First, they tell you you’re wrong, the climate isn’t changing.
Then they tell you, well, it’s changing, but it’s entirely natural, and humans have nothing to do with it.
And finally when reality sinks in, they announce that it’s happening, humans cause it, but it’s ALL THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS FAULT.
We have officially reached stage 3. Carly Fiorina is blaming environmentalists for the severe California drought.
With different policies over the last 20 years, all of this could be avoided,Fiorina, a likely 2016 Republican presidential contender, said in an interview with radio host Glenn Beck.Despite the fact that California has suffered from droughts for millennia, liberal environmentalists have prevented the building of a single new reservoir or a single new water conveyance system over decades during a period in which California’s population has doubled.Fiorina, California’s 2010 GOP nominee for U.S. Senate, said it was a
classic case of liberals being willing to sacrifice other people’s lives and livelihoods at the altar of their ideology. It is a tragedy.
Right. First clue you’re a wackaloon is that you’re talking to Glenn Beck. But the second clue is that your proposed solution to a lack of water is to build more reservoirs to hold the water that isn’t there.
“build more reservoirs to hold the water that isn’t there”
But… But if you build them it’ll come!!!!
Don’t you know anything ’bout sympathetic magic PZ?!?!?!???
I guess reservoirs must attract water in some way. But as the classic Sidney Harris cartoon says “I think you should be more specific here”.
You forgot Step 4, when then they tell you that climate change is happening, humans do cause it, environmentalists were right from the start, but now there’s not enough resources left to feed all of Humanity, and therefore genociding the proles’ in order to cull the herd is the only way for civilization to forestall its malthusian collapse.
Well, it makes perfect sense, because they would have built the reservoirs back when there was plenty of water to collect, and it would still all be there now to draw from. Because everyone knows that if the Republicans are known for anything, it’s for supporting expensive preventative public works projects to guard against future possible calamities that are being predicted by climate scientists.
Also, I would like to officially object to having to share a name with that blockhead.
Build more reservoirs? …That sounds like the logic of a badly designed video game.
Maybe I should build a warehouse and wait for it to magically stock itself with valuable goods. But that would arguably make more sense since humans, noticing I have a warehouse, might ask me to rent space to them so they can store stuff. Rain, however, doesn’t look for storage, it falls where meteorology and gravity tell it to. Or not fall, as the case is with a drought.
But I guess I should pay attention to the audience’s logic: Build reservoirs as a show of faith that they will be filled, and the capricious god might cause it to rain. Or he might leave them dry as a test of their faith. Either way, the important thing is that they don’t change their ways just because the Satanic climatologists tell them it’d be a good idea.
Um… you build the reservoirs, put a little water in to prime the pump, so to speak, and more water is mystically attracted to them?
Carly Fiorina, out of my state, you aren’t helping. I think it’s time to make a bunch of demon sheep costumes and dress up for her speeches. One could just sit quietly in the audience and glare, red-eyed, at the podium…
re 2:
Nerd, you got that wrong, ( !gotcha! ). I “know”, she saying that reservoirs would have preserved the water from the rainy days of the ’60’s, so in the drought of ’15 the water would still be there for all the thirsties to drink now. And it is the ecoterrorists who prevented that water preservation systems and left CA high and dry.
re OP:
stages of denial:
1) the climate isn’t changing.
2) it’s changing, but it’s entirely natural, and humans have nothing to do with it.
3) it’s happening, humans cause it, but it’s ALL THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS FAULT.
4) Profit!!! Climate change will improve the climate:
(.A) abolish those disastrous winters( eg 2014-5),
(.B) make arid lands agricultural,
(.C) yada, yada, yada.
[item 4 of that list is my takeaway from all the posts about ClimateCatastroph over at Phil’s Bad Astronomy blogosphere.]
And she is saying that about liberals? Really? That’s the very definition of conservative, anti-science arsehole…you are describing yourself, you moron…
These people really have no integrity whatsoever…..
It’s good to see that Carly Fiorina has just as solid a grasp on environmental geology as she does on successfully serving as CEO of a major computer manufacturer.
Because water is an infinite resource, right?
And, damn it, if only we’d built larger and more oil storage tanks, there would be plenty of oil.
Thanks, Obama!
Actually the rhetoric here in California is amazing. We need more “water storage” to solve the “water crisis”.
If we as a nation spent our money on our nation instead of blowing other nations up, we would have built a pipeline from the Columbia river to Vegas. One tenth of the Columbia’s output is equal to the entire Sacramento River. But infrastructure is so 20th century, now we blow our cash and credit on overpriced weapons of mass destruction and bailing out bankers who suck at their job.
Those damn libruls and their lack of support for infrastructure!
I believe that the water crisis in California is also due to a severe deficit in number of cups and bottles.
And remember: sacrificing lives in the name of ideology is okay when Republicans do it.
Here is an entertaining website: the lake powell water database, with lots of charts and graphs.
http://lakepowell.water-data.com/
The snowpack is terrible. Lake Powell is at around 50% of its capacity, which means not only is there a shortage of water, the drop is half of what it could be, so the dam doesn’t generate nearly as much power as they had planned for. The Colorado River has claims for more than 100% of its capacity; Las Vegas is busy raising bonds to build another pipe to drain it even faster.
Even if there was sufficient snow to replenish the water, the long term utility of lake powell and lake mead is zero: millions of tons of silt which should have flowed along the Colorado has instead been accumulating in the still waters above the dams, filling them from the bottom up. In less than a century of use, the lakes will have very little capacity left.
Another non-trivial factor is that when you build a reservoir, it presents a huge surface for evaporation. Even in Lake Powell, which has a good surface area/volume profile, around 10% of the annual flow is lost to evaporation and seepage.
“Cadillac Desert” by Marc Reisner is a good book on the history and prospects of water development in the western US.
Carly, not all ecos are at fault! Right now, … now, there is a controv, re the Hetch Hetchey reservoir. The state wants to drain it, to supply MORE water to SanFran. But the ecos are disputing such rash behavior. … erhrhrh, I guess you’re correct: the ecos want to make everybody de-hydrate; for the ecos (nefarious) agenda.
I feel sorry for Ms. Fiorina (whom I call thus out of consideration of our own Carlie). I mean, in her last job, she fucked up HP so badly that it may never recover. It’s really hard to get another job after a cluster coitus like that, and she’s obviously hoping to persuade the gullible in CA to send her to a cush job in DC.
H. L. Mencken was thinking of imbeciles like Ms. Fiorina when he said, “For every complex problem there is a simple but wrong solution.”
That’s by design. Mitch McConnell caught onto this first: whatever criticisms you receive, accuse your opponents of the very same thing. The casual observer will only see a bunch of mudslinging, and decide both sides are equally at fault.
Don’t laugh, it worked in 2014.
1. It’s a cosmically dumb thing to say.
This is the worst California drought in 1200 years. Liberals weren’t even in California 1200 years ago!!! And BTW, Ms. Fiorna, they don’t control the weather either. I mean we’re good but we’re not that good.
2. A lot of previous governors in California were Republicans. Reagan, and the one before Brown was Arnold Scharzenegger.
3. More water storage will help a little. Which is why California has voted money to build more in a Democrat controlled state no less. But it won’t help a lot. The snowpack and rainfall just isn’t there.
4. No one can say for sure that this is due to global warming. But it might be. And it might be the new normal. Some models have the rainfall belts moving north in a warming world. And the snowpack will definitely be less in a warming world.
5. Ms. Fiorna doesn’t have much credibility. Her time as head of HP was a disaster and she was eventually fired.
Also, I think it helps to look at a known example of Republicans, infrastructure, and dealing with droughts:
http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2011/09/drought-worsened-rick-perry-slashed-fire-fighting-spending
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2011/09/perry-asks-for-federal-funds-to-fight-wildfires-after-slashing-state-fire-budget/
If only Rick Perry had prayed for more reservoirs.
re @4, raven wrote:
??
I disagree. apologies, I am in argumentative mode, at the moment. The bulk of your comment@4 is right-on, no disagreement; and most of the point I singled out above is also quite good. My ONLY dispute is the statement that “no one …”. I got 97% of climatologists who say that the cause of the drought is definitely due to climate change (“global warming” is passe).
Reservoirs are Hydraulic Black Holes. Build some, they suck all the water in, so there’s no water. Build enough, they suck all the snow in as well, so there’s no snow. Build some more, and they start to suck all the cheese in, so there goes the Moon.
Does anyone know how how many are needed to suck in all the blockheaded thugs?
There is no consensus much less “97%” that the California drought is due to global warming.
NOAA who is the main climatology center in the USA says not proven.
You really need 10 or 20 years worth of data to get a signal from the usual noisy climate variability.
I suspect it is but don’t feel like overselling the science. We will know soon enough.
twas brillig,
Raven is right on this, although the models do predict an increasingly dry CA, along with the rest of the Western US. So, while we cannot say that the current >4 yr drought is “due to” climate change, we can say they’d better get used to it.
Note also, that increasingly, more precipitation will come as rain rather than snow and that it will occur in impulsive events–several inches of rain falling on parched, packed ground that cannot absorb it. So, while reservoirs will catch some of the water from these events, the reservoirs will fill up with sediment more quickly than historical norms would suggest.
And then there are the aquifers that are drying and compacting as we speak, never to be filled with water again.
The drought is very likely due to global warming: the precipitation is low but not particularly unusual (precipitation has been equally low, even in living memory), but the temperatures are record highs. That makes for more evaporation, particularly in summer — and more of the precipitation falls as rain, rather than snow.
The one time a supply side arguent would actually be correct…
Ms. Fiorina manages to combine a huge number of fails.
1. One of which is that California isn’t trying to build up their water infrastructure and storage.
Democrat governor Brown and the Democrat controlled legislature put a $7.5 billion bond issue on the ballot. Which passed. 75% of which is directed towards….water storage*.
2. And as many know, California long ago invented the self perpetuating war. The water wars have been going on for over a century and will forever. It’s urban, agriculture, and the environment. The environment, not being a voter, usually comes in third.
*I haven’t looked at this in a while. But the last time I looked, they were having a hard time finding good water storage projects. It’s not like California hasn’t already dammed up pretty much everything that moves.
I don’t know about Fiorina or GB specifically but a decade ago a lot of the people who share their beliefs were complaining about low-flow toilets and watering restrictions. It was those ‘nanny state liberals’ who were interfering with their God-given right to use as much water as they wanted any way they wished. It wasn’t uncommon to find people on certain forums bragging about letting their, typically unmetered, water run into the gutter 24/7 to show their contempt for water regulations.
So it figures that these same sorts of people would blame the liberals when the water starts to run out.
I remember, about 20 years ago, hearing a proposal to dam a valley in BC, flooding several towns in the process and then building a pipeline to ship all the water to Los Angeles. I suppose if they had gone ahead and done that, it might have mitigated the drought.
If they had done that though, it would have triggered a clause in NAFTA that would allow any and all bulk water exports and the volume of the flow would not ever be allowed to be reduced, no matter how thirsty Canadians might get.
As it is, Angelinos will have to settle for buying Nestlé bottled water, for which the company pays the BC government the staggering price of C$2.25 per 1 million litres.
@OlliP:
yeah, apparently Fiorina doesn’t like it when she’s the one waiting for things to trickle down. Imagine my surprise.
@ 22 twas brillig (stevem)
groan
Please do not repeat denier tropes. It’s still global warming and it’s climate change, too. The former produces the latter.
It’s really no surprise that right-wingers can believe in backwards science when so many of them fail upwards.
Clearly what we need to do is ignore those liberal environmentalists and drain the aquifers more quickly. That’s the only way to ensure a larger and more permanent water supply.
Exactly. Conservatives have long sneered at water conservation efforts or any regulation of agricultural use, which accounts for 80% of the water. As a result, water gets used wastefully to grow stuff like alfalfa without anyone paying its true cost. And then when the water runs out, they blame environmentalists who have been warning them for decades that this would happen.
The lack of self-awareness is fucking astounding.
Uh, many of you seem to be missing part of the point, or perhaps just not addressing it.
The existing dams and water works in California were built assuming that there would be adequate snow in the mountains. The planned water storage consisted of dams and snow. The dams were intended to primarily to catch the runoff from melting snow. My understanding is that, while the rainfall this year has been below normal, the biggest problem is that most of the precipitation in the mountains this year was rain, rather than snow. This means that later in the season, there will be little or no snow melt to refill the reservoirs. The point is that catching more of the runoff as rain earlier in the season requires a different organization of water retention facilities and strategies. For example, up until recently, the strategy has been to keep the existing dams below capacity in the spring, in anticipation of major snow melt later. Most of the existing dams can be filled much faster than they can be emptied (safely), especially when there are sudden large storms. In order to protect the dams from being overtopped, the amount of water they store has been limited. That is a strategy that needs to change. But such a strategy would also imply storing more water “in depth”, with a series of dams, rather than a few large ones.
No, it is not a “solution” to the problem, but a change in water management strategy would help mitigate the problem of having too much water from “bursty” storms, and not saving enough of that for later in the year.
Yes, the filling of dams with silt is a problem, but that problem is a separate question from water retention strategies, and that problem has engineering solutions. Are those solutions adequate? I don’t know, but they are also much longer term problems.
Yes, it doesn’t make any kind of sense for farmers to be growing rice in semi-arid California, or to be trying to address the problem without addressing the users of 80% of the water. I have no idea why that is never addressed. Yes, conservation of water resources is more cost effective.
But sneering at the stupid conservatives, while it certainly feels good, doesn’t change the realities of hydrology, nor the increasing population in the West.
And yes, before you jump all over me and call me names, I’m a card carrying liberal (former Republican; I learned my lesson as I grew up), but I’m not a geologist or meteorologist, or any other kind of scientist. If I have my facts wrong, please correct my facts, rather than ad homenim attacks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem
Yes, Minister described the 4 stage process 30 years ago, and, as happens so often, we have sadly not actually learned from it yet:
Clearly the solution to this drought is to build more kitchen sinks. That’s where water comes from, isn’t it?
Crip Dyke@31 wins the thread!
@ Scott F #37
It doesn’t make any difference if the runoff is from melting snow or rainfall; runoff is runoff. So from what you’ve said, the issue must purely be one of timing. That would make sense if they were predicting drought later on in the season, but as I understand it that’s not the case. There’s a drought on now.
I’m also not sure how different the strategy would need to be to deal with consistent rain rather than sudden snowmelt, other than the deliberate act of keeping the existing dams below capacity in the spring, in order to stop floods due to overwhelmed damns when the snow melts later in the year. I imagine this could potentially be solved by building more and bigger reservoirs to enable them to keep more rainfall without fearing floods later.
That is of course assuming that you are correct and the problem is purely one of strategy. California has always been relatively arid and over the last couple of decades or so droughts have become more common due to a persistent “ridge of high pressure over the eastern north Pacific Ocean and western North America. Such high-pressure ridges prevent clouds from forming and precipitation from falling.” This suggests that the problem causing the current drought is one of “decreased rain and snowfall since 2011”. This repeated pattern has been exacerbated by rising temperatures in recent years.
Insulting you and calling you names are not ad hominem attacks. This incorrect definition of ad hominem is rapidly becoming a bit of a bug-bear of mine.
@ Thumper #42
Not purely, no. As you point out, there is a drought on now, and has been for several years. And yes, most of California has a relatively arid climate.
Not purely, no. Containment strategy is only one part. Another part is capacity. At the end of the wet season, (Dams + Snowpack) contains a lot more water than (Dams) alone. If you eliminate the snowpack, you have significantly reduced the water retention capacity. Even if California received an average year of rain, the existing dams alone cannot hold enough water to supply the state’s needs for the rest of the year, and were never designed to.
The original post was saying that more dams isn’t the answer.
Well, that’s true, as far as it goes. More dams isn’t the *sole* answer. There is a drought, and building dams now isn’t going to fix that. But it’s not just the current drought that’s the problem.
The long term problem is climate change. The change in climate for California probably means more years of drought, but it also means less snow fall and more rain in the mountains, even in good years.
Hence, the need for more storage capacity, even in the good years.
Saying that dams isn’t the answer is like saying that seat belts isn’t the solution to deaths in autos. (Or pick your favorite analogy.) It’s a complex problem, with lots of levers that one could pull, but no silver bullet.
Sure, conservation is part of the solution. Eliminating wasteful farming practices would be a big step. Fixing the pollution to “fix” the climate problem would be a huge step. There are lots of ways to reduce the problem. Increasing storage capacity is one of them.
And no, it was not the “fault” of the “environmentalists”. The existing lack of capacity was by design. A design engineered for a different climate, a different population, and a different agricultural economy.