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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.
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.
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
The response to the drought by people and local governments has been great. If you go outside in a residential area of the bay area, you'll see plenty of brown lawns. Farmers have adapted by using more efficient irrigation techniques. Overall, California is capable of surviving the drought, or even a longer one.
The biggest problem is the state government. The state government manages water like it manages money: when a good year comes, they find some project to use it on, ignoring that there will not always be so much water/money. When the bad year inevitably comes, the resources have been allocated too many places, and there is a deficit. Unfortunately you can't borrow water the way you can borrow money.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Desalination requires equipment and sometimes energy, neither of which falls out of the sky.
I'm pretty sure energy does fall out of the sky. Some of these desalination plants use solar power.
http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-Solar-desalination-plant-5326024.php
Is it? Why is lake Shasta at 42% capacity then ( looks like this)?
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
There's plenty of drip-irrigation in the central valley. During the current drought, even more farmers have switched to it.
btw, drip irrigation is only a good thing during droughts. During times when there is enough water, flood irrigation is better for the environment, because it helps replenish the ground supply (and in the case of rice fields, it provides important wetlands for wildlife).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
People are always the issue. But I take your meaning.
Indeed in the 1930s the dust bowl exodus was by people who were farmers, or from towns and cities who's existence was 100% dependent on agriculture, for food and employment. At most this exodus was numbered in the thousands, not millions or anything. The 1930s dust bowl crisis (including the weather and horrible storms) was caused in large part by soil erosion, not from the drought itself per se. There was no irrigation. The drought triggered it no doubt, but it was the farming practices of the time that brought it on. Once this was realized and tillage techniques were altered, things settled down and droughts, though bringing crop failures, no longer bring the dusty conditions that were common in Oklahoma in the 1930s. If you've ever seen pictures of the dust storms back then, it really was truly apocalyptic-looking, and very frightening.
Things are very different in CA today. For one, the issue is not about soil erosion causing weather patterns and dust storms. For two, if and when CA does run out of water for agriculture, there really will be an exodus, but only from farms and agricultural areas, probably numbered in thousands, not unlike the dust bowl exodus in the 30s. Modern western living brings in foods from all over the world, so people living in a city in CA are, except for state-imposed water rationing, completely oblivious to the devastating effects of drought.
So all's good, right? After the final crisis, farmers will all leave and all that water will become available. And at only a 2% loss of the state's GDP. Win win. Very sad, but when it comes down to the bottom line, this is probably what will happen. Only the total loss to the GDP will be somewhat higher than 2% because there's an entire sector of the economy around agriculture that also generates its own part of the economy, including laborers.
The problem is that across the world, vast amounts of water are required for growing food, and this is not going to change anytime soon. Human survival depends on this. As a farmer myself, I get very discouraged at how out of touch people are with the food they eat. They have not idea where food comes from. Grocery stores stay stocked regardless of local, regional, or even national conditions. Rich people can continue to buy organic, as one person put it, "because [they] care," though they aren't sure what it is they are caring about. Food prices are lower than they've been in decades compared to incomes, but that's contributing to things like growing almonds when more traditional food staples could be grown.
California used to grow grains and other commodities before irrigation was developed. Probably farmers will return this way, but the amount of acres required to make a go of this is quite a bit higher than with vegetables or almonds, so we'll probably see far fewer farms survive, and they will have to be much larger.
Farmers have responded by pumping water from the aquifers at an unsustainable rate. The farmers with more money have been able to drill deeper wells to get more water leaving poorer farms behind. Yes, they have invested in water saving technologies but they are still using too much.
That's not the only two issues, unfortunately. If you take the size of the population, the length of the coastline, and the existing sea currents into consideration, there could be issues with brine rejection. You need to reject about 35 kg of salt per cubic meter of desalinated water. California is 40M people along a ~1400km coast line. That's about 29 people per meter of coast. So there's quite a lot of brine you'd have to get rid of somehow, preferably in the deeper parts of the continental shelf rather than right next to the coast.
Ezekiel 23:20
It reminds me of the joke about the CEO who was talking with his departing predecessor. The predecessor handed him three envelopes, with instructions to open them whenever things got bad enough that his job was on the line. One day, things got bad, so he opened the first envelope. The note inside read, "Blame your predecessor." He did, and things were okay for a while. Then, things got bad again, so he opened the second envelope. The note inside read, "Restructure the company." He did, and again, the crisis was averted. Finally, things went badly wrong a third time, so he opened the final envelope. Inside it, the note read, "Prepare three envelopes."
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
California used to grow grains and other commodities before irrigation was developed.
California grew winter crops before irrigation, because that's when the rains come. You can still see winter oats across the central valley when the canals are empty. When irrigation came, it allowed people to start growing melons.
The reason farmers have switched so much to almonds is because other crops (like peaches) are high-labor, and with recent improvements in shipping technology along with free-trade agreements, means American farmers are competing against the labor costs of peach farmers in Chile. You can harvest 20 acres of almonds with two people, but 20 acres of peaches can require dozens.
That said, California is still extremely important to the US as an agricultural region.
California produces a sizable majority of many American fruits, vegetables, and nuts: 99 percent of artichokes, 99 percent of walnuts, 97 percent of kiwis, 97 percent of plums, 95 percent of celery, 95 percent of garlic, 89 percent of cauliflower, 71 percent of spinach, and 69 percent of carrots (and the list goes on and on). Some of this is due to climate and soil
I don't know why Chile can compete on peaches but not on plums.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
How much water would those reservoirs have today if they hadn't dumped out so much of it in the name of saving a fish? From what I've heard, there went about 2/3rds of CA's stored water.
(fish that arguably aren't native in the first place, but that's a different topic)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?