This is a really poor illustration, because it only includes Lake Oroville, which is a reservoir. Reservoirs exist to be tapped like this and drained down. Even a small drought would see a significant change in the water level for a reservoir.
One reservoir or not, meant to be tapped or not, Lake Oroville is at it's lowest point ever. Also that dam isn't generating as much power which is causing brownouts; the drought is causing brownouts:
"The dam at Lake Oroville is not generating enough power; only 510 megawatts. That’s down from 820 megawatts. The power shortage is causing rolling brownouts in parts of in eastern Butte County on Kelly Ridge and Forbestown Roads.
“We are dropping a foot a day in a 24 hour period,” said Frazier."
Without all of the relevant data it may be hard to draw conclusions from these photos and news stories. As an example... This year the Blue Mesa Reservoir (Colorado) would have filled up but in order to keep a downstream endangered fish species around, much more water than normal was let out. Having not known that I could have made some wrong assumptions about the state of water in our area.
To be clear, I'm not disputing the existence or seriousness of the drought. Just pointing out that this really isn't a very good visualization of its seriousness.
California has a mediterranean climate. It is normal for most of the state to receive no significant rainfall May-October and for streams and rivers, especially in the coastal range, to run dry by late summer.
Are you native Californian perchance? Everyone I meet from here seems to not mind the drought too much(although it seems very serious this time, boy cried wolf-type situation).
I'm not a farmer with junior water rights, so no I'm not concerned.
Even in dry years as we are experiencing now, California has more than enough water for domestic use. Some communities, especially those dependent on small local reservoirs, may run into trouble if the drought continues for several years, but California has dealt with this successfully in the past, most recently in the 1976-1977 drought[1].
The people who really need to worry are farmers, especially those without senior water rights. Many farmers in the state have moved from producing row crops, where fields can be left fallow in dry years, to orchard crops like almonds which still need irrigation during a drought. I don't have a lot of sympathy for almond farmers in Bakersfield. Here's a thought: maybe an area of the state with average rainfall of 6" a year isn't a good place for an almond orchard. The drought might actually be a good thing if it forces some of those farmers to move back to row crops. It may also finally force California to regulate groundwater pumping. Unrestricted pumping leads to subsidence[2] and kills off native vegetation by lowering the permanent water table below where the roots of valley oak and other drought adapted plants can reach.
Governor Brown has also been fanning the flames a little to sell the public on his delta tunnel plan. He used a similar tactic during the 1976-1977 drought to try and sell the peripheral canal.
Maybe California should re-evaluate their relationship with agriculture.
"But California grows so much of our nation's food! What would we eat without them!" you exclaim. Well, I actually agree with you. For the sake of a stable society, it is important that our supply of food remain uninterrupted. Food is essential to the US, and California is essential to the US's food supply.
Fucking pistachios are not though. Tax the ever-loving shit out of any farmer growing bullshit luxury crops like that, and quit blaming regular Californian citizens who just want to take a nice shower after a hard days work for all the missing water.
Oh, and somebody fix the "save water" propaganda to include some notion of watersheds and aquifers. I've met 3 people recently who don't understand that my [mis]use of fresh water has fuck all to do with California's water supply. I am sick of explaining that my supply of water neither flows out of nor into California.
Cattle is raised in places that are technically desert, like Montana, without requiring any water beyond natural rain fall. They eat the hardy natural grasses of the area. If the land was plowed to grow grains or any other human palatable vegetable crop, the soil would dry up and blow away, becoming desert like other over farmed areas like the Middle East.
Certainly there are sustainable farming methods, but it doesn't change the fact that industrial factory farms are a reality.
My comment was that simply eating less beef would have a huge impact on the environment. I'm not advocating that we replace cattle farms with wheat fields, nor am I advocating that people go vegetarian.
This really should be the top post in this thread.
They are restricting water to residents to benefit farmers. i.e. it's about money, not water.
Yet this greenwashing is tricking virtually everyone. And add in the fines they levy for over use of water and it's blindingly obvious this is about money not water.
Nobody doubts there's a serious drought here in California, but those "before and after" photos (2011 vs. 2014) are misleading and likely show seasonal variance.
Those were uploaded in 2009 (the camera used was announced in 2006, so that's a three-year window).
Yes, there's a drought. Yes, 80 percent of the developed water supply in California is used by agriculture. But not accounting for seasonal variation in a state with a dry vs. rainy season doesn't do the argument justice.
I'm curious how much water the various water projects in California lose to evaporation. The All-American Canal goes through the desert and is uncovered, for example. It seems like people have talked about covering them with solar cells, but it might be valuable just to cover them with anything.
Now, I know nothing about Earth science, but is this not at least a little bit expected given that this is a man made lake? Can I see some pictures of natural lakes in this area? Obviously the drought is bad, because this isn't common and looks very worrisome - but how much of this is just due to this lake basically being a giant swimming pool?
Unfortunately, California (and the American West) have experienced droughts on the order of decades or centuries, and in the fairly recent past. So it could get so much worse:
For a comparison to historical averages, see California Department of Water Resoruces Reservoir Conditions. Where the historical average calls for about 2/3 capacity, most reservoirs are at about 1/3, some markedly less (10%).
You'll get percent-of-average from Reservoir Water Storage (By Hydrologic Region), with historical data for selected years to 1977.
A plot for Lake Oroville showing annual patterns for current, wet, and dry years: Lake Oroville Storage Level Graph.
URLs in the Reddit comment below, apologies but moblie cut & paste stinks.
From what I've heard, a lot of CA rice is grown around the Sacramento-San Joaquin river delta, in areas the water table is so high farmers turn pumps off to water crops.
Also, keep in mind that while rice can use a lot of water (600 gallons or so to produce a pound of rice), it's small fry to beef, which is an order of magnitude more. Or if you want another beloved non-meat product for comparison, an equivalent weight in wine probably uses on the same order as rice (significantly more for less careful wineries, somewhat less for efficient ones).
Not that I'm against the state taking a hard look at all agricultural, industrial, and residential water use. Just not sure we should be picking on rice in particular...
All good points, but remember, they're still significantly less value-dense uses of water than things we're being hounded to stop.
For example, how much is it worth to me to blow 50 gallons of water in a shower. Maybe 5 cents at least? That water is valued at .1 cents per gallon.
In contrast, a pound of beef at the ranch costs maybe a dollar. 100 cents to 5000 gallons of water makes it valued at .02 cents per gallon at most (because it has other inputs).
The rancher should still cut back way before showers.
Why are you comparing the cost of the water to your house with the cost of beef at the source? You sure as hell aren't paying $1/lb for beef, and remember that the water you're using in your shower has to be transported and treated before it can be re-used; it's not evaporating off your bathroom floor.
This seems like a really odd way to make a comparison, even if we accept that the value to you of a shower and a meal are roughly the same.
1) I was conservatively assuming that the cost of the meat is due entirely to the cost of the water. In reality, it's even less. Taking the value of meat-in-the-city would make the estimate err even further in the wrong direction by attributing, to water, value that was actually added by transportation.
2) For city dwellers, I wasn't using the actual cost paid for the water, but the (approximate, much-higher) amount they would way if push came to shove, in order to estimate the relative utility destroyed by people cutting back on showers compared to farmers producing less water-intense output, and thus how misguided are the campaigns to get people to cut back what are already high-value uses of water.
The numbers around water "used" for beef are a bit disingenuous. It's counting water used to grow the feed - but feed is relatively easy to transport and can be grow in water-rich areas.
Because beef feed is the most water efficient crop that can be grown in many areas. Cattle have four stomachs, they are very efficient at turning grass and similar crops into calories. They are inefficient at turning energy dense foods such as grains into calories.
In other words, if the most environmentally friendly crop for an area cannot be eaten directly by humans, the most environmentally friendly thing may be to use cattle to turn them into calories that can be eaten by humans.
A large portion of North America used to be grassland fed upon by Bison. Range cattle have a very similar ecological footprint to Bison. By that measure, they are much more "natural" than any other food (except perhaps bison or mastodon). Pasture and hay land is rarely/never a monoculture, it is rarely/never sprayed with chemical. (Which is much more environmentally friendly than the organic alternative, plowing). It's also rarely irrigated. You're much more likely to find wild life on pasture and hay land.
As far as I'm aware, most beef cattle in North America is free range and grain finished. In other words, they eat hay (or their mother does) for most of their lives and are only fed grain for a couple of months before being slaughtered or on especially cold winter days.
It mostly depends on the relative prices of corn and beef. Corn is heavily subsidized in the States, so an unnatural amount of it is fed to cattle.
>Most of the farms with livestock were farms with pastured livestock types and few other livestock, represented by 707,365 farms (54 percent). Farms with few livestock numbered 361,031 (27 percent), farms with confined livestock types numbered 237,821 (18 percent), and farms with specialty livestock types numbered 8,834 (0.7 percent).
>Overall, farms with pastured livestock types and few other livestock accounted for only 17 percent of all livestock sales
Of course, farms w/ confined cattle may raise free-range cattle as well.
>Farms with confined livestock types accounted for 99 percent or more of all animal units on all farms with livestock for each of fattened cattle, milk cows, other dairy cattle,11 swine, chickens, and turkeys
From skimming. This actually has some pretty interesting data, prolly warrants a more serious look.
Yep. Cattle just don't do well, long term, on grain. It acidifies the stomach(s) which they're not equipped to handle. All cattle in the US is grass fed for the first 2/3 of its life, then moved to grain for most. Mine eat grain as a treat, it's like candy to them. But the primary source of their food is grass. Grass that I would be mowing otherwise (well, my wife - I'm allergic).
Because people like eating meat and the fact that eating meat is like driving an SUV causes some cognitive dissonance in people who consider themselves socially conscious.
A lot of the rice is actually grown using water from lakes Oroville and Shasta. I grew up in the area, and places like Marysville (south of Oroville) and Colusa don't really grow anything but rice.
Yeah, all of the rice fields are currently flooded. They won't be for much longer, it's almost harvest time.
Despite getting water from the reservoirs, most ranches have had their allotments restricted to the point that they have to use well water to maintain their crops. A lot of the ranches have been forced to drill deeper and deeper wells. I know of a few ranches that are pretty much in competition with their neighbors to go deeper- one ranch drills under the other, and is then draining the aquifer out from under people with shallower wells. Most drilling companies are booked solid for the next year due to demand.
It's scary driving through the valley and seeing drill rigs everywhere, it really drives home how serious the situation is. I wouldn't want to be someone that lives off of well water, chances are their wells are going to go dry before the end of this, and it's crazy expensive to go deeper, plus the scheduling issues. What would you do if your well ran dry but it's $50000 and six months before you could do anything about it?
Makes you wonder if this is indeed a permanent change in the earth's water distribution, rather than just a time of low flow rates. I don't think our climate models can predict it. Not because of atmosphereic, but because of geothermal. We can predict atmospheric, but geothermal is as unpredictable as earthquakes.
Basically 10 years of below average rainfall. Melbourne's water storages got down to about 25% at one point and I seem to recall you basically can't use the last 20%.
There were terrible bushfires in 2002, 2006 and 2009 and farmers needed a fair bit of relief from the government but life went on (with water restrictions).
The worst part of the drought was the Victorian government decided to build one of the worlds biggest desal plants (will cost the state about $30b over its lifetime), which was delayed in being finished because the drought broke.
Cost of the plant was around $4 billion and the 30 year operating costs are apparently around $1.5 billion.
It was only finished in 2012 and so far it has not been required to be used.
Over the course of the drought the government handed out $4.5 billion in drought assistance to farmers and the economy overall had over $5 billion in losses per year. 2002-2003 alone cost $6.6 billion.
To be honest, this looks like a good insurance plan. Australia should build more of them.
Sydney also has a desalinisation plant. Like Victoria, the NSW government copped flak for building this as the drought broke as it finished. Personally I think the detractors are very short sighted. They seem to forget how our dam was almost empty despite heavy water usage restrictions. Running out of water is simply not an option for a major city so it seems pretty handy to have this backup IMO even if it isn't used for 50+ years.
A desal plant in Australia is a good idea because it is an arid continent and is prone to drought. The biggest desal plant in the world was not a good idea. It was not required at the time and probably wont be required for another 20 years, especially given how well water restrictions worked during the drought.
Over-building on infrastructure is almost as bad as not building it at all. And as someone else pointed out this particular project was beset by dodgy builders, unions drinking at the trough and grandstanding politicians who wanted to be seen doing "something". All up, massive waste of money.
Fair enough. I must say from looking into it more that there seems to be an absurdly wide range of cost estimates being quoted, as well as a lot of mixing up of prices and costs, so the figures I quoted are probably bullshit.
Edit - I am not sure I agree with you about overbuilding on infrastructure though. A good example of this is the London sewer system by Joseph Bazalgette, that was massively overbuilt to the tune of twice the maximum requirement from what was considered the highest possible population density, just in case. Which was very lucky, given the development of the towerblock 100 years later.
The Victorian desal is a bit more expensive to the taxpayers than that to the tune of $24B, but has been embroiled in financial problems mostly due to the dodgy tender process.
I'm reminded of Hong Kong, which has dual plumbing - fresh water for drinking, cooking and washing, and salt water for the toilet. I understand most of Hong Kong's fresh water is piped from the mainland (and has been done for decades).
> there a reason why one couldn't use saline water for showers?
Yes. Water sent to a municipal sewer is usually recycled by sending it downriver to the next city. If you used salt water you couldn't do that.
Even the last city on the river before the ocean can recycle their sewer water for farming (although I'm not sure they do).
And with a septic system salt water would severely harm the septic system, and the land around it.
For the most part it's really hard for a regular home user with a sewer system to waste water. Water is "used up" mainly for watering plants (either residential or farming).
Southern California is a result of big government messing around with the market to disastrous consequences. If it was worthwhile for people to live in California, then the market would've built the necessary irrigation, without Army Corps of Engineers meddling.
People have lived in California since at least 17,000 BCE, according to archaeological excavation. It had about a third of the native population of what is now the USA.
The total precolumbian population of the Americas (north, south, and central) was ~40-112 million. Less than 1/6 to 1/3 that of the present US and only slightly more than California today at the low end.
See Charles C. Mann's 1491, pp. 104-109, among others.
"something approaching one third of all Native Americans living within the present-day boundaries of the continental United States - which is to say, more than three hundred thousand people - are estimated to have been living within the present-day boundaries of California."
The 17,000 BCE may a bit early (that was based off stone flakes rather than direct evidence of human remains), but there are 14,000 year old human coprolites in Oregon and evidence of boat use in California 12,000 years ago.
My point was that there were quite a lot of people considering it worthwhile to live in what is now California, long before Europeans got there, let alone any army engineers.
There are now a lot more people and it is stretching the water use, but there are a lot more people in most places, not just California.
And saying that markets will build any necessary irrigation projects and that the state shouldn't build them is an interesting position to take, given the historic link between irrigation planning and central government. You could make the argument that government wouldn't even exist in the present form, if it were not for the history of managing irrigation.
Starr's quote isn't what you'd said. The precolumbian population of California was less than one tenth the present total, and equivalent to a large town, not even a city. Say, Stockton.
It had about a third of the native population of what is now the USA.
Which to me means, take what is now the USA, find out what the native population was, and then find a third of that.
I wasn't saying that it was anything close to the population of modern California, just that California is not inhabited because of the irrigation, but that the irrigation is there because it is a place that people want to inhabit.
At the time Columbus landed London only had ~100,000 people. For the time, California was pretty busy and if Europeans had not taken over the western USA, I am pretty sure there would still be massive irrigation networks in California today.
I was actually just trying to work out what you thought I had meant. I can be pretty childish, but I wasn't doing anything other than stating what I meant by that sentence. You don't have to tell me what you thought I had meant but it would be nice.
It's the same here really since most people live on the coast so yeah most of the population would be a few meters above seal level.
We've lost so much land and people argue about reclaiming some of the land, some places have lost hundreds of meters in on the last decade. We don't have any rock here it's all sandstone.
We're as big as Long Island but I think we may be in trouble if we don't start rebuilding the coast and cutting carbon emissions of course.
