The headline is the epitome of burying the lede. If you read to the bottom, the writer clearly lays out the actual thesis: rainfall is the same - the problem is that snowpack is seriously declining. Which is kind of like a moisture battery. This is why climate change can counterintuitively cause both "droughts" and floods.
I'll admit that it took the longest time for me to understand the concept myself.
Compared to the last 1,000 years, yes.
Compared to the abnormally wet 1900s-era patterns that established our current expectations, no.
This assertion seems to compare historical rainfall averages across the entire nation against just the SW region.
ref: https://nca2014.globalchange.gov/report/our-changing-climate...
But it isn't. 20 to 10 years ago every winter in norcal was heavy rains for a few months.
That's happening less and less, many winters are now almost entirely dry (like current one).
Being born and raised in California and, and having been there until my mid 20s with occasional year long long projects and several trips back to see family I can tell you the winter snowfall are definitely lower.
This years crazy January freak me the hell out after having lived in Colorado where it's typical to have a slight snow fall at night into the morning and then have it all melt with near 70F by the afternoon.
We all knew that CA is susceptible to an incredibly precarious situation in regards to water and we were bombarded with a need for conservation since I was a kid in the 90s.
What never happened, however, was meaningful infrastructure investment and reform to accommodate for the rainy years that could be so heavy as to wipe out the roads to Big Sur, or make those celebrities mansions in Malibu fall into the Pacific.
And this is the problem, much like the homeless issue, money can be taxed for the purpose but so many either delay or skim so much that what is left is never going to be enough to actually solve the problem in any meanigful way.
When I was doing a project at the Clim Co-Lab for MIT, I also hung out at Caltech meetups and the topic of water reclamation was all the rage--the goal is to capture the water run off and replenish the aquifers in record rainy years for later usage.
Many spoke passionately about climate change's impact on the way of life in California, specifically in SoCal where we're from. But then politicians got their way with the budgets and it was this kind of non-sense [0] we ended up with to protect the LA reservoir that is a critical part of it's ability to meet the water needs of greater LA (where Caltech is in Pasadena).
I've seen this all my life, and it's why I decided to just no live in CA for any prolonged period; which pains me a multi-generational Californian with deep roots there. But whether it's this, their reaction to the shutdowns, homelessness, crime, poverty, nuclear waste storage etc... it's always the same result.
Sheer incompetence is tolerated far too much at the leadership level, and this is the crux of the problem. California has the resources to solve this critical issue, despite it's frontier-centric water right's issue, but it seems almost intent on gaming this like they did with Enron until it all blows up in their face, again.
Also, Colorado has decided to turn off the tap to the Colorado river due to the massive population growth in the last decade or so as they have had severe water wars due to periodic drought years.
I honestly hope renewable based desalination solves this, but I fear their will be like 20 years of deliberations and red-tape to wade through before anything gets done. Despite Carlsbad having a working plant [1] and model to follow for over a decade now--I was still in CA when it opened as I worked in the area.
0: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/article/150812-sh...
The shade balls are primarily to prevent the water's antibacterial chemicals from interacting with sunlight and becoming poisonous.
This became necessary after some recent upstream changes in the process.
The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. So when politicians say "drought", they actually mean "deficit". There's more than enough rain and snowpack, but we're not collecting enough of it to meet demand. We could collect more--at great expense--or use less.
As i mentioned with my opening quip, something like 50% of the water that we could collect is allowed to run into the sea. The somewhat infamous reason for this is the endangered Delta Smelt. The truth though is that there's actually no limit to the water that would be used. Growers would still be demanding more. We allow the creation of billionaires on water rights here, through the growing of insanely water-needy crops like almonds[1].
Whenever this subject comes up, I recommend reading "Cadillac Desert". It really opened my eyes about the history and politics of water in the West. The "drought" talk is all kind of a scam, and it's good to see articles that kind of hit on that.
> But Central Valley lawmakers are hopping mad that the governor didn’t declare drought statewide, because they want the rules bent to allow the opposite — more water from reservoirs to grow their crops, less for urban residents and migrating fish.
Current models predict a warmer and wetter California punctuated by extremely dry periods [3]. This is really bad news for a couple of reasons: Sierra snowpack accounts for around 70% of the state's overall water storage, which means it would need to double its total liquid water storage (and where is that supposed to go?), and agriculture is an important part of California's economy and contributes significantly to national food production, but also uses 80% of the state's water supply.
And then there are the aquifers. Subterranean water has been pumped out faster than it has refilled for decades [5], and wells have had to be dug deeper and deeper. In 2016, some communities ran entirely out of water because they were built on underground water supplies that had gone dry. Some of this water storage can't be replenished, because the substrate that stores the water gets compressed as water is extracted and then can't store water again.
Considered altogether, it is currently impossible to collect enough warm water to meet the state's needs.
I love California but the long term water outlook for the state might be enough to get me to move elsewhere. It's very grim.
[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/02/sierra-snowpack-at-61...
[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
[3]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...
[4]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3062/fs20163062.pdf [pdf]
[5]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-cal...
As far as powering that goes, we'd either have to start deploying as much renewable energy generation as physically possible or get over our collective fear of building more nuclear power plants. Or both.
One of those self contained, passively safe tanker truck sized 100 MWe reactors that last 30 years that LLNL has proposed a few times sounds like an awful nice way of powering your 40 MW desalinization plant...
Deal with beef and dairy first, then we can talk about almonds: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths
I lost a lot of respect for anxiety over drought in California when my university set out little fact cards ("Please save water!") on all the dining tables with the following information handily presented:
Rainfall last year: 210% of annual average rainfall
Rainfall this year: 20% of annual average rainfall.
That's not a drought. We're significantly above average over just the last two years. (As of years ago.) How can ABOVE-average water supply be an emergency?
The most obvious confounding factor is that California relies heavily on Sierra snowpack to provide water throughout the year. Snow that melted last year and ran out to sea is simply no longer available to us this year, no matter how much of it there was. There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.
Further, we need the vast majority of this moisture to come as snowpack in the year it does fall, so it can be naturally distribute throughout the warmer months. When most of that water arrives in the spring and summer, it quickly runs off. As things get drier, this problem worsens since the ground becomes less able to absorb moisture in the short term.
People tend to think about water distribution similarly to electricity, which is completely wrong. With electricity, there is one all-encompassing grid that everyone uses, and if some people use more of it, there is less of it available for others. Water is not like that: it is as if there were thousands of independent grids that cannot be easily connected, because pumping water over large distances is most often prohibitively expensive.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/feb/28/californ...
~99% of free flowing water in CA would evaporate or dump in a tiny number of rivers which are tapped for urban water. The only reason many of these watersheds appear separate is 100% of the water is removed long before it enters the ocean. The Kern River being a great example that used to dump into the San Joaquin River but none of that water flows into the ocean today.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_rivers_of_California
PS: Wells generally tap flowing water even if it’s simply not obvious that’s what’s going on. Basically, the ground can only hold so much water and it normally absorbs excess from rain which eventually flows into streams etc.
Yes, it does, ultimately, in very large part. It may not traverse all of the same infrastructure, but it comes from the same sources, which have limited capacity. (And, in California, quite a lot of both urban and agricultural water is delivered by either the California State Water Project or the federal Central Valley Project, and an additional fraction of both urban and agricultural water is from sources downstream from the diversions for those water projects, and thus competes directly with them.)
> However, it is not clear at all that agricultural uses even compete with urban uses.
Yes, its quite clear that they do compete quite directly in California.
> People tend to think about water distribution similarly to electricity, which is completely wrong. With electricity, there is one all-encompassing grid that everyone uses, and if some people use more of it
In California, water is very much like that. Even the sources that seem separate (“I have my own well”) tap into sources (aquifers in the case of wells) shared with, and thus competing with, other uses.
> it is as if there were thousands of independent grids that cannot be easily connected
It’s really not like that all in California, especially outside of certain parts of rural Northern California: the vast majority of both the urban and agricultural parts of the rest of the state are dependent on the two big water projects and/or Colorado River water.
Most today comes from the State Water Project, which pumps all the way from northern California where the Sierra Nevadas drain into rivers and this is the principle source for both Los Angeles and for the Central Valley. Los Angeles also still gets some from the Colorado River pumped across the Mojave, but this is arguably even more insane as it feeds four major metros in Los Angeles, San Diego, Las Vegas, and Phoenix, none of which have their own local water sources to sustain a large city.
LA basin was a pretty terrible place to put the country's second largest metro. LA did originally get its water from local groundwater basins, but those tapped out when the population was still around 6,000. It was solved by building the original Los Angeles aqueduct to pump all the way from Owens Valley. What other city can say its most famous street is named after a water engineer?
"Records show 68 million gallons passed through the pipeline in 2019, and an estimated 58 million gallons flowed through the pipeline last year."
The corrupt system will persist and urban users will continue to overpay, but at some point before people start dying of thirst the politics of unduly favoring agriculture will become untenable.
You have to look at the second and third order consequences of such a policy. Do you think the farmers eat the cost and business in California goes on as usual? The water cost will be paid, one way or another.
From 2015: https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-nuts...
"it takes about a gallon of water to grow one almond, and nearly five gallons to produce a walnut. Residents across the state are being told to take shorter showers and stop watering their lawns, but the acreage devoted to the state’s almond orchards have doubled in the past decade. The amount of water that California uses annually to produce almond exports would provide water for all Los Angeles homes and businesses for almost three years."
Some of it will end up in the ground and eventually become part of the water table in that region, eventually coming back out via wells to be reused.
A lot of it will be transpired into the air by the plant. Some of that will condense out and end up in the ground. The winds in those areas tend to blow toward the Sierra Nevada mountains to the east. I suspect a lot of that water ends up rain on the west side of those mountains, where much of it makes its way back to the farming regions.
Some will be broken down in chemical reactions in the plant, with the H and O being combined with other elements to form various compounds. It would take someone with a much more extensive knowledge of plant biology than I have to say what happens to those compounds and if any of the H and O used for them ends up as water again later.
I've never seen any analysis that actually looks at where the water goes after the nut is produced.
Of course the atoms are conserved. Any plant matter that is consumed by humans or burned will end up back as water while it isn’t tied up in your body or buried.
Certainly some will go to groundwater and some will evaporate and get locally precipitated... but depending on weather patterns some water vapor will leave the state and rain down past the mountains or into the sea.
A large ecological transformation could be undertaken to plant forests and other plants to increase water capacity and make more water cycle locally, but that kind of transformation would be terrificly expensive and environmentally controversial. (but could work in places... there are a lot of rainforests out there where if you burned them down they would be deserts.)
Nuts are calorie dense, and most foods require as much if not more water per calorie. Food simply requires a lot of water. For example, A 5 oz glass of wine takes 34 gallons. A head of iceberg lettuce takes 16 gallons of water.
You will note that the motherJones article compares almond water things like home use, not other food sources.
Many crops around the world receive zero irrigation, the only water they get comes from rain. Much of the cereal grains (not all, but still much) are grown without irrigation.
In Iowa we drain the land by putting porous pipes a few feet down which are interlinked and drain into the rivers. If we didn’t, the water table comes up all the way to the surface and much of the land would be ephemeral ponds for significant portions of the year.
Yup. Beef and dairy are far worse, yet almonds get shit on: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths
A snack size serving of almonds is around 20 of them, representing about 20 gallons. A side dish of lettuce is probably about half of one, 8 gallons.
That said, California's water is probably best used in high value add industries like semiconductor manufacturing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Roman_cisterns
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_stepwells_in_Gujara...
Los Angles piloted a "smart cisterns" program in 2015 that captured residential roof runoff in centrally monitored and operated cisterns, which could hold or release water according to flood conditions and local demand:
https://stormwater.wef.org/2015/11/los-angeles-homeowners-ca...
The state needs to liquidate 90% of its forests ASAP, because reducing carbon emissions and blaming political enemies aint gonna turn California into a tropical climate. It's an arid state prone to hundred-year droughts, and it's not the place where you want to see lots of trees, not unless you also enjoy seeing the occasional massive wall of flame devouring the countryside.
Metropolitan Area Outer Underground Discharge Channel - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Area_Outer_Underg...
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/304869/california-real-g...
This is what economists sometimes call a stock-flow inconsistent argument. Water, like money, circulates, and to stick your finger on one part of that chain and insist that something is being used by X and thus not available for Y does more to obfuscate than enlighten. Some of the water "spent" on agriculture then evaporates into the air and ends up as snowfall where it is "spent again" on skiing, and then it melts and travels down a river and lands in hetch-hetchy where it is "spent" on someone in San Francisco taking a shower. Things like subsidies matter, government's role in diverting water from A to B matters. But just as more rains fall on rural areas than urban areas, you will see more water used to support agriculture than to support cities. That does not mean that anyone is taking away anyone's else water and using it up for some nefarious purpose.
It is true that water that evaporates is likely to someday fall somewhere as rain or snow. However agriculture is going to spread a lot of water during summer. At that point it evaporates very efficiency. But unfortunately during summer it is unlikely that anywhere in California will have the conditions for rain, so that water is going to fall in some other place. Normally Colorado, from which it is unlikely to go back into California.
So from the point of California, water used in agriculture is gone. Not to be seen again any time soon.
I'm not an expert in this area but I have strong doubts that this argument is useful in this case.
Let's think of an example. Two people are die because of dehydration. Luckily they happen to find a full 1 liter water bottle.
One of the them quickly grabs it and drinks it all. Then she tells the utterly shocked other person: "Don't you worry, water, like money, circulates. You see, I will eventually pee out this water and it will evaporate and it will become rain and so on".
My point is, that the amount of usable water matters. If you have X liters of waters from wells, rivers and so on each year that you can access, it won't be any more just because there is a water cycle.
CA climate has been much drier in the past, even before global warming. We seem to have this discussion every few years when there's a drought, but quickly forget. It seems like we do the same thing with wildfires and earthquakes.
Even if it's worse today, we knew there were ~35 year drought cycles!
Deal with animal agriculture first, then we can talk about the fruits and nuts.
I'm trying! I can only eat them so fast!
Worst of all is some places in California you aren't ALLOWED to remove the high maintenance, water sucking, worthless patch of grass because of some HOA or city regulation. They call a mulched, tree covered, sustainable and bare dirt yard "Ugly." Then they want to replace it with a fungus looking growth that has to be trimmed all the time by loud gasoline powered equipment that wakes night shift workers up at 9AM.
https://deeply.thenewhumanitarian.org/water/community/2017/0...
https://singularityhub.com/2019/06/18/inching-towards-abunda...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sundrop_Farms#/media/File:1604...
It's a farm in the middle of the desert that gets all its water from desalinated sea water powered entirely by an array of mirrors.
https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2021-04-26/ddt-was...
Yup. I spend a good deal of time training for and rescuing people in the Sierras. Snow pack is very obviously lower than a decade back. Sure, sure, we'll get the occasional outlier like that massive snow pack a few years back, but ever other year, it gets lower and lower.
