California is not in drought
latimes.com
latimes.com
The headline is the epitome of burying the lede. If you read to the bottom, the writer clearly lays out the actual thesis: rainfall is the same - the problem is that snowpack is seriously declining. Which is kind of like a moisture battery. This is why climate change can counterintuitively cause both "droughts" and floods.
I'll admit that it took the longest time for me to understand the concept myself.
Compared to the last 1,000 years, yes.
Compared to the abnormally wet 1900s-era patterns that established our current expectations, no.
This assertion seems to compare historical rainfall averages across the entire nation against just the SW region.
ref: https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate...
But it isn't. 20 to 10 years ago every winter in norcal was heavy rains for a few months.
That's happening less and less, many winters are now almost entirely dry (like current one).
Being born and raised in California and, and having been there until my mid 20s with occasional year long long projects and several trips back to see family I can tell you the winter snowfall are definitely lower.
This years crazy January freak me the hell out after having lived in Colorado where it's typical to have a slight snow fall at night into the morning and then have it all melt with near 70F by the afternoon.
We all knew that CA is susceptible to an incredibly precarious situation in regards to water and we were bombarded with a need for conservation since I was a kid in the 90s.
What never happened, however, was meaningful infrastructure investment and reform to accommodate for the rainy years that could be so heavy as to wipe out the roads to Big Sur, or make those celebrities mansions in Malibu fall into the Pacific.
And this is the problem, much like the homeless issue, money can be taxed for the purpose but so many either delay or skim so much that what is left is never going to be enough to actually solve the problem in any meanigful way.
When I was doing a project at the Clim Co-Lab for MIT, I also hung out at Caltech meetups and the topic of water reclamation was all the rage--the goal is to capture the water run off and replenish the aquifers in record rainy years for later usage.
Many spoke passionately about climate change's impact on the way of life in California, specifically in SoCal where we're from. But then politicians got their way with the budgets and it was this kind of non-sense [0] we ended up with to protect the LA reservoir that is a critical part of it's ability to meet the water needs of greater LA (where Caltech is in Pasadena).
I've seen this all my life, and it's why I decided to just no live in CA for any prolonged period; which pains me a multi-generational Californian with deep roots there. But whether it's this, their reaction to the shutdowns, homelessness, crime, poverty, nuclear waste storage etc... it's always the same result.
Sheer incompetence is tolerated far too much at the leadership level, and this is the crux of the problem. California has the resources to solve this critical issue, despite it's frontier-centric water right's issue, but it seems almost intent on gaming this like they did with Enron until it all blows up in their face, again.
Also, Colorado has decided to turn off the tap to the Colorado river due to the massive population growth in the last decade or so as they have had severe water wars due to periodic drought years.
I honestly hope renewable based desalination solves this, but I fear their will be like 20 years of deliberations and red-tape to wade through before anything gets done. Despite Carlsbad having a working plant [1] and model to follow for over a decade now--I was still in CA when it opened as I worked in the area.
0: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/150812-sh...
The shade balls are primarily to prevent the water's antibacterial chemicals from interacting with sunlight and becoming poisonous.
This became necessary after some recent upstream changes in the process.
The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. So when politicians say "drought", they actually mean "deficit". There's more than enough rain and snowpack, but we're not collecting enough of it to meet demand. We could collect more--at great expense--or use less.
As i mentioned with my opening quip, something like 50% of the water that we could collect is allowed to run into the sea. The somewhat infamous reason for this is the endangered Delta Smelt. The truth though is that there's actually no limit to the water that would be used. Growers would still be demanding more. We allow the creation of billionaires on water rights here, through the growing of insanely water-needy crops like almonds[1].
Whenever this subject comes up, I recommend reading "Cadillac Desert". It really opened my eyes about the history and politics of water in the West. The "drought" talk is all kind of a scam, and it's good to see articles that kind of hit on that.
> But Central Valley lawmakers are hopping mad that the governor didn’t declare drought statewide, because they want the rules bent to allow the opposite — more water from reservoirs to grow their crops, less for urban residents and migrating fish.
Current models predict a warmer and wetter California punctuated by extremely dry periods [3]. This is really bad news for a couple of reasons: Sierra snowpack accounts for around 70% of the state's overall water storage, which means it would need to double its total liquid water storage (and where is that supposed to go?), and agriculture is an important part of California's economy and contributes significantly to national food production, but also uses 80% of the state's water supply.
And then there are the aquifers. Subterranean water has been pumped out faster than it has refilled for decades [5], and wells have had to be dug deeper and deeper. In 2016, some communities ran entirely out of water because they were built on underground water supplies that had gone dry. Some of this water storage can't be replenished, because the substrate that stores the water gets compressed as water is extracted and then can't store water again.
Considered altogether, it is currently impossible to collect enough warm water to meet the state's needs.
I love California but the long term water outlook for the state might be enough to get me to move elsewhere. It's very grim.
[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/02/sierra-snowpack-at-61...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
[3]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...
[4]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3062/fs20163062.pdf [pdf]
[5]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-cal...
As far as powering that goes, we'd either have to start deploying as much renewable energy generation as physically possible or get over our collective fear of building more nuclear power plants. Or both.
One of those self contained, passively safe tanker truck sized 100 MWe reactors that last 30 years that LLNL has proposed a few times sounds like an awful nice way of powering your 40 MW desalinization plant...
I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also expensive, in both up-front and ongoing costs, and the predicted intermittent wet years are going to make the economics of desalination tricky. And then there's the environmental impact; it's a good bet that 40 years from now, the state will be even drier than it is now, and 40 years of brine dumped up and down the coastline may have more severe consequences than we are anticipating. (To their credit, the Carlsbad project has made a large effort to remediate this with the construction of 60 acres of wetlands.)
For perspective, the Carlsbad plant is the largest in the western hemisphere and it produces enough water for 400,000 residents in one county. It is, aptly, a drop in the bucket.
Can brine be duped on regular and/or sandy land and make it more fertile via minerals, or will briny/salty land be less fetile?
What does that mean?
https://m.economictimes.com/news/science/sulphuric-acid-clou...
Desalination is easy for household water but probably not practical for farming.
But running out of household water is almost entirely a political and allocation problem to begin with.
So while desalination is one way to prevent dire situations, there's no reason to even have dire situations.
Do reasonable people still believe we can simply produce millions of square miles of solar panels and wind mills(that have their own production and maintenence issues), and that will somehow solve our energy issues? It's just not going to happen. We need nuclear power....and more.
It's sad because it's probably the only thing that'll save us at this point, but it seems to be political suicide. Most of the problems surrounding it are solvable if we desired to solve them. (By 'desired' I mean funding research at an actionable level even though the current regulatory hurdles are expensive)
On a side note, I wonder what the energy consumed mining and refining uranium versus the power that can be generated from it is compared to getting the resources for photovoltaics or the neodymium you need for practical wind turbines.
I lost a lot of respect for anxiety over drought in California when my university set out little fact cards ("Please save water!") on all the dining tables with the following information handily presented:
Rainfall last year: 210% of annual average rainfall
Rainfall this year: 20% of annual average rainfall.
That's not a drought. We're significantly above average over just the last two years. (As of years ago.) How can ABOVE-average water supply be an emergency?
The most obvious confounding factor is that California relies heavily on Sierra snowpack to provide water throughout the year. Snow that melted last year and ran out to sea is simply no longer available to us this year, no matter how much of it there was. There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.
Further, we need the vast majority of this moisture to come as snowpack in the year it does fall, so it can be naturally distribute throughout the warmer months. When most of that water arrives in the spring and summer, it quickly runs off. As things get drier, this problem worsens since the ground becomes less able to absorb moisture in the short term.
It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".
Water is cheap.
You'll note that there was one completed in the 2010s and one in the 2000s. There were 33 completed in the 1920s.
The US produces 30 times as much as it did in 1920, in real terms. It is "economically plausible" for a nation 30 times richer than it used to be to produce some tiny fraction of the infrastructure it used to produce.
Californians might not want to build reservoirs, Californians might be too incompetent to build reservoirs, Californians might prefer blaming a snowpack that melts out slightly earlier to building reservoirs, California might prefer saving snails and slugs to building reservoirs, but California, undeniably, has the money to build reservoirs.
Reservoirs require land with natural geographic boundaries (such as valleys), will displace any human populations in them, and will completely destroy whatever existing flora and fauna exists in there. Perhaps Californians are trying to wrangle with the idea that destroying ecosystems at great financial expense to deal with the problems caused by destroying other ecosystems isn't the right way to approach problem-solving.
Seems like the own definition of forest to me.
Incompatible with arsonists and liquid gold diggers in any case. They must to choose one path or the other. Is either returning the water that forests own, so there is clouds, so there is snow, and punish severely arsonists, nature eaters and boycoters..
Or accept the place being sucked dry for money until the resource vanishes for everybody
Deal with beef and dairy first, then we can talk about almonds: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths
People tend to think about water distribution similarly to electricity, which is completely wrong. With electricity, there is one all-encompassing grid that everyone uses, and if some people use more of it, there is less of it available for others. Water is not like that: it is as if there were thousands of independent grids that cannot be easily connected, because pumping water over large distances is most often prohibitively expensive.
~99% of free flowing water in CA would evaporate or dump in a tiny number of rivers which are tapped for urban water. The only reason many of these watersheds appear separate is 100% of the water is removed long before it enters the ocean. The Kern River being a great example that used to dump into the San Joaquin River but none of that water flows into the ocean today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California
PS: Wells generally tap flowing water even if it’s simply not obvious that’s what’s going on. Basically, the ground can only hold so much water and it normally absorbs excess from rain which eventually flows into streams etc.
This was news to me, thank you. Do you have a source for further reading?
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/28/californ...
Yes, it does, ultimately, in very large part. It may not traverse all of the same infrastructure, but it comes from the same sources, which have limited capacity. (And, in California, quite a lot of both urban and agricultural water is delivered by either the California State Water Project or the federal Central Valley Project, and an additional fraction of both urban and agricultural water is from sources downstream from the diversions for those water projects, and thus competes directly with them.)
> However, it is not clear at all that agricultural uses even compete with urban uses.
Yes, its quite clear that they do compete quite directly in California.
> People tend to think about water distribution similarly to electricity, which is completely wrong. With electricity, there is one all-encompassing grid that everyone uses, and if some people use more of it
In California, water is very much like that. Even the sources that seem separate (“I have my own well”) tap into sources (aquifers in the case of wells) shared with, and thus competing with, other uses.
> it is as if there were thousands of independent grids that cannot be easily connected
It’s really not like that all in California, especially outside of certain parts of rural Northern California: the vast majority of both the urban and agricultural parts of the rest of the state are dependent on the two big water projects and/or Colorado River water.
Most today comes from the State Water Project, which pumps all the way from northern California where the Sierra Nevadas drain into rivers and this is the principle source for both Los Angeles and for the Central Valley. Los Angeles also still gets some from the Colorado River pumped across the Mojave, but this is arguably even more insane as it feeds four major metros in Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, none of which have their own local water sources to sustain a large city.
LA basin was a pretty terrible place to put the country's second largest metro. LA did originally get its water from local groundwater basins, but those tapped out when the population was still around 6,000. It was solved by building the original Los Angeles aqueduct to pump all the way from Owens Valley. What other city can say its most famous street is named after a water engineer?
The corrupt system will persist and urban users will continue to overpay, but at some point before people start dying of thirst the politics of unduly favoring agriculture will become untenable.
"Records show 68 million gallons passed through the pipeline in 2019, and an estimated 58 million gallons flowed through the pipeline last year."
You have to look at the second and third order consequences of such a policy. Do you think the farmers eat the cost and business in California goes on as usual? The water cost will be paid, one way or another.
From 2015: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...
"it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. Residents across the state are being told to take shorter showers and stop watering their lawns, but the acreage devoted to the state’s almond orchards have doubled in the past decade. The amount of water that California uses annually to produce almond exports would provide water for all Los Angeles homes and businesses for almost three years."
Nuts are calorie dense, and most foods require as much if not more water per calorie. Food simply requires a lot of water. For example, A 5 oz glass of wine takes 34 gallons. A head of iceberg lettuce takes 16 gallons of water.
You will note that the motherJones article compares almond water things like home use, not other food sources.
Yet we never see beef or dairy demonized the way almonds are.
Believe me, there are better plant milks than almond milk (pretty much any of them), but dairy has such a higher impact on the environment (as does beef), it's incredibly disingenuous and hypocritical to complain about almonds before addressing dairy and beef.
A snack size serving of almonds is around 20 of them, representing about 20 gallons. A side dish of lettuce is probably about half of one, 8 gallons.
That said, California's water is probably best used in high value add industries like semiconductor manufacturing.
edit: i am apparently worse than an almond milk drinker, since coffee uses even more water at 1,056:1.
and learning even more, cow-milk is about 2000 gallons of water to make a gallon of milk!
so i really have no idea about any of this and its all surprising
https://shamelesshousewife.wordpress.com/tag/how-much-water-...
Irrigating California deserts and semi-arid regions for agriculture isn’t just some kind of random vanity project.
California has some of the best soil for farming in the country (or even the world). A gallon of water used for agriculture in California will be more effective than a gallon used for agriculture in most other places.
As far as I know there is nothing that makes California a great place for semiconductor manufacturing. A gallon of water used for semiconductors in California isn't more effective than a gallon used for semiconductor manufacturing anywhere else.
That argues for prioritizing in California water for agriculture over water for semiconductors.
Also there's much actual semiconductor manufacturing in Silicon Valley anymore.
Honestly not sure if you are joking or just being glib? Nuts are extremely calorie dense.
Almonds - 165 calories per oz
Iceberg - 4 calories per oz
Romaine - 5 calories per oz
Nuts are primarily used to add flavouring to a meal based on (say) rice, or as snacks rather than full meals.
Most food isn’t consumed purely for its caloric value, but the calorie density of nuts means that they are often a major source of calories as consumed.
> Nuts are primarily used to add flavouring to a meal based on (say) rice
Arguably, preference for the flavor is a result of them being used for a long time to add additional fat and protein calories to a meal based on rice. They don’t have to be the major component to be significant that way, since rice has little protein and less fat and is far less calorie dense than nuts are.
> or as snacks rather than full meals.
Snacks tend to be eaten largely to fill a caloric demand (not necessarily need, as it can be in people habituated to surplus) and a nut-based snack may be a bigger calorie chunk than a “full meal” of less calorie dense foods the same person eats.
https://waterfootprint.org/en/water-footprint/product-water-...
Many crops around the world receive zero irrigation, the only water they get comes from rain. Much of the cereal grains (not all, but still much) are grown without irrigation.
In Iowa we drain the land by putting porous pipes a few feet down which are interlinked and drain into the rivers. If we didn’t, the water table comes up all the way to the surface and much of the land would be ephemeral ponds for significant portions of the year.
That is a fascinating. How extensive and interlinked are those pipes?
Here's some drainage basics:
https://fyi.extension.wisc.edu/drainage/files/2015/09/Basic_...
There is extensive law regarding drainage and interconnection obligations between landowners, Iowa is pretty flat, there just has to be a path between your fields and a local river. All of the roads are edged with drainage ditches, there are bigger much deeper ditches where necessary to direct water.
http://publications.iowa.gov/19966/1/IADOT_tr_497_Iowa_Drain...
The problem is political because California has water rights and the legislature does not want buy the water rights from farmers or use eminent domain to seize them with fair compensation.
Yup. Beef and dairy are far worse, yet almonds get shit on: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths
The missing information from these almonds vs cows debate is how big the two respective industries are in California. (I don't actually know this answer, so I'm curious if anyone knows.)
Some of it will end up in the ground and eventually become part of the water table in that region, eventually coming back out via wells to be reused.
A lot of it will be transpired into the air by the plant. Some of that will condense out and end up in the ground. The winds in those areas tend to blow toward the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east. I suspect a lot of that water ends up rain on the west side of those mountains, where much of it makes its way back to the farming regions.
Some will be broken down in chemical reactions in the plant, with the H and O being combined with other elements to form various compounds. It would take someone with a much more extensive knowledge of plant biology than I have to say what happens to those compounds and if any of the H and O used for them ends up as water again later.
I've never seen any analysis that actually looks at where the water goes after the nut is produced.
Of course the atoms are conserved. Any plant matter that is consumed by humans or burned will end up back as water while it isn’t tied up in your body or buried.
Certainly some will go to groundwater and some will evaporate and get locally precipitated... but depending on weather patterns some water vapor will leave the state and rain down past the mountains or into the sea.
A large ecological transformation could be undertaken to plant forests and other plants to increase water capacity and make more water cycle locally, but that kind of transformation would be terrificly expensive and environmentally controversial. (but could work in places... there are a lot of rainforests out there where if you burned them down they would be deserts.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_cisterns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_stepwells_in_Gujara...
Los Angles piloted a "smart cisterns" program in 2015 that captured residential roof runoff in centrally monitored and operated cisterns, which could hold or release water according to flood conditions and local demand:
https://stormwater.wef.org/2015/11/los-angeles-homeowners-ca...
Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Underg...
The state needs to liquidate 90% of its forests ASAP, because reducing carbon emissions and blaming political enemies aint gonna turn California into a tropical climate. It's an arid state prone to hundred-year droughts, and it's not the place where you want to see lots of trees, not unless you also enjoy seeing the occasional massive wall of flame devouring the countryside.
To those downvoting - this is a town-owned parcel in my neighborhood, just a few miles down the hill from the CZU complex evacuation zone. https://i.imgur.com/PVUoUVg.jpg
"Academics believe that between 4.4 million and 11.8 million acres burned each year in prehistoric California. Between 1982 and 1998, California’s agency land managers burned, on average, about 30,000 acres a year. Between 1999 and 2017, that number dropped to an annual 13,000 acres[...] California would need to burn 20 million acres — an area about the size of Maine — to restabilize in terms of fire."
https://massivesci.com/articles/megafire-california-climate-...
Unfortunately this article was written in Sept 2020 so I think (but don't know) that those are baked in. But in the big picture, yes, nature will eventually burn what needs to be burned. However the hope is for controlled burns, not burns that destroy lives and property. The Camp Fire in 2018 alone killed 85 people. That's a steep price to pay for refusing to do controlled burns.
So the data the article is using is from before the 2020 fire season. Only 15.4 million acres to go.
But over the last century or so, well intentioned environmentalism has meant that these fires get put out before they get going. This has led to a very dense accumulation of this underbrush and young growth trees, which essentially have turned California forests into tinderboxes. Now when a fire starts and gets out of control, it gets so intense that it takes out old growth trees with it.
We’ve managed to turn natural forest fires from something that was a rejuvenative part of the ecosystem’s life cycle into an apocalyptic death blow.
Seems like you're talking out your ass about something you don't understand. To make the claim that "90% of California's forest shouldn't exist"(paraphrasing, correct me if I misinterpreted) as you did in one of your other comments is absolutely absurd. It illustrates a complete lack of understanding regarding the extremely varied and countless ecosystems present in California. California is not "a desert", California "has a lot of desert".
To be clear though: It definitely HAS been proven that the absurd amounts of fire suppression California has engaged in over the past several decades has indeed increased the severity of wildfires[1].
[1] https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/ES14...
Been thinking of trying to organize something to clear out some of that crap. I know our neighbors take it upon themselves to cut park trees that encroach on their properties.
Given the close calls I'm really surprised that there isn't a strong rallying around removing fuel.
Can't build housing in cities with MASSIVE housing shortages because we need to "preserve historical character" of the laundromats that's currently there wasting space.
Can't cut down trees or do controlled burns to prevent turning much of California into a hellfire for months because "conservationism"
All of this is of course mainly tied to maintaining property values. And keeping the wrong people out of the community.
Why are people such selfish assholes?
California is no longer as big a source of lumber as it once was.
"According to the California Forestry Association, tree density in the Sierra Nevada is too high when compared with the region’s historical rates, creating an elevated fire hazard. It estimates there was an average of 40 trees per acre in the Sierras roughly 150 years ago but puts that number today at hundreds of trees per acre [...] The U.S. Forest Service estimates that California has 129 million dead trees, most in the central and southern Sierras. Insects and drought are to blame for the high numbers."
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/08/03/california-timber-firms-mayb...
But California makes this incredibly costly and difficult to do, even on private land. You need to submit 500 pages of paperwork for each cut, and the state has been notorious in dragging its heels to approve these harvesting plans.
In terms of the fascination with "old growth", an old growth tree is just a tree of a certain diameter, and these tend to survive forest fires.
Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved as in Maine, rather than the dangerous pest that trees are in arid climates.
They just never got the memo that California is not New England and the role played by trees in our ecosystem is very different. California needs trees like Australia needs rabbits.
And so now we have 130 million dead trees, ready to kill hundreds of people, cause billions in property damage, and destroy air quality in the state, just so people can preserve these unscientific romantic notions of "preserving forests", when our top public policy priority should be to reduce the amount of land covered by forests back to safe levels.
For some groups it's like a religious thing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Ancient_Order_of_Druids...
> Really the problem in California is that a lot of people from the East Coast have moved here and decided that forests were some precious resource that needs to be preserved
That seems pretty speculative. Doesn’t it seem more likely that people just don’t want the forests near them to burn, so that their houses don’t burn down either? And now, most of the state is “near” someone?
The wounded souls crying about greedy timber companies clear cutting forests in the 17th Century or whatnot are strangely silent about the Ohlone regularly burning down 10 million acres a year. Because the Ohlone realized that in the arid western U.S. (what used to be called "the great American desert"), trees were dangerous elements that needed to be suppressed.
this is for large-scale harvesting. I'm seeing <2 months from public comment close to THP approval, usually 2 weeks [1]. how long do you think is reasonable?
individual lot tree removal is a pretty straightforward form [2]. provide reason, site plan, maybe arborist report, etc.
[1] https://caltreesplans.resources.ca.gov/Caltrees/Report/ShowR...
[2] https://www.placer.ca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/40240/Tree-Per...
Agricultural and Prescribed Burn Notices are currently approved in the vast majority of the state [1]. and you can see from the historical data [2] that only Aug - Oct have significant restrictions.
(Rolling eyes).
Seriously, this is getting ridiculous. This tunnel vision is defeatening. Enough is enough.
This is like claiming that the solution to remove computer bugs is to smash the computer against the floor. See?. No bugs survived.
And now the myth of the good savage.
I don't think that what (maybe) worked for a population of, lets say, 20.000 Ohlone Indians with bronze age tools will be scalable to solve the problems of the entire LA population. Do you think that we have the same complexity of problems, same longevity, or that we use the land in the same way that indians did?
We have better tools now. Ecology, science, knowledge based in facts, satellites without turtles added, scientific police. Maybe we just could try to use it instead?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-g...
Except for that whole pesky "lack of rain" thing--which was part of "climate" last I checked.
That would seem to indicate that California's Central Valley really isn't the best climate for growing almonds.
80% actually[0], and that only uses 8% of agricultural water in California. Given that dairy consumes 15% and only produces 1.4% of world yield (plus it can easily be done elsewhere), perhaps we should focus on that first.
Same thing, for practical purposes.
This is what economists sometimes call a stock-flow inconsistent argument. Water, like money, circulates, and to stick your finger on one part of that chain and insist that something is being used by X and thus not available for Y does more to obfuscate than enlighten. Some of the water "spent" on agriculture then evaporates into the air and ends up as snowfall where it is "spent again" on skiing, and then it melts and travels down a river and lands in hetch-hetchy where it is "spent" on someone in San Francisco taking a shower. Things like subsidies matter, government's role in diverting water from A to B matters. But just as more rains fall on rural areas than urban areas, you will see more water used to support agriculture than to support cities. That does not mean that anyone is taking away anyone's else water and using it up for some nefarious purpose.
It is true that water that evaporates is likely to someday fall somewhere as rain or snow. However agriculture is going to spread a lot of water during summer. At that point it evaporates very efficiency. But unfortunately during summer it is unlikely that anywhere in California will have the conditions for rain, so that water is going to fall in some other place. Normally Colorado, from which it is unlikely to go back into California.
So from the point of California, water used in agriculture is gone. Not to be seen again any time soon.
Therefore water given to California agriculture in any given year is unlikely to come back to California within that year. So for planning purposes, water given to agriculture should be considered mostly consumed and available to no other use within California.
And as the climate becomes hotter, this becomes even more true. A hotter climate means faster evaporation and an easier time for it to blow over the Rockies. Which is part of the reason why the trend as the climate changes is for land to the west of the Rockies to become ever drier, while land to the east to become wetter. (Most of the water to the east comes from the Gulf of Mexico.)
Not OP.
The argument made in Cadillac Desert is pretty much the opposite: in order to irrigate California and to give drinking water to its inhabitants, we have damned and diverted many rivers elsewhere with some very large ecological effects.
Another thing to take into account is the salinization of soil as an effect of irrigation: every time water evaporates it leaves behind a salt deposit. This is a process we don't know how to revert and it's considered to be an important historical factor in the rise and fall of civilizations, migration patterns etc.
I'm not an expert in this area but I have strong doubts that this argument is useful in this case.
Let's think of an example. Two people are die because of dehydration. Luckily they happen to find a full 1 liter water bottle.
One of the them quickly grabs it and drinks it all. Then she tells the utterly shocked other person: "Don't you worry, water, like money, circulates. You see, I will eventually pee out this water and it will evaporate and it will become rain and so on".
My point is, that the amount of usable water matters. If you have X liters of waters from wells, rivers and so on each year that you can access, it won't be any more just because there is a water cycle.
CA climate has been much drier in the past, even before global warming. We seem to have this discussion every few years when there's a drought, but quickly forget. It seems like we do the same thing with wildfires and earthquakes.
That is to say, we should be building desalination plants in California. Israel figured out a way to do this economically already. It's high time for CA to follow suit.
[1] https://www.sdcwa.org/your-water/local-water-supplies/seawat...
In other words: California does not value water equally between use cases -- to the point where certain crops are exploiting that imbalance. E.g. almonds might be a special case since, while water intensive, there may be fewer alternative geographies. Cattle, however, are plenty-viable elsewhere & shouldn't receive such an imbalanced incentive to consume water.
One natural starting point: One liter of water is priced uniformly regardless of use...
Before we have desalination, we need more renewable energy.
It kind of sounds like it has everything to do with people, unless people aren't eating that agriculture or eating whatever that agriculture eventually feeds.
Even if it's worse today, we knew there were ~35 year drought cycles!
Deal with animal agriculture first, then we can talk about the fruits and nuts.
Cows do drink a fair amount, especially if they're not shaded in the heat. In the case of dairy, there's also a lot of washing water for milking.
I'm trying! I can only eat them so fast!
[0]: https://extension.oregonstate.edu/bloomberg-illustrates-how-...
This is the thing that really gets me. It's so bloody obvious from the second law of thermodynamics that animals are going to require more resources than plants. There's even a name for this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trophic_level
This, much like weight loss and treating mental illness, seems to be one of those communal Dunning-Kruger areas of HN. Probably because people don't want to admit that their diet is contributing to global warming, or they have some "hurr durr, vegans suck!" attitude.
Then again, I've noticed an influx of people denying the fact of the January 6th insurrection, so I shouldn't really be surprised.
People don’t seem to grok this.
On land with little rain you can raise animals where you give a huge expanse per animal. They eat grass and fertilize and participate in the ecosystem.
If you wanted to do anything else with the land you would have to irrigate nearly every drop of water and many places you can’t actually do that at all.
There aren’t just easy equivalents like you’re trying to pose.
I highly doubt all 781 million acres can only be used for animal grazing.
I doubt this. The "think of the farmers" argument against increasing plant food production often goes a little something like "farmers don't want to change from what they've already specialized in". The market is never as efficient as people want it to be.
You also suggest that what is currently used as rangeland is rangeland because it can only be used as such. The truth is that neither of us really knows the true capabilities of the 654 million acres of rangeland. The difference here is that I don't suggest all of that land should have a single use. Rather, I argued that it's unlikely that all 654 million acres can only be used for grazing.
>But it's misleading to just point out how much land gets used for what without considering the capability of the land in question.
There is nothing misleading about what I've said. I said we use a lot of land for animal agriculture and that I doubt all of it can only be used for rangeland.
>Ending the corn and soy subsidy regime would help a lot right off the top.
Sure sounds good. You know we subsidize meat and dairy too? How does that factor into the incentive to allocate more cropland?
Worst of all is some places in California you aren't ALLOWED to remove the high maintenance, water sucking, worthless patch of grass because of some HOA or city regulation. They call a mulched, tree covered, sustainable and bare dirt yard "Ugly." Then they want to replace it with a fungus looking growth that has to be trimmed all the time by loud gasoline powered equipment that wakes night shift workers up at 9AM.
https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/water/community/2017/0...
https://singularityhub.com/2019/06/18/inching-towards-abunda...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundrop_Farms#/media/File:1604...
It's a farm in the middle of the desert that gets all its water from desalinated sea water powered entirely by an array of mirrors.
However my past concerns for altering seawater on a planetwide scale are much abated. Rising sea levels and glacier melt have put an end to that.
Maybe I'm crazy or not informed enough, but I always thought this water-desalination thing was a solved problem. Then I got confused when they talked about how there is "brine waste" and it's a huge ecological problem. Why do they stop short of full evaporation of the brine?
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-04-26/ddt-was...
Yup. I spend a good deal of time training for and rescuing people in the Sierras. Snow pack is very obviously lower than a decade back. Sure, sure, we'll get the occasional outlier like that massive snow pack a few years back, but ever other year, it gets lower and lower.
One level up from eyes, you can just look at the geological record to observe climate change and CO2. CO2 goes up, place gets hot. No need for models.
You only need fancy models if you're trying to get super precise about when changes will occur, like less than 100 years precise.