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Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

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Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#191

Post by rsync »

panzagl wrote: post #114
speeder wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, seirously? People are growing Eucalyptus in a desert? That is one of the most mind boggling stupidity thing I ever heard of! It is just insane and suicidal to do that! Eucalyptus trees have 60 meter long roots, and use water at absurd amounts! In my country people only have those in places that rain a lot and have a ton of groundwater!

Not on purpose, hence 'invasive'

Originally it was on purpose.

None other than Jack London had a financial scheme to import these fast growing trees and plant them throughout the Bay Area, etc.:

https://gilroydispatch.com/thank-jack-london-for-the-eucalyp...

I think they are beautiful. Also very dangerous (falling limbs) and explode like torches in a wildfire.

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#192

Post by sklargh »

juve1996 wrote: post #186
sklargh wrote: post #143

This seems like an ideal use case for a small modular nuclear reactor + desalination.

I'm all for nuclear power but I'd rather them not be located in seismically active regions. We've already seen the issues there.

That’s a very fair point.

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#193

Post by rory »

ac29 wrote: post #181
rory wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The worst culprits (in terms of volume + heavy water usage) are almonds, pistachios, and walnuts. No one is going to starve because nuts become rare and expensive, so let's start there.

The worst culprit is Alfalfa, used as livestock feed: https://pacinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/CA-Ag-Water-U... (pdf link)

This source is out of date-- alfalfa acreage has substantially declined over the past decade while nut acreage has boomed. Both are bad though, obviously.

https://cms-static.wehaacdn.com/hoards-com/images/2-CA-hay-a...

https://d3qz1qhhp9wxfa.cloudfront.net/growingproduce/wp-cont...

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#194

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

floor2 wrote: post #177
t-3 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Artifacts are not history, they are items. The names, languages, and cultures of many native groups are completely unknown due to genocide and forced integration. I said that they lacked the trappings of what present-day humans think of as civilization, not that they didn't exist or have civilization, which I know they did - but they died out due to drought. Much of the time, they lacked resources for widespread acce…

While you're correct about the native people often living as nomads and lacking clothing or permanent structures, it's worth clarifying the "genocide" claim which is a source of mass misunderstanding about American history. To be clear- many indigenous groups lived as distinct tribes for decades or centuries which then disappeared, but essentially none of them were due to direct contact with immigrants from Europe. D…

I find this a little disingenous in that while it is true that:

> Disease, drought, inter-tribal warfare wiped out the vast majority.

it was really overwhelmingly disease, and it was disease introduced by colonists from Europe.

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#195

Post by pnutjam »

8note wrote: post #187
pnutjam wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hahaha.. Room between the 2 "extremes" of "use every drop of water in the river so it never makes it to the ocean" and "Let plants and animals have a little water". This is exactly what's wrong with discourse in America.

The compromise is what's already there today. The extreme would be to get rid of all human water use to allow the environment to recover

exactly my point. It's like the cartoon where one side says, "kill them" and one side says "don't kill us" and the guy in the middle is asking for a compromise.

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#196

Post by eesmith »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #149
eesmith wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I understand you right, Namibia lacks the " trappings of what present-day humans think of as civilization" because many San live as hunter-gatherers? The link you gave describes people who live on the margin; "peripheral members of the Puebloan culture". Not "most of the native groups", which is the phrase yous used earlier. Yes, many modern people don't have a sense of the pre-Spanish history of the Southwest.…

to be fair to t-3, they seem to have some real focus on the Chihuahan and Sonoran deserts, and I suspect that things may indeed have been a little different there than the areas occupied by the Tewa/Pueblo peoples and even the Hopi.

I think you're being generous.

"American west" covers a lot of area.

The idea that the people there 'lacked resources for widespread access to fire' is preposterous. And t-3's own example shows the Jumanos 'developed a high skill in tanning buffalo and deer hides from which they made clothing and moccasins', the and the Mansos women 'cover themselves from the waist down with two deerskins', so definitely with access to resources from which to make clothing.

That they didn't is a different thing.

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#197

Post by IntrepidWorm »

sologoub wrote: post #154
maratc wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Israel has successfully reused its wastewater for agriculture. Turns out crops like the recycled wastewater just as much as drinking water. More than 90% of wastewater is reused in Israel. The second-place holder reuses less than 25%. United States’ rate is less than 10%. [0] [0] https://www.fluencecorp.com/israel-leads-world-in-water-recy...

Israel also uses a lot of desalination: “ Israel now gets 55 percent of its domestic water from desalination, and that has helped to turn one of the world’s driest countries into the unlikeliest of water giants.” [1] While CA is busy stonewalling desalination project that could cover 1/3 of Orange County needs and would reuse old power station infra. And not much else is planned. Recycled water isn’t readily availabl…

I'm not familiar with the reasons given for stonewalling desalination plants. It seems to me (a layman) that this would be one of the first real avenues for actual progress on the shortage. Why is this being fought so hard?

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#198

Post by ncmncm »

twofornone wrote: post #128
lokar wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The residents see it differently. They have been farming there for several generations and it's been mostly fine, the land is very productive when irrigated. The fact that it all depends on a massive public subsidy (both cash and water) from the rest of the state is ignored by then. They focus on arguments like "stop dumping water in the ocean" - eg make all the river run dry before reaching the coast, and "this is w…

Do we even grow a sizeable proportion of staple crops in the western US? Isn't the majority of water going to crops like almonds (as opposed to grains)? Edit: looks like the bulk of land at least in california is allocated to hay production, with tomatoes in a somewhat distant second. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Quick_Stats/Ag_Overview/stateOverv...

California grows 80% of the US vegetable crop (i.e. excluding grain and pulses).

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#199

Post by s1artibartfast »

8note wrote: post #189
s1artibartfast wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not about subsidies, it is about water contracts and infrastructure that the farmers paid for up front.

The infrastructure that came with water in it? They built the Colorado River?

Most of the fights over water in the central valley is over water coming from the American and Sacramento rivers, not the Colorado river.

Bonds were raised and contracts were made with farmers for X gallons at Y price. The state water project doesn't want to uphold the contracts and this is what the farmers are demanding.

There is a separate fight also going on about new laws preventing farmers pumping their own water with private wells. The state holds that the new laws supersede the water rights of the farmers, but that restricting their use does not constitute eminent domain and the farmers do not need to be compensated. There are a number of heated cases making their way through the courts regarding this now.

Last, the waters imported from the Colorado River are used for drinking and domestic use, not for agriculture.

Re: Nearly all of the Western USA is in drought and it's not even summer yet

#200

Post by ncmncm »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #182
krapp wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People lived in deserts all across the US for tens of thousands of years and got by just fine and never had to pay a dime for water. This isn't a desert climate problem, it's a "capitalism charging money for something that should be free" and "modern civilization having no concept of ecological balance" problem.

> and got by just fine Or maybe not. The Anasazi left a bunch of uninhabited ruins. Current thinking is that drought played a big part in why their population declined.

Likewise, cf. The Catastrophe, when every coastal city around the Mediterranean was sacked c. BCE 1190, beginning a 300-year dark age, which appears to have started with a multi-year region-wide drought; although it is hard to be sure at this remove, especially when record-keeping evaporated along with civilization itself. Archaeology has had to fill in the blanks.
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