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California is not in drought

latimes.com

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Re: California is not in drought

#151

Post by stouset »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #150
trimbo wrote: post #95

1000 word opinion piece and not one mention of the Delta Smelt? 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…

> The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. 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 av…

This is a wildly oversimplistic way of viewing the situation.

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.

Re: California is not in drought

#152

Post by thaumasiotes »

stouset wrote: post #151
thaumasiotes wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. 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 av…

This is a wildly oversimplistic way of viewing the situation. 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…

> 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.

It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".

Re: California is not in drought

#153

Post by zo1 »

throwaway197812 wrote: post #21
WarOnPrivacy wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worked for a desalination company in the 1980s. From then until a few years ago, I would have disagreed with your assertion. Some recent advances have me rethinking that, however. https://singularityhub.com/2019/06/18/inching-towards-abunda...

Better membranes and renewable-powered desalination plants are not going to do anything about the waste problem. Has there been any progress on that?

Can't we just have giant "salt plains" where we allow the brine to evaporate and we just collect the remaining salt/minerals?

Maybe I'm crazy or not informed enough, but I always thought this water-desalination thing was a solved problem. Then I got confused when they talked about how there is "brine waste" and it's a huge ecological problem. Why do they stop short of full evaporation of the brine?

Re: California is not in drought

#154

Post by zasz »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #152
stouset wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a wildly oversimplistic way of viewing the situation. 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…

> 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. It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".

Reservoirs are expensive. The commenter you are replying to was careful to use the phrase "economically plausible."

Re: California is not in drought

#155

Post by thaumasiotes »

zasz wrote: post #154
thaumasiotes wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".

Reservoirs are expensive. The commenter you are replying to was careful to use the phrase "economically plausible."

Saying that there is not an economically plausible way of producing or keeping water is just saying that you don't want the water very much. This immediately proves that, if you are in a drought, it doesn't really matter.

Water is cheap.

Re: California is not in drought

#156

Post by zdkl »

rsj_hn wrote: post #93
Retric wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oddly a large majority of the state actually drains into San Francisco Bay Area. ~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…

> 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. This was news to me, thank you. Do you have a source for further reading?

This ought to be a decent starting point for vocabulary and mechanisms: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aquifer

Re: California is not in drought

#157

Post by Teknoman117 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #149
trimbo wrote: post #95

1000 word opinion piece and not one mention of the Delta Smelt? 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…

No, there is not enough snowpack. It's currently well below the seasonal average for the last 15 years [1], the average for that period is lower than the historical average was when California water policy was first established, and 2014 was the driest period California had experienced for the last 1200 years [2]. Only 2017 and 2019 provided some relief since then. Current models predict a warmer and wetter Californi…

I hope we start rolling out desalination at scale before things get dire.

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...

Re: California is not in drought

#159

Post by piva00 »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #155
zasz wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reservoirs are expensive. The commenter you are replying to was careful to use the phrase "economically plausible."

Saying that there is not an economically plausible way of producing or keeping water is just saying that you don't want the water very much. This immediately proves that, if you are in a drought, it doesn't really matter. Water is cheap.

Available free running water is cheap. Building reservoirs, with all their environmental and social impacts, is not cheap.

Re: California is not in drought

#160

Post by cornel_io »

digitalsushi wrote: post #66
tuatoru wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is also poor logic. Nuts are not a calorie crop, they are a relatively high-cost garnish/flavouring. 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.

I believe I read once that it takes about 920 gallons of water to make 1 gallon of almond milk. edit: i am apparently worse than an almond milk drinker, since coffee uses even more water at 1,056:1. and learning even more, cow-milk is about 2000 gallons of water to make a gallon of milk! so i really have no idea about any of this and its all surprising https://shamelesshousewife.wordpress.com/tag/how-much-water-...

Sure, but water isn't scarce everywhere, so optimization for water cost is not like carbon footprint where it all gets blown into the atmosphere and is bad. Many regions don't need to worry about water at all so it's basically free.
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