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California is not in drought

latimes.com

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Re: California is not in drought

#171

Post by pvaldes »

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…

> There is no economically plausible way to capture enough of the excess in one year to last us through extended dry periods.

Seems like the own definition of forest to me.

Incompatible with arsonists and liquid gold diggers in any case. They must to choose one path or the other. Is either returning the water that forests own, so there is clouds, so there is snow, and punish severely arsonists, nature eaters and boycoters..

Or accept the place being sucked dry for money until the resource vanishes for everybody

Re: California is not in drought

#172

Post by IgorPartola »

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.

I think you misunderstand the scale of which we are talking about here. This isn’t a swimming pool or a lake’s worth of water.

Re: California is not in drought

#173

Post by Chris2048 »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #161
Teknoman117 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

California has a number of desalination plants online already, including the large billion-dollar Carlsbad project, and several more plants in various stages of planning or construction. I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also ex…

Hmm, is brine a waste product of desalination? Interesting.

Can brine be duped on regular and/or sandy land and make it more fertile via minerals, or will briny/salty land be less fetile?

Re: California is not in drought

#174

Post by saagarjha »

Chris2048 wrote: post #173
thaumaturgy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has a number of desalination plants online already, including the large billion-dollar Carlsbad project, and several more plants in various stages of planning or construction. I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also ex…

Hmm, is brine a waste product of desalination? Interesting. Can brine be duped on regular and/or sandy land and make it more fertile via minerals, or will briny/salty land be less fetile?

Yes, and it's usually exceptionally bad for any environment.

Re: California is not in drought

#175

Post by Xylakant »

Chris2048 wrote: post #173
thaumaturgy wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California has a number of desalination plants online already, including the large billion-dollar Carlsbad project, and several more plants in various stages of planning or construction. I'm skeptical that desalination will be enough to prevent a reckoning over water in the near future though. It eases the strain on parched coastal communities, but it's pretty hard to move a lot of water very far inland. It's also ex…

Hmm, is brine a waste product of desalination? Interesting. Can brine be duped on regular and/or sandy land and make it more fertile via minerals, or will briny/salty land be less fetile?

Salty land will become less fertile to the point of becoming a desert. Very few plants actually like salty soil (mostly marsh plants). "Salt the earth" is an expression for that reason.

Re: California is not in drought

#176

Post by [deleted] »

tzs wrote: post #68
testfoobar wrote: post #41

We use a lot of water growing nuts in California. 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…

That gallon of water to grow one almond or the 5 gallons for one walnut obviously does not actually end up in that almond or walnut. Only a tiny amount of water is in the nut itself, and so exported from the state when the nut is exported. 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…

[deleted]

Re: California is not in drought

#177

Post by skystarman »

zbrozek wrote: post #50
rsj_hn wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The technology to prevent wildfires is controlled burns. The Ohlone indians would regularly do controlled burns, reducing the density of trees by 90%. A combination of anti-controlled burn mentality, building expensive homes in forested areas, and an antipathy to "greedy loggers" has turned California into a tinderbox waiting to go off. The state needs to liquidate 90% of its forests ASAP, because reducing carbon emi…

Many CA communities make it hard to cut down trees ("conservationism"), and also don't religiously enforce clearance rules that they do have on the books. The combination means that there's a huge pileup of fuel even in suburban neighborhoods. To those downvoting - this is a town-owned parcel in my neighborhood, just a few miles down the hill from the CZU complex evacuation zone. https://i.imgur.com/PVUoUVg.jpg

Local regulation for "conservation" seems to be a net negative for society in many places.

Can't build housing in cities with MASSIVE housing shortages because we need to "preserve historical character" of the laundromats that's currently there wasting space.

Can't cut down trees or do controlled burns to prevent turning much of California into a hellfire for months because "conservationism"

All of this is of course mainly tied to maintaining property values. And keeping the wrong people out of the community.

Why are people such selfish assholes?

Re: California is not in drought

#178

Post by itsoktocry »

Teknoman117 wrote: post #157
thaumaturgy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>have to start deploying as much renewable energy generation as physically possible

Do reasonable people still believe we can simply produce millions of square miles of solar panels and wind mills(that have their own production and maintenence issues), and that will somehow solve our energy issues? It's just not going to happen. We need nuclear power....and more.

Re: California is not in drought

#179

Post by giantg2 »

This sounds more like the local environment is just not able to support the large local population and agricultural. It's similar to the cause of housing issues and cost of living issues in that area - there's too many people.

Re: California is not in drought

#180

Post by rjmunro »

drran wrote: post #168
Teknoman117 wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sun already does desalination at the scale. Just create shadows over mountains to collect all this water at winter.

"Just create shadows"?

What does that mean?

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