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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

I too spend a lot of time in the Sierras, though more of the Southern end. I would concur with your conclusions. While I'm not the most cognizant of foliage, I can say that the watershed has dropped noticeably over the years. People might say "who cares? you only need water for overnight trips.", but that's not only wrong, but missing the big picture. The Sierras have been getting less snow, and LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct, refusing to even consider solutions such as desal plants. Public transportation to reduce AGW is also a no-brainer that no one seems to want. Damage has already been done, but there are actions that could be taken to improve the situation. No one seems to care, though.

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refusing to even consider solutions such as desal plants.

That's not really true; improved stormwater capture, potable reuse, and fixing leaking infrastructure are far more economical & environmentally friendly options being planned or undertaken. MWD put out a proposal last year for a billion dollar potable reuse plant and the SWRCB put out a draft report for regulation of direct potable reuse out last month.

Desalination plants are really an option of last resort given their cost, environmental impact, and capacity. The Carlsbad desalination plant cost $1 billion, runs their RO membranes at 800 PSI, produces 50 MGD, and is ~ $2,000 per acre-foot of water. Whereas OC's GWRS(indirect potable reuse) cost ~$623 million after an initial expansion last year, runs their RO membranes at 150 PSI, produces 100 MGD, and is ~ $476(~$850 before subsidies) per acre-foot.

> LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct

Those alfalfa farms where the entire crop is shipped off to China are a huge chunk of the state's water usage. The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops. If it was just vegetables and tree fruit it wouldn't be so bad.

> The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops.

Subsidies are a big problem. Washington actually has pretty good climate for growing almonds and there's plenty of resources for thirsty almonds... yet most almonds are grown in California because growers can assume water is essentially free.

Good luck running on a platform to end subsidies though. Media will immediately spin that into "shipping jobs overseas, hurting our poor local farmers". The conservative Central Valley will love that.

That actually would be a good argument for splitting CA in two. Culturally it's shocking it's one state anyway.

Culturally it's much more diverse than 2 states.. rural, LA, SF, modern suburban intermediate.

California is a strangely successful state considering that if it was a country it would probably have gone the way of Czechoslovakia ages ago.

Although the trick here in LA is we actually have these super rich mega water users, they have a lot of clout, they should be required to use desal to water their lawns but they won't do it, only the best for their mansions. If we made the super rich pay their fair share for taxes we would actually see some relief for northern california from the massive suckage from the south. If you look at the stats the water consumed by ordinary working people in LA is dwarfed by the amount consumed by just a handful of mega consumers who got a free pass from Governor Brown to keep sucking out that water for their massive gardens and trees and lawns.

This is completely irrational. Urban use (all urban use including "super rich mega water users" ?) is 8% of California's water use.

http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108

Residential users ("super rich") pay 40 times what agricultural users do and they get their water from the same sources. http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/23/california-drough...

The truth is that it would be completely cost effective to get urban water from desalination plants, but very expensive to replace farming water that way, which is now being taken from groundwater. But lets not let the facts get in the way of blaming people in mansions.

The reality is that it's too late at this point. The easy fixes might have worked if we could get worldwide buy-in 20 years ago but short of a planetary-scale engineering project or outright banning fossil fuel usage we're in for some bad times even before we factor in economic growth from India, China, and Africa.

Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions. And beyond that we need to start thinking about levelling out energy consumption entirely, even independent of CO2 emissions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U

Classic Newsroom clip but fact-checked as accurate, minus the hyperbole at the end about permanent darkness. We're already seeing majorly shifting weather patterns, movement of the jet stream, droughts, unprecedented wildfires, etc. We're already starting to see the first major cities lost due to rising sea levels - Miami is already sinking beneath the seas and it's only a matter of time before it exceeds the limits of engineering to fix it. It's built on porous limestone and borders directly on hundreds of square miles of swamp, so it's something of a worst-case scenario. You can't pump out water when it just comes right back in through the limestone, and even if you could we would be talking about hundreds of times as much wall as the Netherlands uses.

Every single building in Miami will need to be elevated Chicago/Seattle style or abandoned within the next decade or two. Otherwise people are going to start leaving rather quickly once the sewers start backflowing on a regular basis. All of modern society is built on the shoulders of sanitation infrastructure and it's going to get nasty once it stops working.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-...

https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath...

I wish I had something positive to say like "maybe this will finally get us to proactively solve our problems instead of assuming they can always be fixed at some future date" but I don't actually believe that will happen. We are unwilling to systematically factor in future risks into present costs. Heck, even we as a community don't do it properly - how many times are we going to get hacked before we learn to lock things down from day 1?

Sorry to be pessimistic but that's the reality at this point. Objections to this are political slant and wishful thinking. The US military's job is to be apolitical and make realistic assessments about future threats to our nation, and they're planning for increased levels of conflict due to climate change in the 21st century. It's happening and it's going to suck pretty bad.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN1...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-cl...

I wish I had something positive to say

When the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire as the Iraqis left, the prediction was that it would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got.

In the 1990's, they were predicting a global financial meltdown due to y2k and people were prepping for it -- putting away food stocks, etc. That got quietly solved and no one wakes up every day going "THANK GOD THEY SOLVED THAT AND WE AREN"T LIVING IN THE POST Y2K APOCALYPSE!!!!"

I think we can solve this. I also think if we do solve it, people will act like the fears we are expressing now about it were overblown. People are terrible about being unable to count the disasters that did not happen. When things go well, we seem to think that is "normal" even though it really is not.

I am aware we may not solve it and the world may, in fact, go to hell the way everyone is predicting. But may not and cannot are different things. But, you know, we are all dust in the wind anyway. In another million years, none of this really matters.

My experience is that if you have something positive to say, people pretty much ignore you. I am still trying to figure out how to get traction for being able to talk about things that actually work in various problem spaces. People mostly do not want to hear it. They are far more interested in being all emo about the state of the world while carrying on with their lifestyle as usual for the most part.

I fixed my fair share of Y2K bugs in COBOL in 1998-1999. I agree with you. I know from the work I did then that there would have been some pretty serious, life-disrupting issues had there not been the colossal effort to fix it all (payroll jobs in fact did fail to run, as did financial reports, report cards, etc.).

I'm generally an optimist. I think there will be fairly widespread support for environmental engineering in our state to protect and repair our natural areas. (There already is a lot of that.)

But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.

But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.

I know that you are aware that I am homeless in California and have been for about 4.5 years. Every place I camp with my two sons, we urinate on the local bushes and trees to intentionally try to grow better cover for our campsite.

Where we currently are, we are camped behind what we thought was a dead tree. Large parts of it are covered in lichen. With being peed on for months, it grew a whole new section and developed berries. Birds began nesting in it. Nearby, what was previously essentially a dead zone is alive with insects and smaller animals.

The large bird that routinely perches above us has stopped screeching constantly -- a territorial behavior intended to drive off competitors for its food -- and we recently witnessed multiple birds of the same species gather nearby in a copse of trees. We think these are all golden eagles and we think they may have paired off to mate, though we aren't sure. It was somewhere between 8 and 11 birds that we could count and it may have been more.

I am homeless and live without a car (and gave up my car a few years before I walked away from my corporate job) and everywhere I pee, the flora and fauna flourish.

My "boots" are probably on the ground a lot more than yours, and to me it looks like it isn't that hard at all to make a positive difference in this situation. Though I have no idea how to start a "please walk more and please pee on a tree" campaign. Nonetheless, everywhere I go, people begin walking more and the local environment visibly improves -- a thing I have written about some: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

I also have a deadly medical condition that is incurable and I am getting well when doctors claim that cannot be done. So I spent over a year at death's door and have spent a lot of years coming back from that. Thus, what we are doing to our environment looks solvable to me. I have done harder things.

But I am a homeless woman that everyone dismisses as insane because, obviously, only men in white lab coats can figure out how to help deathly ill people (for scads of money, of course) not former homemakers who are dirt poor because of a) being a woman that no one will listen to and b) having an expensive debilitating medical condition.

So, to my eyes, the big challenge is figuring out how to get an audience and how to present the information in a manner that will be palatable. If I can get off the street in the near future, I imagine I will work on that -- because we all need a hobby, I guess.

Well, there are some important differences between berry-bearing trees and the larger conifers, as well as all the various different microbiomes we have around the sierra. There's chaparral, scrub, high desert, foothill, subalpine and alpine environments, and they all have different needs and react differently to environmental changes. The high desert stuff, for instance, is really good at coming back from extended dry hot periods. Chaparral, scrub, and foothill aren't likely to change drastically, I don't think (in my totally uneducated opinion).

I'm more worried about the subalpine forest, the kind of stuff you see in the western Sierra from about 3,000 to 8,000 foot elevation. That's where we're seeing the worst of the tree die-off and wildfire disasters, and it's an ecology that takes much longer to return to what we think of as "healthy". The watersheds in these areas is also a major, very important part of the state's water supply, so impacts on these ecosystems have the potential to affect communities all over the state.

Best wishes to you. Good to hear from you again.

there are some important differences between berry-bearing trees and the larger conifers

Yes, one of which is that some pines only reproduce in the aftermath of fire.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BOREASFire/

http://creationrevolution.com/plants-that-need-fire-to-survi...

"So other than that Lincoln, how did you like the play?"

I'll make an assumption here that is, the oil fires if extinguished would leave something of immense value behind for resources companies to extract? That might be why effort and money was spent on extinguishing them. Why else would the Iraqis set them on fire, so people couldn't have them?

I'm not saying the engineers did a bad job, at all. It sounds like they worked miracles, but the issue with climate change is that the global money distributers and politicians want engineers to stop people from solving this problem. they just don't seem to care. There is no consent given for the right people to fix it.

Solving the problem in this case using common sense and reasoning, just means you're stepping on self-interested, highly deluded people's toes.

The real problem that needs solving first is the baking and political systems. People problems.

Common folk seem to want the issue resolved but have taken the failed stance of being a single entity who can't make a difference, without realising they're everything, the way they vote, travel, eat and consume all are part of the solution. We're all feeding the machine.

The consumption levels in the world are just out of control, I wonder how we have gotten this far. Even today in Rome I was looking at the millions of cigarette butts on he ground, a storm was forecast and I just felt sorry for Mother Earth, she needs rain to provide for us but when it happens, she is rewarded with toxic rubbish ending up in the oceans. She has provided us with everything and that's what we give back.

By the way I think you're right, if the problem was one of pure engineering, science and reasoning, we wouldn't have a problem. In that sense there is a positive side.

What is wrong with us?

Yeah, they lit oil wells -- petroleum. And after the fires were extingushed, sometimes with large amounts of water, the water- and ash-covered desert bloomed like no one could remember in at least twenty years. This did not make the news. It was a footnote in stories with more drama and human interest.

The rich people failing to do something effective about this are fools. They are like the hyenas in "The Lion King" destroying the landscape -- the very source of their wealth. Without abundance, wealth dies.

I blog about varying topics -- homelessness, managing health issues without drugs, etc -- topics to empower ordinary people to solve their problems with minimal resources. There isn't much money it and a lot of people are openly dismissive of me. But not doing it scares me more. No one seems to be effectively addressing these problems.

I would be thrilled if you would check out some of my writing and Tweet it or otherwise share it.

> When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got.

The problem here is that the parallel to the burning oil wells are already on fire, have been on fire for years, and the collective response hasn't been one determined to address this, it's been a fight between people who are saying there's a problem and people who are saying the idea of burning oil wells is a conspiracy (and even if it's not, we didn't light the oil wells on fire).

The two examples you gave have a significant mitigating factor -

They are not massively cross disciplinary.

Oil wells were a specific problem solved by finding a solution possible with current tech.

Same for y2k. The fear got us on the other side, and the damage was far less than expected.

But.

We have been harping on climate change forever, there are vested interests who have found it useful to cloud civic thought with FUD, there is a political movement which has evolved (implying that even the base debate was fraught), to openly mock science and research.

Working on climate change is further hampered by it being vague and imprecise, dependent on our improvements in science and tech.

It also severely curtails the options of growing economies who see it as the west robbing them blind, living like kinds and then denying them the same quality of life.

Global warming requires people around the world to feel and believe they are in the same boat, which is worth saving, with other people they share a lot in common with.

Since that is a pipe dream no one is working on, broad political solutions are out, leaving weird targets and alliances to move forward. Targets which most people don't want to meet because it means engines cost more, products become expensive, and margins thin.

This is not a problem solved the same way.

I have not found it necessary to convince anyone global warming is real to inspire them to walk more:

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

So, in my mind, your objections are irrelevant. There are plenty of Americans -- the so-called 99% that rich assholes would like to treat like sheeple and give Basic Income -- whose lives are in the toilet. I in no way need to convince them they are saving the world. I just need to get solutions into their hands that make their lives work better. The solutions that work are lightweight and low cost. If you can arrange your life so that you do not need a car, your quality of life can go up dramatically even if you are some "loser" failing at having a spiffy well-paid career. And then you are doing less harm to the environment even though saving the environment was not on your agenda.

I am a big believer in enlightened self interest. Our current system does not work for most people. We have a shrinking/shrunken middle class and most people's lives are just not working, even if they are doing everything the system tells them is the right thing to do.

The gig economy is growing and Millenials are insisting more on walkable neighborhoods and many of them live without a car. To the best of my ability, I try to encourage people who are failing to get a job to stop looking for a job and embrace the gig economy.

This is not a movement I need to start. It is already happening because no car and flexible work just works better for some people. But I can toss in my two cents worth and hopefully make the transition process a little easier for some folks, basically.

But it's not a black/white thing where once we've gone too far, the bad things happen and it's too late to act.

Things can get _way, way_ worse than this, and we still need to do everything we can asap.

>> The easy fixes might have worked if we could get worldwide buy-in 20 years ago

This is completely true - it's just sad that even now, we can't seem to make the right decisions. Both democrats and republicans have had the opportunity to head this off and have done little to nothing to stop it.

Every time one of these threads come up, I still see Carter's speech in 1977 about the energy crisis: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-...

That was 35+ years ago, what have we done since then? Not much. Reduce emissions by a fraction here and there while other countries ramp up their industrial revolutions and outweigh any gains we make in this country.

>> Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions.

Not sure how this would even be accomplished. Even if you took off all the gas powered cars on the road and replaced them with electric vehicles it wouldn't be enough - and then you have to contend with the pollution on the Li-Ion battery production and recycling issues.

I'm not being sarcastic, but would like to know what you'd propose that would work. In smaller countries mass transit works well, but since our country is so large geographically and our mass transit differs from state to state, I'm not sure even if you outlawed cars all together and just ran with public transportation that would help either.

>> Not sure how this would even be accomplished.

Essentially an end to fossil-fuel combustion as far as is technologically feasible. A large-scale rollout of nuclear power, replacing literally everything, with enough capacity to cover the peaks. Large-scale electric vehicle rollout where feasible, large-scale synthetic-liquid fuel (derived from nuclear energy and atmospheric sources) rolled out where direct electric is infeasible (colder climates and aircraft).

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jrse/4/3/10.106...

There is no technical impediment to a large-scale nuclear rollout. We literally have unlimited power at our fingertips and we cannot find the will to use it. The only thing we need is the political will to solve the waste disposal problem - which is another of those problems that humanity refuses to solve until their house is burning down. Between reprocessing and our geologically-sound repositories we can easily solve the problem until we have cheap and reliable launch capability in 50-100 years (eg launch loop) and launch it into the sun. Arguably we have that now - the Atlas-V has done 106 consecutive successful launches now.

This is actually why I say that we need to solve energy consumption on a long-term basis as well. Nuclear is so good that we will literally poison our planet with waste heat unless we preemptively solve that problem. Depending on your figures the impact of waste heat is between 1% and 50% as significant as the greenhouse impact of fossil fuels. The number varies based on how much of the atmosphere you are considering venting the heat towards - a vast majority of our energy is dissipated within say 100 meters of the surface and a vast majority occurs in cities that make up say 1% of the total surface area.

We can certainly bring everyone up to a first-world standard of living but we can't continue indefinite population growth and indefinite per-capita increases in energy consumption. A 25-100x increase in total energy consumption can easily happen within a few decades if we continue to allow population to boom while also increasing per-capita consumption, both at exponential rates. Exponential growth happens fast.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/waste-heat-global-warming.h...

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/01/waste-heat-as-a-contribu...

LA is literally sucking them dry with the aqueduct

That's not really how aqueducts work, They don't suck water from mountains, they collect and divert it. Rivers and lakes downstream mountains lose access water. The mountains don't lose any water that they wouldn't have anyway. You can blame gravity, not aqueducts or Los Angeles.

The tree die off is an effect of the long California drought.

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