Originally a comment by hotshoe on No snow at the Phillips Station site.
A slow-motion natural disaster which directly affects at least 40 million people – and indirectly affects all 320 million USAians, as well as having international implications – is bound to create a little emotional tension. It’s bound to lead to finger-pointing and blame-games, but those are worthless (even if accurate, which they’re mostly not) unless in turn they lead to actual solutions.
Yes, turning off the fountains is a good minor solution; Las Vegas is criminally wasteful. Turning off the agricultural output — which has up till now been larger than the output of entire countries such as Mexico, Germany, and Canada — is not a good solution. However, turning off CA agriculture has already happened in some degree, and we’re just waiting to find out what fresh disaster that causes.
We’re going to see renewed unemployment, worsened poverty in the already poorest rural counties, plus widespread child malnutrition due to unavailable/unaffordable produce.
The massive federal, not state, Central Valley Project has notified all customers that it must deliver zero water to farms this year (in hopes of being able to provide about 25% of contracted allocations to drinking-water utilities and to wildlife refuges). That missing irrigation water would have gone to about 3 million acres of vegetables and fruit in six out of seven of the most productive farm counties. Last year, some fields were fallowed and some – particularly orchards which are too expensive to replant – were kept in production or at least kept alive by drawing on new deep groundwater wells, This year, who knows. Already, so much groundwater has been pumped that the land is subsiding as much as a foot per year. It’s not sustainable. Imagine the damage to bridges, levees, buildings’ foundations. Worse, the water table in some areas has been sucked dry below the reach of residential wells and we now have thousands of scattered homes without running water.
I’m not a farmer. I know some ranchers but I don’t personally know anyone who farms. As they say, I don’t have a horse in this race … except that I’m a human being, a fellow citizen, concerned, or to be honest, rather panicked about the welfare of all the parents and children who have nowhere else to go. That, and the only reservoir from which my town can draw its water is filled not by rain but by the CVP. I don’t expect to see people in my town lining up at the water truck for their water ration this year, but it could happen someday, and will almost certainly happen to other CA communities of as many as 10,000 people by next month.
That’s going to be quite a picture.
I’m in SoCal and I agree that it’s stupid to damage food crops. Growers should be supported in switching to Israeli-type drip irrigation, adapted to California.
Some crops, though, really could be shut down. I drive past square miles of sod farms. Lakes’ worth of water gets used up to produce instant green lawns for use in suburbia. Give the workers help in adjusting to other farmwork (installing drip systems!), and shut the stupid useless wasteful sod farms down.
I also wanted to add a footnote to the point about reserving water for “wildlife refuges.” A lot of that is important for recharging aquifers, for drinking water watersheds, and for providing the right water balance that ultimately allows some coastal fisheries to exist. So it’s not as if it’s just pampering the Lesser Blue-Eyed Mountain Plover or something.
Gods yes. Could we please please please shut down sod farms?
I live within driving distance of one in MidiCali and I feel like spitting whenever I see their sign.
I don’t know if there’s any provision in that 1Bn-dollar Emergency bill which goes towards retraining ag workers on drip irrigation. If not, there should be . I’ll have to look into that.
Thanks, Ophelia, for choosing to post my comment. And with the perfect edit, too 😉
I follow this personally because a good friend of mine moved to the Sierra Nevada foothills a year ago. She lives a little above the New Melones Lake on the Stanislaus River. This Wikipedia page shows how California’s reservoirs fit together for context.
Her water supply seems alright, but a couple weeks ago, I heard this piece on the radio about a community of 3200 people who get their water from the Merced River about an hour south of her by car. The text on that web page is a transcript of the audio. The photos illustrate what hotshoe wrote here:
Studies of tree rings show that droughts in California can last 30 and even 40 years. Early explorers like Zebulon Pike and Stephen Long declared that California was far too dry for conventional settlement.
http://news.yahoo.com/californians-adapt-catastrophic-drought-122022443.html
Which means the aquifer is on it’s way to being gone forever. Subsidence is a one-way process.
One has to wonder how long those redwoods have. And forests in general, to be honest. If the drought is this bad, then large vegetation can’t have very long to survive if something isn’t done. And you can’t exactly tell the trees to use less water…
Also, “USAian?” What?
Thanks for writing it (and the others), hotshoe!
Godalmighty, sod farms – yes, shut that down. I would never call that a “crop,” by the way, even if it technically is one. Or at least I would never call a failed sod farm a crop failure.
Shorter way of saying ‘thing/people from the united states of america’. A more accurate descriptor than ‘American’.
@7:
First, you have to remember their age. The sequoias live thousands of years and the coastal redwoods live hundreds of years, so they have probably seen times close to as bad as today. The range of the coastal redwoods will probably shrink a little at their eastern margin, but most of them will survive as long as there are frequent coastal foggy days. These are driven by the climate with an offshore Pacific high and daily low pressure caused by higher temperatures in the interior. Then San Francisco climate would be more like San Jose and San Jose would be like Sacramento.
naturalcynic
You have made many claims. Do you have citations to back them up?
Working renovation of houses a common question is “what can we do?” the answer is always the same: It is just a matter of time and resources. I worked on a three story house with a near Olympic-size swimming pool, lap pool where you swim and the water moves, huge deck, Jacuzzi, sauna, and a BBQ setup big enough to handle half a cow. This array covered most of the first floor. He had the money and we had the time.
Ten years later he is moving into a nursing home and the next owner wants it all ripped out and replaced with a huge garden and a six car garage. If he has the money we will make the time. Irony is that in those ten years the BBQ and Jacuzzi was only used once, during the opening party. Odds are, unless the next owner hires a gardener, the garden will be limited to a few tomatoes. We dream big, but live on a much smaller, some might say a human, scale.
The point is that humanity has the technology and wealth to do pretty much anything we can imagine. Southern California is testament for out ability to have things our way, at a price. Little thought was given to reigning in our desires or compromising to make our dreams align, even slightly, with the existing environment. We have had things our way for a long time and now we are coming up against hard limits.
No doubt we could double-down and impose our will to get what we want. Build a few dozen nuclear power plants on the coast dedicated to desalination and we could ease the water shortage considerably. Cost, just a WAG, something around a trillion dollars and a world-wide shortage of uranium. What happens when the inevitable happens and one of several hundred Pacific volcanoes erupts and lands a wall of water on those plants is anyone’s guess.
Bottom line here is: it is all up to us.
@#11 Kamaka
I’m on my mobile, so I can’t provide links, but if you Google “redwood trees and fog” you will find that they use fog as an important moisture source that does help them survive long droughts. Unfortunately, global warming is probably going to reduce the fog, so the trees are still at great risk.
Water can be extracted directly from the air, a bit like the way mountains do it, and with existing techniques.
http://www.aquasciences.com/
lorn:
If we have access to sea water or salty groundwater and live in a sunny location like California, we should be able to obtain all the fresh water we need from solar distillation.
http://www.solaqua.com/solwatdis1.html