Heat up the coffee and stay alert, it's minutes before midnight and the sea is running hard….
May 1, 2015 Leave a Comment
A good page at SFWater.ORG with some ideas about water saving. Clearly, home use of water is a small part of the problem. Psychologically, however, doing everything we small users can do helps organize the necessary pressure against the big wasters.
April 25, 2015 Leave a Comment
Very interesting report at revealnews.org about the big money exploitation of Saudi aquafers — now depleted and disaster looming.
A decade ago, reports began emerging of a strange occurrence in the Saudi Arabian desert. Ancient desert springs were drying up.
The springs fed the lush oases depicted in the Bible and Quran, and as the water disappeared, these verdant gardens of life were returning to sand.
“I remember flowing springs when I was a boy in the Eastern Province. Now all of these have dried up,” the head of the country’s Ministry of Water told The New York Times in 2003.
The springs had bubbled up for thousands of years from a massive aquifer system that lay underneath Saudi Arabia. Hydrologists calculated it was one of the world’s largest underground systems, holding as much groundwater as Lake Erie.
So farmers were puzzled as their wells dried, forcing them to drill ever deeper. They soon were drilling a mile down to continue tapping the water reserves that had transformed barren desert into rich irrigated fields, making Saudi Arabia the world’s sixth-largest exporter of wheat.
… A Saudi banker turned water detective put together the pieces in 2004 and published the now seminal report “Camels Don’t Fly, Deserts Don’t Bloom.” Elie Elhadj’s investigation revealed the culprit: Wealthy farmers had been allowed to drain the aquifers unchecked for three decades.
Beginning in the late 1970s, Saudi landowners were given free rein to pump the aquifers so that they could transform the desert into irrigated fields. Saudi Arabia soon became one of the world’s premier wheat exporters.
And, as to California?
For the past two years, stories similar to Saudi Arabia’s have been bubbling up in the Central Valley, which produces about 10 percent of America’s agriculture. Wells are going dry, farmers are forced to chase water ever deeper underground, and the ground is sinking.
California scientists warn that they have little idea how much groundwater is left, or how long it would take aquifers to refill even if all the pumping stopped now.
Some California aquifers have been so depleted by irrigated farmland that the state is now pumping water that trickled down more than 20,000 years ago. Rainwater won’t recharge these ancient aquifers. When it’s gone, it’s gone – at least for the next 800 generations or so.
April 10, 2015 Leave a Comment
Straight from the pages of Bloomberg news: It’s not just the drought, it’s the heat
Sadly, this is only the beginning
The chart below shows average temperatures for the 12 months through March 31, for each year going back to 1895. The orange line shows the trend rising roughly 0.2 degrees Fahrenheit per decade, just a bit faster than the warming trend observed worldwide.
April 4, 2015 Leave a Comment
A golf course in Sun City Palm Desert next to the original barren earth.
Good article, great photos, about California water, NYTimes
We already know the Sierra Nevadas got nada, BUT NOW, you can’t depend on the Rocky Mountain snow pack to wet yer whistle, either….
Drought-weary Californians can’t expect much encouragement from mountains elsewhere in the West: Snow that fills the Colorado River is lagging, too, officials said Friday.
The snowpack in the Colorado and Wyoming valleys where the river originates now ranges from 51 to 79 percent of normal, said Brian Domonkos, Colorado supervisor of the U.S. Department of Agriculture snow survey, which monitors snowfall and water availability.
The Colorado River supplies water to about 40 million people and 6,300 square miles of farmland in seven states, including California.
July 7, 2014 Leave a Comment
Lake Mead, well known to Colorado River rafters as the terminus of their great three week adventure, and not so well known to millions as the source of their water, is reaching a record this week, and probably not stopping there.
The last time Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States, reached maximum capacity was 1983. This week the lake, located along the Colorado River near Las Vegas, Nevada, is expected to reach a new milestone — its lowest point ever.
Formed by the Hoover Dam, Lake Mead has been suffering for years as an expansive drought across the West, coupled with rising temperatures and populations, has overstressed the massive man-made body of water. According to forecasts from the federal Bureau of Reclamation, water levels will fall this week to their lowest since it was first filled in 1937. The lake, which provides water for 20 million people across the Southwest has been losing water for over a decade and is currently at about 40 percent capacity.
Bathtub Ring of Once High Water at Lake Mead
Among those who will be affected as the lake shrinks more and more will be plenty of climate change deniers, who in their wisdom, will blame the federal government for conspiratorially siphoning off millions of gallons of water for nefarious purposes and depriving Mr. and Mrs. Ostrich of their right to get what they want!
Can’t we start a class-action suit for damages caused by obstinate idiocy?
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And the American southwest of course is only a small part of the problem. A 2013 comprehensive study by the National Academy of Sciences says what’s ugly now is only going to get uglier.
…even modest climate change might drastically affect the living conditions of billions of people, whether through water scarcity, crop shortages or extremes of weather.
The group warns that water is the biggest worry. If the world warms by just 2 °C above the present level, which now seems all but unavoidable by 2100, up to one-fifth of the global population could suffer severe shortages.
“Water and all that relies on it, from food to sanitation and public health, is an emblematic aspect of climate change whose urgency people tend to instantly understand,” says Schellnhuber.
Regions most at risk from water scarcity include parts of the southern United States, the Mediterranean and the Middle East. By contrast, India, tropical Africa and high latitudes in the Northern Hemisphere can expect to receive more water in a warming world.
drought conditions are likely to become more frequent and severe in some parts of South America, western and central Europe, central Africa and Australia, another project team reports3.
Uncertainty, adds Schellnhuber, is no excuse for inaction. “Those who might say, ‘Come back when you’ve narrowed down the risk’ should be reminded that climate change is a treacherous gamble,” he says. “We don’t quite know the odds, but the chance of losing heavily might be a lot bigger than many tend to think.”
April 25, 2014 Leave a Comment
Those concerned about California’s record-breaking drought received four pieces of bad news this week.
First, the state’s drought conditions did not improve at all. For another week, an unprecedented 23.5 percent of California is experiencing the worst drought category -– exceptional drought. And nearly 69 percent of the state is still either under extreme or exceptional drought. And a remarkable 95 percent of the state is still suffering from severe drought or worse.
Read all at Climate Progress
March 17, 2014 Leave a Comment
California is not alone in its water wars, nor the nearest to outright armed stand-offs. All through the South West the situation is dire, and the scaffolding of agreements from which decisions are to be made, looking increasingly rickity.
Texas:
Just outside this minuscule farm town, Frank DeStefano was feeding a 500-acre cotton crop with water from the Brazos River 16 months ago when state regulators told him and hundreds of others on the river to shut down their pumps. A sprawling petrochemical complex at the junction of the Brazos and the Gulf of Mexico held senior rights to the river’s water — and with the Brazos shriveled, it had run short.
State regulators ordered Mr. DeStefano and others with lesser rights to make up the deficit. But they gave cities and power plants along the Brazos a pass, concluding that public health and safety overrode the farmers’ own water rights.
Now Mr. DeStefano and other farmers are in court, arguing that the state is wrong — and so far, they are winning.
…In southern Texas, along the Gulf coast southwest of Houston, the state has cut off deliveries of river water to rice farmers for three years to sustain reservoirs that supply booming Austin, about 100 miles upstream.
Nevada
In Nevada, a coalition ranging from environmentalists to the Utah League of Women Voters filed federal lawsuits last month seeking to block a pipeline that would supply Las Vegas with groundwater from an aquifer straddling the Nevada-Utah border.
Colorado
In Colorado, officials in the largely rural west slope of the Rocky Mountains are imposing stiff restrictions on requests to ship water across the mountains to Denver and the rest of the state’s populous eastern half. Fearing for their existence, Colorado farm towns on the Arkansas River have mobilized to block sales of local water rights to Denver’s fast-growing suburbs.
Arizona
In Arizona, activists and the federal government are fighting plans to tap groundwater used by a vast housing development — a move that would reduce the water level of a protected river.
Kansas
Kansas accuses Colorado and Nebraska of allowing their farmers to divert Kansas’ share of the Republican River, which flows through all three states.
And the Rules?
In Texas, landowners own the groundwater beneath their property, but a neighbor pumping groundwater from the same aquifer can siphon it away without penalty.
The Arizona court battle over a proposed housing development hinges on the still-murky question of whether the state can allow the builder to pump groundwater that sustains a river that is under federal control.
The prevailing law on rivers and streams is all too clear: The earlier someone stakes a claim on a stretch of water, the more bulletproof that owner’s right to it.
“If you’ve got the oldest claim on that river, you get to use that water regardless of what you’re using it for — agriculture, industry, whatever,” said Gabriel Eckstein, a professor at Texas A & M University School of Law and a lawyer with Sullivan and Worcester. “That’s regardless of whether you’re doing it efficiently, regardless of whether it’s the highest use.”
Meanwhile, large segments of our elected decision makers are spending precious hours and court time on whether your marriage threatens my marriage or whether the poor are poor because they won’t work…
Paying Attention to the Water… NY Times: Wines
March 4, 2014 Leave a Comment
Even as we bask in a Northern California smirr, not quite a rain, the multi-year drought that threatens to turn the Central Valley from a fruit basket to archeological site continues. Desperate minds turn to the ocean: there’s an awful lot of water there! How to get and use it? Desalinization has been used on naval ships for decades – potable,barely, but certainly good for showers and washing down decks. What’s the situation of large-scale terrestrial projects? Here’s a brief, recent, report from Grist.
Enter the ongoing construction of 17 desalination plants across the state. A $1 billion plant being built in Carlsbad, Calif., expected to be ready by 2016, will pump 50 million gallons of drinkable water out of the ocean daily — making it the largest such facility in the Western Hemisphere. Another project underway near San Francisco (a discount at only $150 million) could supply 20 million of the 750 million gallons of water guzzled daily in the Bay Area by 2020.
Desalination involves sucking up seawater and pushing it at high pressure through a series of very thin membranes, to strip away the salt and ocean gunk. Water purists (ha) know it as reverse osmosis. It’s not an ideal process, since it uses an enormous amount of energy to turn about two gallons of seawater into one gallon of potable water, plus there are the aforementioned ocean gunk leftovers, but it does keep working rain or shine.
I didn’t know so many were in progress, albeit with delays and frustrations. Given the increase in population, even with lots of water savings, many more plants would be needed if the drought continues.
Weaning So Cal off water imported from other areas would mean building a Carlsbad-scale plant every four miles along the coast, which adds up to 25 plants just between San Diego and L.A.
January 14, 2014 Leave a Comment
When outdoor writers feature the state of state’s drought you know it’s not good. Tom Steinstra’s report is not good.
It seems few in government recognize what is happening out there, a full-on drought. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys, everybody connected to the outdoors gets it.
The only ranches, farms and duck clubs that are getting water are those that have wells. Those few are worried about pumping too much ground water. Last week, I actually saw one almond orchard where a rancher was running piped water from a well into spray-type sprinklers to try to keep the trees from dying. In the middle of winter?
All the water deliveries from irrigation districts have been cut off. Some duck clubs have been high and dry all winter and have members who haven’t taken a shot.
In the San Joaquin Valley, it’s grim. Many cattle ranches have landscapes that consist of brown stubble and dirt. Ranchers are bringing in hay at tremendous expense – one at Pacheco Pass has spent $350,000 this winter trying to keep his herd – and some are selling off parts of their herds.
December 29, 2013 Leave a Comment
As California enters its third consecutive dry winter, with no sign of moisture on the horizon, fears are growing over increased wildfire activity, agricultural losses, and additional stress placed on already strained water supplies.
The city of Los Angeles has received only 3.6 inches of rain this year — far below its average of 14.91 inches, USA Today reported. And San Francisco is experiencing its driest year since recordkeeping began in 1849. As of November, the city had only received 3.95 inches of rain since the year began.
The state is enduring its driest year on record
… wildfire risk remains high. Mid-December’s Big Sur Fire scorched through more than 900 acres and destroyed dozens of homes before it was contained.
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