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How California Is Winning the Drought
An anonymous reader writes: California is in its fifth year of drought; the past four years have been the driest four-year period in recorded history, and the hottest as well. There have been consistent worries about how it will affect California's residents and its economy — but somehow, the state still seems to be doing fine. "In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole — the state has grown faster than the nation every year of the drought. ... The drought has inspired no Dust Bowl-style exodus. California's population has grown faster even as the drought has deepened."
The article makes the case that California is pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere in the country if the global climate continues to warm. "The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings — more than one billion gallons each day — is enough to supply all of New York City." The article notes, however, that this resilience won't last forever — if the drought continues for several more years, California will be in trouble despite their water-saving tactics.
The article makes the case that California is pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere in the country if the global climate continues to warm. "The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California now supplies roughly 19 million people in six counties, and it uses slightly less water than it did 25 years ago, when it supplied 15 million people. That savings — more than one billion gallons each day — is enough to supply all of New York City." The article notes, however, that this resilience won't last forever — if the drought continues for several more years, California will be in trouble despite their water-saving tactics.
slowly.... with tears innocence mercy.... see you there..
Desalination is cheaper than not having water at all. Whether it is cheaper than litigation over rights and usage, or outright war, I don't know.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
California often has drought, but this one is different. California has numerous large reservoirs that are nearly drained after three plus years of drought. Groundwater is being rapidly depleted. The state started out with lots of water, but the persistent drought has nearly exhausted the reserves. If the situation doesn't change this winter, the problems we see now will seem trivial. Resilience works up to a point, and then it snaps when certain limits are exceeded. California's water supplies are stretched to the limit right now.
The desert and arid regions like Southern California aren't meant to support so many people. So California is winning nothing, they are just delaying what is the inevitable collapse of the water supply, unless migration to the state can be stopped.
They are expensive, but desalination plants should become a measurable and important source of California water usage. The upcoming Carlsbad plant is a nice start. But, it will only produce 50 million gallons per day. Conservation and grey water usage only goes so far.
They won't even entertain the idea of stopping the rest of the country from trying to move here. If we stopped people from moving here from other states a couple of decades ago, the state wouldn't be in such bad shape.
how unmystical could we be? other than the hymen quandary?
California cities and towns only get 10% of the water. Farmland gets 80% (or somewhat less depending on how you account for it), yet only produces 2% of the state's GDP. The problem is that they are STILL growing the size of the agriculture sector, planting more almond trees for example, even while the existing almond trees are dying from salt poisoning. The reason the overall GDP hasn't been hurt yet is due to the fact that so much of the water is used for so little of the state's income. When the groundwater is all gone due to lack of planning, things may actually change.
That is part of the problem
too many cows in CA
to return it to the previous owners who were --------- (insert your choice here)
I got to the chocolate box before you, that's why the hard ones have teeth marks.
That is part of the problem
too many cows in CA
too many cows and too few republicans
You hear most of the cutting edge health nuts coming from Cali and lately they've been talking about the toxicity levels of plastic in bottled drinking water if left out to age or in the sun. Yet they managed to pour plastic balls in their drinking water reservoir. Didn't anyone go,"Hey, maybe this sounds like a bad idea to California residents concerned with their health?"
God spoke to me
bring all of your friends & pack a lunch... rock on.. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oFRbZJXjWIA .. we are a special event no doubt https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6zpYFAzhAZY
And yet, there's still no drip-irrigation in the central valley...
Vonal Declosion
Is one way we are NOT winning the drought. I tried doing the math on this and it doesn't make sense to me, yet I see big F250 pickup trucks with 275 gallon tanks everywhere around here. How is driving 20 miles round trip to pick up 275 gallons of reclaimed water worth your time, wear/tear on vehicle, tank and pump, and fuel? According to my water bill that 275 gallons costs maybe $1.28. Even at higher tiers I don't see how it would add up. You'd have to make a trip to the water plant almost every day to even get enough water for even a very small lawn.
Their net worth is not actually their net worth you say?
As if the use of net worth is deceptive you say?
Oh my what could possibly be going on?
(The use of the word worth in net worth is deceptive.)
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From this [see "uses of water" section]:
- Agriculture uses 39% of the water vs. 11% for residential use
- A typical household uses 170 gallons/day
- It takes 4.9 gallons to grow one walnut, almost as much as a head of broccoli at 5.4 [but with much less food value]
- It takes 1.1 gallons to make an almond, so a small jar of them uses more water than a household does per day.
Most of the regulations [and hoopla] so far are about getting residents to use less water, but their usage is a drop in the proverbial ocean. Where are the regulations to get farms to plant water efficient crops that have high food value instead of water thirsty crops that, effectively, waste water?
Producing crops that have good nutrition, use less water, and provide lower prices to consumers would seem to be the responsible thing to do during a prolonged drought. If farmers can't see the logic of this, then, if regulation comes, they would only have themselves to blame.
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
But why don't people in states that are either grossly mismanaged (to the point where things will collapse like Detroit, or like California, which might run out of water soon despite sitting next to a very large ocean), or are prone to things like hurricanes, tornadoes, or have super high crime rates (I'm not trying to be racist, but most people don't actually WANT their kids to die before the age of 18) move to places where they don't have to deal with those issues?
I mean, California is like a sort-of Hurricane Katrina: people know that eventually everything is going to get fucked up, but they still insist on staying there until after everything is destroyed. Like in New Orleans. To be fair, maybe the folks in New Orleans didn't know that a hurricane was coming. ...or maybe they just wanted a chance to loot stores, shoot guns at rescue workers, and rape little boys and girls.
Even disregarding the discussion about climate change: if you use 217 US gallons of water per capita per day, and you live in a state with water issues, and that's disregarding the water use of growing crops that is (a) not measured and (b) really hurting the ground water reserves that people depend on to live, you know you are heading for deep trouble.
I'm not surprised that Schwarzenegger ordered water meters installed in every house - I *am* surprised it's only mandatory by 2025 and not for farmers either.
Oh, and in The Netherlands we use 31 US gallons per capita per day. That's 7 times less. We don't shower less either. But in our climate we don't have a lot of swimming pools. Maybe that's a good explanation? I'm not sure about the price of water in California though - it looks rather difficult to compare to our pricing.
Therefore, by the (faulty) logic you're using, you're just a cow with a keyboard - osu-neko (2604)
Seriously. They shouldn't have killed them all.
If it ain't broke, don't fix it.
You endure and survive it, or move or die
"If you go back thousands of years, you see that droughts can go on for years if not decades, and there were some dry periods that lasted over a century, like during the Medieval period and the middle Holocene [the current geological epoch, which began about 11,000 years ago]. The 20th century was unusually mild here, in the sense that the droughts weren’t as severe as in the past. It was a wetter century, and a lot of our development has been based on that.
If you look at the archaeological record, you see that the Native American population in the West expanded in the wet years that preceded those long droughts in the Medieval period. Then during the droughts, they were pretty much wiped out. There was the so-called Anasazi collapse in the Southwest about 800 years ago. In some ways, I see that as an analogy to us today."
http://news.berkeley.edu/2014/...
Anyone who wasn't expecting a multi year drought in California obviously didn't study history.
it's in my head
Well, we have a lot of tech here, that's exported all around the world, so until we are spitting dust, people here will be making money, for now.
People here in Silicon Valley have done their part and let their lawns die, and yet, we don't hear anything about export farms making any sacrifice.
If the powers that be were serious about water conservation, they would tax it, but how would that tax be distributed for residence, agriculture, and industry?
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
Only idiots and morons could run out of water when next to an ocean.
California's issue is not a water shortage. Their issue is a cheap water shortage.
When you live on an ocean, you can desalinate all the water you could ever need. But, it does cost more than skywater or skywater stolen from Arizona.
In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole...
If a tornado damages your house and you have to rebuild it, GDP will grow as a result. GDP measures economic activity but it does not tell you anything about what that activity is achieving or where that investment is flowing through.
California is experiencing an economic boom when it comes to drilling wells, for example. Farmers have to dig deeper and deeper in order to find water. That leaves some farmers out of cash and unable to compete. Guess what? Another economic boom. There is less farmers supplying crops such as pistachios and other water intensive crops. The supply of these crops is down so the prices go up. If you are a farmer and you have a well that is deep enough, what is the smart thing to do right now? Switch to these very water intensive crops because the prices have gone up. There is so much money to be made on those crops that hedge funds are moving in and they have the cash required to dig those wells: http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/california-drought-almonds-water-use
So talking about GDP growth can be incredibly misleading.
Don't worry, Republicans will use electoral fraud to stay in power.
Everything is fine until it isn't.
The Greeks were fine with their debt until the Germans came to collect.
The American colonies were fine until they rebelled.
The situation with the housing market and banks was fine until it wasn't.
So saying "Cali hasn't imploded yet" is not the same thing as saying they're fine.
As to the economic arguments... the bullshit on the economic statistics is well understood at this point and basically everyone knows they're full of shit besides the willfully ignorant. So we'll just skip over that.
On the issue of the drought, the issue is that they have not linked GROWTH with infrastructure. This is why we get brown outs, over crowded schools, over worked police departments, water shortages, and hellacious traffic.
Anyone ever play sim city back in the day? It was a game of balancing things that increased your resources with things that were needed to supply the things that produced your resources. It was about managing land, tax revenue, water, power, schools, police.
Okay... so what happens if you just build lots of houses and don't build power plants, don't build water aqueducts/reservoirs/treatment plants/desalinization plants, schools, hospitals, police stations, or transport?
That's basically what happened in california. They okayed development project after development project... EVERYWHERE... and in no sense linked that to infrastructure.
So radically increasing the population did not correspond to an increase in water resources.
What is the solution? Link the two.
Say "zoning for new housing/business/etc must not exceed literal construction and activation of relevant resources required to sustain that development."
So if you want to build housing for another million people, then I want to see somewhere in there that you've expanded water and power resources for an additional million people. And if it isn't on line... NOW... then I'm not zoning land for use by another million people.
Now here someone is going to say something profoundly stupid like "well where are they going to go!?"... well... anywhere. Arizona, Texas, Montana... it doesn't really matter. There are plenty of places for people to go. And if you want those new developments THAT badly... then build the fucking power plants and reservoirs and aqueducts and schools and highways and police stations... Or go fuck yourself. Saying "we don't have the money to do X or Y or Z right now"... fine... then when you do we can build the infrastructure and then you can have your development. But if you don't have it, then you can't built the infrastructure and you can't have the development.
Suggesting otherwise is somewhere between short term exploitative thinking where someone does things that are against the long term interests of the state for short term profit... and childishness/ignorance.
The developers and politicians are mostly liars or too self interested to care what happens. And the public mostly is just too stupid to know what is going on.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Private agriculture uses 80% of the water. If you stopped growing rice, alfalfa, and all other crops you should not be growing in a desert, California's city populations could increase FIVE TIMES with no shortage of water.
The small guys are being squeezed, but the agricultural industry has no limits on water use as certain crops (namely almonds) require huge amounts of water.
And we're still letting Nestle milk our water supply dry despite having proof they have no valid paperwork to be able to do so.
I love the Governor but he should hold the larger players responsible.
That it was Nevada (mainly Las Vegas) that was coping well and that California was struggling.
http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21660546-why-las-vegas-has-coped-well-drought-so-far-concrete-oasis?zid=311&ah=308cac674cccf554ce65cf926868bbc2
A quote:
In theory, theory and practice are the same; in practice they're different. (Yogi Berra & A. Einstein)
The first thing I noticed about the "shade balls" is that they are black, meaning they will absorb virtually ALL of the sunlight that hits them and convert it to heat, given the relative conductivity of air and water, most of that heat will end up in the water. They will also significantly increase the surface area that is exposed to heating. In fact, I can't think of a more cost efficient way to heat a large body of water, so what on Earth makes them think this will "prevent evaporation"?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
How California Is Winning the Drought
Who came up with that headline? You don't "win" a drought. You might beat a drought, or win against a drought.
California's population has grown faster even as the drought has deepened.
Or, to put it another way, the drought has deepend as the population has grown faster.
I seem to remember Germany doing quite well in WWII, as well, until they weren't.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The solution to CA's water woes, since they import all their water owned by UT is simple. Capture rain run-off during the frequent flash-floods, and recharge the desperately depleted water table. Recharge the battery folks. Collect near the coasts and inject near the base of the Sierras, and throughout Mojave.
Done. Long germ solution, and very low cost. Even financeable using "infrastructure funding".
JJ
In 2014, the state's economy grew 27 percent faster than the country's economy as a whole — the state has grown faster than the nation every year of the drought.
That's because California's economy took a huge water-unrelated nosedive just before the drought. Depending on which metrics you're looking at, the nosedive started circa 2006-ish at a notable pace, or held off until 2010-ish when took a huge one-year hit. Either way, the point is that in the absence of the drought, the state would need to be growing its economy significantly faster than the rest of the nation just to try to recover from the previous enormous slump. Assuming the slump is artificial rather than related to resources (and it was, but that's a long conversation), the recovery was more or less guaranteed and has nothing to do with water conservation.
Is this the same Republican math that led Karl Rove to predict Romney was winning, which showed Eric Kantor winning his seat, and which produces pie charts that add up to 193%?
Leftist at the New York Times (which infamously reported that life was wonderful and under Stalin and the tens of millions of people he massacred were just fine ... because everybody KNOWS leftists are wonderful and their policies are always good) are now telling the world that the leftists running California (the governor, the justices and both legislatures are Democrat-run by super-majorities) are doing a wonderful job. If you are a lefty and all your news sources ore lefty and all your friends and colleagues are lefties, you are in an intellectual bubble and can see nothing else. Indeed, many on the left demand everybody avoid watching Fox news, the only major media outlet that offers any contrary views on anything. Right-wingers do not have such a luxury - they can listen to right-wing talk radio or go to slightly-right-of center Fox (an outfit so far left it accepts gay marriage, transgenderism, etc which traditional liberals like FDR and JFK would never have touched) but everything else (ABC,CBS,NBC,PBS,MSNBC...) is left-wing and cannot be ignored.
As a Californian, let me assert that this is a nightmare. Government freely wastes all the water it wants, watering its grass and deciding not to fix old and leaking water pipes (they re-directed a bunch of the state's water infrastructure money into the pension funds for state workers). There is a constant drum beat of "save water!" and "let your trees die!" and "let your lawn get a tan!", and much more East-German-like: "turn in your neighbor for wasting water, you can do it anonymously!". All this as they do NOTHING to increase either the supply of water or the storage of water, yet they made the whole state a "sanctuary" and thus are importing wave after wave of illegal immigrants (who all need water, of course). We are paying more and more money per unit of water, while getting worse service, and many people are delaying activities that need water and which they will not delay forever (not all the current cuts are sustainable).
What the author of the propaganda piece did NOT say, but which is known to the CA government and has been reported out here is that we are not saving enough water to get demand down to where it will need to be in 2016 to avoid actually running out; we are still using far more than is being accumulated so we are continuing to dry-out the ground water and reservoirs. I have no doubt the press will tell every tall tale they need to tell to keep the voters voting Democrat in the 2016 cycle, but absent a VERY wet winter, the state will likely go dry sometime after the Nov 2016 elections. The moron who wrote the piece in the NYT seems to think the drought is a good thing because it will re-educate Americans to live with less - rationing is a sure sign that leftists are in charge; in a free market with entrepreneurs encouraged to innovate more supplies would be created or brought in to satisfy demand.
With all the trees and grass we are killing for lack of water, our state's carbon footprint will rise by more than Jerry Brown's crazy train will EVER offset.
http://www.snopes.com/politics...
Supposedly you have a brain... try using it for a change.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
Wait, what proof do you have that he has a brain (or at least a functioning one)?
California is in huge trouble already and the real solutions may not be at all possible. Growth is the cause of the misery in California. California needs to reverse growth. That means sending the population to other states, shutting down businesses and industries and getting rid of the effects of human activity. The real game is that the officials in California know that no good solution is in sight. Everybody hopes that new science and new technology will enable the madness to continue to exist. And sometimes that nick of time development actually does act to extend the status quo. However betting that science can stay one step ahead of catastrophe is a seriously stupid bet. Designing a society where everything is interwoven and interdependent assures catastrophic failure. Something as minor as a loss of the power grid could create mayhem and chaos and massive loss of life in a state like California. Since power grids are spread out it is all too easy for almost anything to knock out a grid and with bad luck the entire grid may be very heavily damaged, A solar flare, a large meteor, a sizable earthquake, or a band of terror lunatics could devolve California into total failure and chaos with an economic shock that might actually take down the world economy. The chances of anyone doing anything positive about the situation approach zero.
The article makes the case that California is pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere in the country if the global climate continues to warm.
This seems to contradict long established facts brought to light by 60 minutes and other news sources that has data saying that California is pumping the deep aquifers dry at a rate that is unprecedented in history. Celebrities are watering their lawns in direct defiance of local water conservation ordinances, almond orchards are dying, wells are drying up all over, etc. This is not "pioneering the water preservation and governance techniques that will be helpful elsewhere".
California is the only state in the nation that has never regulated groundwater — farmers are largely free to pump as much as they want, without even tracking what they use.
This is a baldfaced lie. When I was a child in the 70's my parents and I visited relatives that owned a small farm in southern California. They had a private well they paid someone to dig for them ... and it had a city water meter attached to it. They had to pay to pull water from their own well.
Of course we should require cities to pay to build highly expensive desalination plants and burn greenhouse gasses to power them so that we can continue to provide agribusiness with cheap water using socialist-built water projects so they can continue to make a profit growing water-intensive crops in semi-desert areas. After all, how else are cotton farmers going to get subsidized for growing something other than cotton and happy cows in China going to get alfalfa grown in California, not even counting the rest of the crops that, even in average-rainfall years, were using up California's ground-water faster than rain was restocking it?
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
California's been burning through groundwater supplies faster than rainfall replenishes them even in the average-rainfall years. It's unsustainable in good times, much less in crisis droughts like the current one.
It's not like that's not a problem other places around the US or the world; look at how the MidWest and Texas are doing.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Yup. Also, I wasn't aware 'the drought' was a competition like 'the super bowl (sattire - don't sue me NFL).
The southwestern united states has been in a cycle of drought arguably worse than California's for some fifteen years, replete with wild fires, and very little was reported on it by comparison, it certainly easn't regarded as APOCOLYPSE! Pretty clear where our priorities lie (hint: it isn't with the majority of us. Everyone knows the valley is the new wall street). And don't play the ag card - a full 80% of that produce is exported, we don't even use most of it.
Before we shell out billions (and generate more pollution) legal reforms will be needed to eliminate this "senior water rights" nonsense.
Senior water right are property - like real estate, gold, food, houses, cars, home computers.
If the government, at any level, wants to "eliminate" this ownership, they must PAY for it. The Fifth Amendment (which has been "incorporated" to apply to the states and below, not just to the fed.) ends with:
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
A billion gallons isn't much.
The Sacramento Valley rice paddys flood to a depth of 5 inches. This utilizes 80B gallons of water, in order to irrigate the 600,000 acres under cultivation in rice. On top of this, it requires another 4B gallons of water a day to deal with the evaporation losses.
So color me unimpressed that conservation by reduced human consumption results in 1/4 of that amount being saved. It's not a big deal, or a big amount, in the grand scheme of things, particularly compared to agricultural usage on products which are mostly exported from the U.S..
Time to get serious about desalination, if California wants to keep its agricultural export industry. Or it could let e.g. China invest in growing their own rice, instead of in building "ghost cities".
P.S. While you are at it, stop drinking "almond milk" please; a quart of that runs about 345 gallons of water.
From the drift of the comments on this topic, one deduces that California is _not_ winning the drought.
Clearly you mean in the Charlie Sheen sense.
No one believes in that nonsense anymore...
Things are doing better in California because the job market has picked up, not because of the government. Our government is terrible, and people who are sensitive to useless bureaucracies should stay away.
But if you like a place where investors are still pretty easy with their money, or a place that is culturally very accepting of immigrants, then maybe California is for you. I believe San Jose has the second largest immigrant population in the US, about 35% of the residents are immigrants.
Answer why our job market is doing better, and you can see how the drought is not stopping us. The drought is hurting the agricultural industry, and if it continues we're all doomed, but right now we're doing well.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Who came up with that headline? You don't "win" a drought. You might beat a drought, or win against a drought.
No, we've got the biggest drought. So we win this round of the drought championship.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Just for fun you should peek in on Kansas some time. They're living the Republican dream!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
The fact is, that they need to start desalinating along their coast line, and providing water inland for 60 miles or so.
Right now, what has been keeping LA and SD going has been the Colorado River. However, lake mead is dropping FAST, since the drought is also spread all the way to vegas.
But, they start building desalination plants now, then if the drought persists, they can solve SD and LA, while saving water for Vegas.
BTW, this is where CONgress is so wrong. We desperately need to start building new nuke plants that will use the nuke waste. With these, they can provide electricity AND desalination.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Yup. Also, I wasn't aware 'the drought' was a competition like 'the super bowl
You ignoramus - the biggest game in the sport of drought is the Dust Bowl!
A warmer climate means more, not less, water across the planet as a whole, even if some individual areas may have worse droughts (though California's drought to date is not nearly as bad as the worst historical droughts, so to claim it is from warming is to ignore the difference between climate and local periodic weather patterns like droughts)
Common sense dictates this is so, because most of the surface of the planet is water, therefore a warmer climate means more water vapor entering the atmosphere. Anyone who has spent time in South America knows it can be hotter than hell but still humid.
What really needs to happen (for California and elsewhere) is cheap nuclear power generation and large-scale desalinization - no reason California could not be pumping lots of water all over the dry West, instead of ravenously consuming the aquifers they have now.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The biggest destinations in California are the Bay Area and LA, and people migrate there not for the quality of life (which sucks) or for gardening, but because a bunch of important companies have their headquarters there.
Furthermore, demographically, California isn't doing so well either:
http://knowmore.washingtonpost...
This works great...until the reserves run out. This is a man falling off a 50-story building declaring at floor 25, "Everything's fine so far!"
California is not doing well at all. The situation now clearly proves that economics and the status of a population have no relationship at all. Other examples abound. Donald Trump may be considered a mental wasteland. Yet he is a billionaire. Clearly there is no relationship between intelligence and the ability to make money. Our notions of economy are completely messed up. If economics involves the distribution of wealth which is what it is supposed to do then we can value the art or science of economics at zero. Economics is nonsense.
Water from desalination isn't covered by existing water rights, so the farmers would have to pay full market value for it. The cities won't supply water to the farmers because the farmers are currently hogging 75% of the water.
Just stop obstructing water sales and the market fixes the farmers growing cotton in Bakersfield problem. To the extent that it is a problem.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The current strategy to beat the drought is to cut back. Not bad for the short term, but technology can do much better if we worked on it. While desalination is expensive today it could be *much* cheaper with the application of much lower cost methods like carrbon nanofilters as described here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/s... http://www.industrytap.com/wat...
The problem is that Utah is in a drout too and the great Salt Lake is at one of the lowest levels it has ever been. There have been talks of pumping ocean water directly into it. If the Great Salt Lake is full, the Rocky Mtns get plenty of snow. If there is plenty of snow, the run off fills reservoirs and rivers all the way to CA.
The other good idea would be to dig a water way between the ocean and Death Valley. As Deat Valley is below Sea level, it would switch from a desert to a giant inland sea and provide moisture, not to mention some nice beach areas, ports and shipping and industry.
He has my vote in 2018!
Supposedly, El Nino is coming to help but won't fix the drough issue. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Supposedly, El Niño is coming to help but won't fix the drough issue. :(
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I love this headline, "California is winning the drought....but not really if it lasts a few extra years"..... ....circular thinking is circular thinking. California has an entire ocean next to it, desalination on a major level is probably the next step.
What Republicans? CA is run by Democrats. That's one of the reason why the natives are leaving. The only reason California's population is growing is due to immigration.
I don't care if the coastal cities and their inhabitants dry up and blow away. I want my almonds, dammit!