
California drought most severe in 1,200 years, study says - percept
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-california-drought-worst-20141205-story.html
======
Animats
It's bad, but California has the California Water Project, a huge collection
of dams, reservoirs, and aqueducts built in the 1960s, to store water and move
it around. Here's current reservoir status:

[http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.act...](http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/resapp/getResGraphsMain.action)

Levels were slightly lower in 1977, but the population of California was 16
million people lower then. The California Water Project was designed to store
enough water to get through 3 years of drought. We just finished drought year
3. (The water year ends Sep. 30, before rainy season starts.)

San Jose has a new sewerage treatment plant so good it can be used to provide
drinking water. It just came on line last summer. Right now, it's just being
used for irrigation and recharging ground water, but if things get really bad,
that backup is available.
([http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26160300/california-
dr...](http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_26160300/california-drought-san-
joses-new-high-tech-water))

So, yes, extensive preparations for this were made a long time ago.

Rain so far during this water year, starting Oct. 1, is slightly above normal.

~~~
tpurves
Population has little to do with it. 80% of water is used by agriculture. The
climate isn't helping, but actual water shortages are entirely manufactured by
an industry that feels like it's infinitely entitled to grow plants in the
desert.

~~~
exhilaration
To be fair, it's because they're feeding a population that feels like it's
entitled to low cost food. Because we've never had to pay the true
environmental and resource costs of our food.

------
rtpg
This drought seems pretty awful, and water resources in a lot of places in the
US seem threatened by issues (either natural or man-made), which makes me
wonder:

What if we were to build a bunch of desalination plants and just start pumping
water into aquifers or something of the sort? Are there major issues with
desalination on a large scale?

~~~
schiffern
>What if we were to build a bunch of desalination plants and just start
pumping water into aquifers or something of the sort?

If you're talking about conventional fossil fuel desalination, I invite you to
do the energy audit on that activity. If you're talking about solar
desalination in industrially-manufactured greenhouses, I invite you to do the
energy audit on that activity. Don't forget to account for the energy-
opportunity cost of land use.

I know there's a lot of hype surrounding desalination here, but a centralized
energy-sucking plant (owned by the ultra rich naturally) is a
counterproductive business-as-usual non-solution.

We can get a net-positive energy audit by redesigning our agricultural and
storm water management. Right now they're designed with exactly the wrong goal
in mind — shunt rainwater to the ocean in big straight hardware as fast as
possible. This maximizes runoff instead of infiltration, so we're
simultaneously preventing aquifer recharge and necessitating aquifer pumping
by drying out the soil.

"Keyline" design—a method of cheaply altering landform to soak water—is
probably a good start for these new infiltration maximizing strategies, but
this is by no means a solved problem.

In California, like any desert, the name of the game is minimizing
evaporation. This means all of the above, plus shading (e.g. date palms),
sunken beds, buried drip irrigation, and dew/rain harvesting strategies like
land imprinting.

Proper rainwater management is the lazy hacker's desalination. :D

~~~
jaekwon
Yeah I was wondering if our storm-water sewage system is sucking the water out
of our lands. But how much does this really matter? There would have to be
some analysis of these systems vs land with no such system vs where they are
to rain sources etc.

~~~
mason240
The city live in (Maplewood MN) recently built rain gardens in our
neighborhood for catching rainwater.

They are basically deep pits filled in with gravel with slightly sunken garden
on top. The water runoff from the street is diverted into them where most of
it is absorbed into the ground.

[http://www.bwsr.state.mn.us/images/ww-
box.jpg](http://www.bwsr.state.mn.us/images/ww-box.jpg)

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-31kb5tVYmJU/Ub9T22Hgy_I/AAAAAAAAAv...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-31kb5tVYmJU/Ub9T22Hgy_I/AAAAAAAAAvI/_TMboIzREK0/s1600/merge1.jpg)

[http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLZpvg9e-H8/UbY86YdLjzI/AAAAAAAAAn...](http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VLZpvg9e-H8/UbY86YdLjzI/AAAAAAAAAn0/gUv7kV1HjCA/s1600/2466+East+7th+St..jpg)

------
Decade
In the meanwhile, conservatives have "experts" like Anthony Watts to come and
say that not only are we not in a horrible drought[0], but that our recent
showers[1] are proof that the alarm over the drought is just part of the
global warming conspiracy[2].

So, if you were wondering how conservatives in good conscience can oppose
efforts to deal with climate change, here's one of the reasons. They have
their own experts from a bizarre alternate universe, where they start with the
same data but conclude that everything is opposite.

[0][http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/worst-drought-in-
calif...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/22/worst-drought-in-california-
history-not-really/) [1][http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/04/the-perfect-
storm-cali...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/12/04/the-perfect-storm-
californias-record-breaking-december-super-soaker/)
[2][http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/23/people-starting-to-
ask...](http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/11/23/people-starting-to-ask-about-
motive-for-massive-ipcc-deception/)

~~~
nkurz
I like your approach, but let me see if I can get you to question some of your
beliefs. First, Watts is actually only the author of your second link, the
other two are guest posts by two other authors. I won't try to rehabilitate
Watts, as he's likely already too tainted in your mind, but I'll guess that
you don't yet have strong opinions about the other two. Please consider how
well they fit the image that you have of them based on the articles you read.

The first piece was written by Robert Moore
([http://www.nrdc.org/about/staff/rob-
moore](http://www.nrdc.org/about/staff/rob-moore)). Personally, having looked
at the actual paper, I thought his article was more accurate than most of the
media coverage. Moore does not "oppose efforts to deal with climate change".
To the contrary, he's an analyst with the National Resources Defense Council
(NRDC), which is one of the largest, staunchest and most effective
environmental groups in the US, and lists "Curbing Global Warming" on the top
of it's list of priorities. If you look at Moore's credentials, I think you'll
be positively surprised -- he's legitimately an expert, and unquestionably an
environmentalist.

The paper uses a very specific definition of "worst drought". It's a
reasonable and defensible one (cumulative deficit on the PDSI scale), but it's
probably not what most people would guess. As Moore says, the paper does not
say that it's the longest dry spell, or the period of least rain. Would you
have guessed from the other media coverage that despite the phrase "worst
drought", there have been two other years with less rain just in the last 100
years? That there have been longer droughts?

I think Moore believes what he says in the piece: "Do these facts mean that we
are in good shape re California’s water supply? No! But we shouldn’t be
framing the search for a stable California water supply by starting from a
wildly incorrect statement that seems focused on creating public panic." He's
bothered (as I am) about the level of hyperbole and inaccuracy in the media
reports of climate change, and wrote the piece to counter that. Neither he,
nor Watts, nor Tim Ball (the author of the third link) believes "that recent
showers are proof that the alarm over the drought is just part of the global
warming conspiracy".

While I fear that some of the kookier commenters at WUWT might believe that (I
don't read the site, although I highly recommend Steve McIntyre's
climateaudit.org) many of those you demonize care a lot about the environment
and climate change, but disagree on the causes and the approach that should be
taken to deal with it. For example, try reading this piece on Urban Forests by
Tim Ball to see if he matches the pathological business-comes-first stereotype
often associated with "climate deniers":
[http://drtimball.com/2012/importance-of-urban-
trees/](http://drtimball.com/2012/importance-of-urban-trees/)

------
nkurz
The author's website:

[https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/daniel-
griffin/home](https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/daniel-griffin/home)

Has a PDF of the study:

[http://www.tc.umn.edu/~griffin9/pubs/griffin_anchukaitis_201...](http://www.tc.umn.edu/~griffin9/pubs/griffin_anchukaitis_2014_GRL_CAdrought.pdf)

------
PhantomGremlin
I haven't seen anyone mention the drought in Brazil. It's possible that
deforestation in the Amazon is at least partially responsible for that[1]:

    
    
       Some scientists have suggested that the recent
       uptick in deforestation in Brazil may be partly
       responsible for the drought, since loss of
       evapotranspiration from trees is known to reduce
       cloud formation.
    

I know its the other hemisphere, but it's certainly possible that drought,
deforestation, and changing weather patterns in South America would also
affect us. Yes, no? I'm just spitballing here.

[1]
[http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141024-sao-p...](http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141024-sao-
paulo-brazil-drought-water-environment/)

------
code_duck
Thankfully, it's been cloudy and raining in LA for a week!

------
leke
Looks like California could benefit from permaculture.

------
Ygg2
What do they know? There aren't any written proof from that period. This is
all a conspiracy of evil mustache twirling scientists. / sarcasm

~~~
crystaln
Yes, some people just don't get the difference between historical and
observational science.

