No, California won't run out of water in a year (LA Times)

[RiverLover]

No, California won't run out of water in a year
3/20/2015


"We have been in multiyear droughts and extended dry periods a number of times in the past, and we will be in the future," said Ted Thomas, a spokesman for the California Department of Water Resources. "In periods like this there will be shortages, of course, but the state as a whole is not going to run dry in a year or two years."

The headline of a recent Times op-ed article offered a blunt assessment of the situation: "California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?"

Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at UC Irvine, wrote about the state's dwindling water resources in a March 12 column, citing satellite data that have shown sharp declines since 2011 in the total amount of water in snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil and groundwater in California.

He explained that the state's reservoirs have only about a one-year supply of water remaining. Reservoirs provide only a portion of the water used in California and are designed to store only a few years' supply. But the online headline generated great interest. Famiglietti said it gave some the false impression that California is at risk of exhausting its water supplies.

The satellite data he cited, which measure a wide variety of water resources, show "we are way worse off this year than last year," he said. "But we're not going to run out of water in 2016," because decades worth of groundwater remain.

...Just because California is not exhausting its water supply "doesn't mean we're not in a crisis," said Leon Szeptycki, executive director of the Water in the West program at Stanford University, who called the state's snowpack, at 12% of average, "both bad for this year but also a troubling sign for the future."...

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-0320-drought-explainer-20150320-story.html

Well that's a relief! Still a horrible situation, but at least millions of people won't be displaced next year.

[NYC_SKP]

1. It was hyperbole, but the dangers are real. Water quality suffers greatly.

As we pull more from the aquifers, salinity sets in, pressures drop, and people start to complain.

I'm confident we don't have to suffer IF we take common sense measures, like metering all use, implementing tier rates, ending water intensive landscaping and other measures.

What we DON'T want to do is build desalination plants and keep growing cities and population.

We need to just calm down and embrace no growth as the smart way to do business.

[RiverLover]

2. Good info, thanks. /nt

[mopinko]

7. something that i wonder about

if salt water were pumped into a dry aquifer, would the salt be filtered out? would it become usable again? assume not immediately, but at some point?

and the almond growers need hugelkultur.

[NYC_SKP]

9. Hugelkultur doesn't fit growers' industrialized and mechanized model

And it's a real shame because they could be harvesting more than almonds.

Current practices evolved around cheap and abundant water, just as current architecture and building practices assumed cheap and abundant energy.

What a shame, because historic practices in both industries were really quite sustainable, but we've since lost them.

Know what I mean?

(I know you do!)

[mopinko]

12. meh. it could.

they could at least border the fields, which would stop runoff of water, fertilizer, and top soil. they could push it around once it is cooked, and have better, more absorbent soils.

seems like they could do it around the trees, too. just stay out of the path of the machines.

and yeah, i sure do.

[NYC_SKP]

13. Did you know that olives are now grown on hedgerows?

I had a guest out from DC, coworker, out here because her boyfriend had some federal business in Sacramento and she had the day off.

She came to my place on the river and then I drove her over to Isleton and Locke and some other historic towns in the Delta region.

We were driving up I-5 by Lodi and she was asking about which crops were off to the left and right and one crop was just not recognizable so I had to take the exit and find out.

Much to my farmboy surprise were olive, being grown on wires or trellises, clearly so that they could be more efficiently sprayed and cultivated and harvested. Wow.

[mopinko]

15. oh wow.

i am going to put in a couple olives, i think.
i have a couple potted ones coming, and was told i could keep them in a pot for about 10 years and get some olives. but because i am in a micro climate zone, between lake michigan and the warmth from the hugel beds, it might just work.

sounds like those are espaliered. i am working on training my fruit trees to that they are climbable. a much more pleasant way to pick fruit.

[dumbcat]

8. OK God! No! Not that!

As we pull more from the aquifers, salinity sets in, pressures drop, and people start to complain.

The horror!

[OnlinePoker]

10. And how do you stop people from moving to places where there is limited water?

Unless you change the U.S. constitution, I don't think the government can halt migration between the States.

[NYC_SKP]

11. Not state by state, but community by community (or by federal mandate).

The state doesn't issue building permits, counties do and sometimes regional planning authorities.

Lake Tahoe pioneered creating limitations on new construction: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tahoe_Regional_Planning_Agency

And other cities like Cambria, CA, simply haven't been issuing new water meters, so if you want to build a new home you have to buy an old home with a meter, just to get the meter, then you can build somewhere else.

The result: better environmental conditions, less congestion, higher quality of life and happiness.

Of course it pisses off developers and land owners who think they have some God-given right to profit without regard to impacts beyond their property lines.

Slow and no growth rules can work.

[Politicalboi]

3. I live in Ca

And I hadn't seen any masses leaving Ca, so I figured it was a wake up call to Ca. We are going to be in trouble for sure, but not as much as the wildlife will be. They don't understand why the water isn't there anymore. And again we only worry about human life above all else. You know, the ones who brought this on all by ourselves. We wait till it's almost or too late to do anything about it. How many years have we heard about Ca and water throughout the decades? And that's when we were getting almost complete months of rain.

[Demeter]

4. Want to make a bet?

something on the order of: your money, or your life!


I've been waiting for Reality to hit the lotus-eaters really hard in a place that will register. One more year ought to do it.

Don't they read Steinbeck in English class in high school in California anymore?

[safeinOhio]

5. Won't be cheap but they won't run out.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2014/03/20/221880/israel-no-longer-worried-about.html

[Demeter]

6. Israel has 8+ million people and imports a lot of food

California has 38.8 million people and exports food to most of this continent and Asia. Almonds, rice, citrus...all high-water-demanding crops.

Either the people leave, the agriculture leaves, or they run out of water.

As if the US would actually build desalinization infrastructure! And for California, the GOP hit list's top target!

Maybe if they talked Elon Musk into putting his money there, instead of building self-driving cars...

but that would be too civic-minded! No chance to browbeat people about their driving habits and taking away the freedom of the road....

[NYC_SKP]

14. Desalination plants will ruin the state and the planet.

We are "out of water" because we've used technology to turn deserts into suburbs and farmlands. It's unnatural and it has consequences because it's unsustainable.

Finding more technology to fix problems that old technologies and overpopulation have created will just create more problems.

Desalination is very energy-intensive. The last thing we need is to start having to generate even more electricity to create water that we don't have.

Please, look into the negative impacts of desalination.