It sure sounds bad and the governor just announced all new kinds of water reduction goals.
What if these dont work? What could an even more serious drought in California lead to?
Correct me if I’m wrong, but it’s my understanding that the new water restrictions don’t apply to agriculture, and that agriculture represents 80 percent of California’s water use. That would seem to drastically limit the effectiveness of the Governor’s water reduction goals.
This isn’t my area of expertise, but unless California gets absolutely drenched with rainfall soon, I don’t see how this reduction plan can possibly succeed.
An even more serious drought in California could lead to . . .
. . . not using cheap water to grow cotton in the fricking Mohave Desert. Or dozens of other crops that could be—and previously were—grown in other parts of the US, just with not quite as long a growing season or not quite as productively.
California’s water crisis is a lot like our landfill crisis of the 1990s. It’s a crisis of political will more than natural shortages.
Snow. California needs epic-level snowfalls on the WEST side of the Sierra Nevada, so that the snowmelt starts filling the reservoirs so it can be doled out as needed using the various aqueducts. If the entire state as a whole gets a ton of rain, it’s going to be a short-term fix for the areas that got the rain, then it’s all going to flow down stream to the sea and be gone.
The realistic long-term effect unless the snow comes back is that a huge number of farms are going to go out of business and shut down. This will affect the cost of most food items, but particularly fruit & almonds. Oddly enough, several dozen wineries have developed in Amador county (gold country) over the past 20 years, and they’re expected to do fairly well as wine grapes are pretty drought-tolerant. I’m also assuming they were built recently enough (with the drought on the way) that they’re using drip irrigation, rather than sprinklers, so that’s even better.
Once the California orange crop dies off, the Florida orange industry will see much bigger profits, until the sea level rise puts all the Florida groves underwater, and then we’re going to have to get our oranges from Idaho, and that’s not gonna work out so good.
italics added.
Why? Sorta serious question.
Until they address the use of water for agriculture, gold courses, and swimming pools they are not serious.
My bet is they ignore the above and soon will come hand wringing and begging to Washington to ask all of the rest of the country to pay for their problem.
Because orange trees like it warm: Orange (fruit) - Wikipedia
I dont live in California so I’d like to ask those who do, are you all starting to really see alot of differences?
I live in Santa Clara County, and we’ve not been given any restrictions yet. The governor doesn’t issue restrictions directly to consumers-- he issues them to the water districts. We have approximately a gazillion water districts in CA, and mine has not translated Brown’s directive into policy yet.
engineer_comp_geek: You do not need to be corrected. You are exactly right.
Most of us have heard of the 80/20 rule. In CA, we use the 20/80 rule. :smack:
How will the drought end? One of two ways:
- It rains. Given that extreme weather is going to be more common, this might invert the recent pattern and flood California while Kansas dries up.
- The Central Valley stops raising beef, almonds, alfalfa etc. The cities on the coast build more desalination plants, further poisoning the ocean. The prices for everything goes up and poor people get even more screwed.
How will Global Warming end? In tears.
I live in California and as a matter of fact, I work at one of the wineries in Amador County. We are on drip irrigation, but there is at least one 300 acre neighbor that is still using sprinklers. Hopefully he will change that this year.
I’m concerned about this issue. I’m a bit worried about selling my house and how the lack of water may affect that. My husband is very worried about his beloved trees.
One thing that might happen is recycling of sewage. Clean it well enough (still cheaper than desalination) and it is perfectly healthy to use. Except for the eew factor and they will learn to live with it.
I am sure Boston would be happy to donate all their snow. Montreal certainly would. My front lawn still has a monstrous snow pile where the blowers blew it from the street.
That’s not a drought, this was a drought.
When I lived in L.A., I listened to KROQ. Kevin & Bean, the morning DJs, had a standard joke whenever it rained: ‘But it will do nothing to alleviate the drought!’ This is because the TV weather guessers reminded us of that every time.
Of course the mountains is where California needs massive snowfalls; but there was some shortsightedness in the L.A. Basin nearly a century ago. Before the aqueduct opened in 1913, the L.A. River was the primary source of water for the area. The trouble was flooding. ISTM that flooding allows water to soak into the ground. Get rid of the flooding, any ground water is going to dry up. In the 1930s the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers turned the river into a concrete-lined flood control channel. Solved the flooding, but so much for the ground water. And of course L.A. exploded as a city. Most of it is covered in concrete and asphalt. Any rain that does fall tends to be channeled into the L.A. river to be gotten rid of.
Short of tearing up the L.A. River and everything covering the ground, L.A. is dependent upon water from the north. Hope for snow.
Idaho is warm?
No, see, Idaho gets cold in winter, which is why… never mind. :smack:
My understanding is that that the 80% statistic is technically true, but it’s a little misleading because the majority of agriculture in the state uses relatively local groundwater supplies. Those groundwater supplies are certainly vulnerable to depletion due to overuse or longer-term climate trends (and have their own issues like ground subsidence) but in general they’re less susceptible to single year droughts.
It’s the big surface water projects that bring water from the Sierras to the cities that are at risk of literally running out of water this year. While there are some agricultural users who are supplied by them, the majority of the use is urban. For example according to this the main California State Water Project goes to about 70% urban users and 30% agricultural.
The simple answer to the OP is this: you’ll have to redefine “bad” because this is the new normal. California has hovered on the edge of drought disaster for decades, maybe even most of the last century, and only the most rapacious theft and misuse of water resources has kept them afloat.
With the planet in only the earliest stages of climate change, the near-mostly-usetabe desert status of Southern California is going to lose all those modifiers, and what we think of as “the Southwest” will stretch right to Malibu, maybe Santa Barbara.
And it ain’t comin’ back in our lifetimes.
Talk as if it’s yet-another-drought (talk I lived with for my first half-century) is nonsense. There may be a few wetter years in the next decade, but SoCal is going to be a desert and Central/NorCal is going to be much more arid. Nevada… will remain Nevada.
And fuck ya very much, “Jamo”… but that’s long ago and far away and never mind.
Get serious about pricing water and you go a long way. “Conserve” is a message that’s quickly forgotten. “You gonna pay through the ass” is one thst is more effective.
I’d stagger the prices so that por people and those without expensive use are not affected, but after certain limits, you pay.
The other thing is that we have an incredibly Byzantine set of rules for water rights in agriculture. I don’t claim to understand it, but it’s anything but a level playing field for the farmers and what they pay for water.