne argues that long term solutions are needed to help make agriculture drought resistant and looks at some of the ways that robotics might help.
When the state finally sobers up and starts cutting the centennial water rights that are strangling the state, the farmers will have to move. Most likely toward the melty and fertile old permafrost. Spending time and effort to pretend that technology will do anything but drag the desertification (of a desert) out, is compiling waste.
killer robots will be the cause of and the solution to all the draught's problems
create a pipeline from the PNW down to southern CA. done.
of course it'd be expensive, but this is either an emergency, or it isn't. at least there aren't (as many) environmental concerns as there are for oil pipelines. if it leaks / breaks you get a ... water spill?
Such needless suffering for the sole benefit of the 'quarterly report' in the portfolio.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
This reminds me of the Horizons ride at EPCOT ages ago. One of their three ecosystems to be tamed was a desert wasteland, and how advanced robots would mine/farm the land. These robots could detect rain, air pressure, and everything!
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=...
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
Perhaps, instead of robots, they should look at fixing their leaky pipes (Bay Area loses billions of gallons to leaky pipes) or sending, so efficiently, most of their rainwater back into the ocean (How to fix California's drought problem) before they spend billions building desalination plants (Drinking the Pacific).
You need some droids that understand the binary language of vaporators to keep the moisture farms in operation. Once you have that, the water problem is solved!
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Maybe robots could build desalination plants?
It''s pretty damn sure that humans never will; they'll plan them, and then shelve the plans, over and over. At least robots are single-minded enough to actually do the work.
Cloud seeding?
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I recall reading California's almond production consumed 3 times the amount of water of Los Angleles. At some point something will have to change in agricultural production.
If your whole ability to farm in the region depends on bringing water from ever further away or draining the underground resources maybe it's a sign that you really haven't picked the best spot to build your farm.
Much of California is a mix of desert, grassland, and chaparral in its natural state. It wouldn't require any water or irrigation. The reason California has an insatiable appetite for water is because people insist on farming there, often with thirsty crops; and farming happens in California because water is effectively heavily subsidized. The solution to California's water problems is simple: have California farmers pay market rates for water and stop subsidizing farmers.
Getting robots to help with desertification is a lot easier if you have a flying time machine, and can go to the future to get said robot, then send the robot back 400 years ago to replant all the trees.
...and almost never discussed: return to herd-based agriculture, to mimic the pre-human massive herds of herbivores that crossed the plains that are desertifying.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan...
Watch it, and tell me you're not convinced.
-Styopa
...that California might, just might, want to take advantage of all that water flowing down from the mountains to the ocean??? http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015... This is the same state that keeps trying to force neighboring states to sell them electricity because the enviroheads won't let California build enough power plants to support their own state!
The severity of this current "drought" is largely due to the incompetent fools in Sacramento putting the environmental whackos agenda over the needs of human beings to eat, wash and water. No new reservoirs, no new aqueducts, and they have dramatically drained large reservoirs to provide an unprecedented environment for the "delta" smelt, which is just like every other smelt in the ocean but only able to live in semi salty delta waters. If we had had a bunch of conservatives running the state, we would have built a massive aquarium that the public could enjoy and filled it with a sustainable population of the delta smelt, and kept our reservoir levels high so that we would have potable water when we have a drought.
People forget that we live in a first wold country (despite the best efforts of the environmentalists) and the government still has a few things that they actually must provide and if they fuck it up, things can go very badly for them. Gray Davis fucked up electricity, and he got his ass handed to him. When we start seriously rationing water and people can't flush their toilets, Jerry "rainbow" Brown is going to get similar treatment. There are few things that can actually end civilized society, one is energy and one is water. Then we will get a republican elected, and they will do the above, build 10-20 more reservoirs, maybe pass a few laws requiring a public vote to divert water for environmental purposes, and if need be, build a big fucking aqueduct up to Oregon and Washington to pull down some of the 200 inches a year they get in western Oregon... The solution is technology and forward thinking, not the environmental whacko mud hut mentality that we have in office right now.
http://www.ted.com/talks/allan...
A guy who killed elephants in the name of science changed his mind and brought back the green.
I'm seriously interested in people shooting this down, because if that's the fix = then vegans are Nazis and the world will benefit from cheap meat.
_ _ _ Go for the eyes Boo! GO FOR THE EYES!
The best modern farm equipment can grow alternate crops in alternate rows. It can be done in a way that is sort of mix between what had historically been done by using seasonal crop rotation and planting trees as wind breaks.
The system works by using a high precision DGPS system so the tractor wheels are in the same spot every year so the rows stay in the same places. The hills can also be mapped so that the side of a hill may get processed first or last in a season and the amount of fertilizer or planting depths of crops can be adjusted for optimum yield or land protection.
Many of the California farming areas were settled after people left the mid-west dust bowl. Most of the dust bowl problems were a result of not using the best farming techniques when a drought worsened and it took lots of time to rebuild those areas. Those areas also get massive amounts of rain from time to time from hurricanes hitting the Gulf of Mexico. California doesn't have that advantage.
Another odd thing is there seems to be some connection between early crop failures in the midwest that predate the dust bowl and those crop failures started screwing with the futures markets which some have claimed was the start of the stock market crash and great depression.
Ban California wine and other ridiculously wasteful agriculture.
The drought will solve itself once retards stop growing watery-heavy crops and then shipping them out of state, water and all.
At the very least they should be made to pay the same fucking price for their water as anyone else.
Why the hell are people still planting almonds in California ? 1.1 gallons of water to grow 1 nut FFS!
we replace the rich people with robots, because then we can get rid of the golf courses and mansions which are huuuuge water hogs.
What AZ, CA, and the whole region need is to slow down the rainwater and help it to soak into the soil. To do this, you need earthworks such as swales and dams (specifically gabions for the arid southwestern desert areas). Those arroyos and canyons in Arizona may be great ATV playgrounds for 11 months of the year, but for a few days they become raging torrents. And as it stands now, ALL of that water simply runs off down to the ocean. But it wouldn't be hard to save that water, and use it to re-green the entire region. (Here's a quick 1-min video which explains the basic process.)
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
No water from Arizona reaches the ocean. It is all collected before it gets anywhere close to the shore.
That would be impressive if Arizona had an ocean coastline.
Oregonian here.
What we NEED is colder winters. We save our winter snow in the snow pack on the mountains(By We, I mean it happens naturally). That melts in the summer, providing ample water for our rivers and hence for us. Our winters are getting warmer (Statistically speaking, everyone's winters are getting warmer) for some reason on a trend line, almost like a hockey stick, if only we knew what was going on....
Just in case anyone reading is stupid and doesn't get it, it's global warming, which I'll call Climate Change because some people are too stupid to understand that when you pump a bunch of energy into a closed system it creates lots of weird effects that are varied depending on local geography. More wind, more rain (Yeah, I live in a temperate rainforest thanks to an ocean and a mountain range), and even sometimes freak snow even though the global average temperature goes up.
What we NEED is colder winters.
What you need is more precipitation. Colder winters might help that happen, but they are not what you need, per se. What you need is lower global temperatures, especially in ocean waters, so that your regional climate is no longer fucked up by climate change.
I understand that the water-harvesting scenario in my previous post depends on rainfall -- of which California has seen practically none for several years in a row. But that's no reason not to start investing in the kind of infrastructure that could help alleviate these concerns over the long term.
Fixing climate change is going to take some time and effort, on several fronts simultaneously. We all have a role to play.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Fixing climate change is going to take some time and effort, on several fronts simultaneously
We're not going to fix (i.e. go back to early 20th century) it. For the next century it's only getting worse. At best we can try to slow down the rate at which it's getting worse.