Posted on 03/28/2015 9:10:54 PM PDT by Beave Meister
Last week when NASA announced that California is on its death bed and has only 12 months of water left, the news hit like a punch to the gut. “Data from NASA satellites show that the total amount of water stored in the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins — that is, all of the snow, river and reservoir water, water in soils and groundwater combined — was 34 million acre-feet below normal in 2014. That loss is nearly 1.5 times the capacity of Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir,” writes Jay Famiglietti of NASA.
Famiglietti adds: “Statewide, we’ve been dropping more than 12 million acre-feet of total water yearly since 2011. Roughly two-thirds of these losses are attributable to groundwater pumping for agricultural irrigation in the Central Valley. Farmers have little choice but to pump more groundwater during droughts, especially when their surface water allocations have been slashed 80% to 100%. But these pumping rates are excessive and unsustainable. Wells are running dry. In some areas of the Central Valley, the land is sinking by one foot or more per year.”
Tensions are high in the state, and small conflicts are breaking out as people are beginning to steal water from others. Caroline Stanley of Refinery 29 writes: “As Tom McKay points out, the water crisis will likely have the biggest impact on the state’s agricultural community — which currently accounts for a whopping 80% of its water usage. (According to Carolee Krieger, president and executive director of the California Water Impact Network, the almond crop alone uses enough water to supply 75 percent of the state’s population.) But, recently, your average citizens are feeling it, too. People in the Bay Area are actually stealing water from their neighbors.”
(Excerpt) Read more at feelguide.com ...
And poured it down the river for salmon and smelt, instead of growing crops and sustaining people
Good point. But now I know what Jade Helm is for..
There will be rationing for residential and industrial users, but there will mainly be devastating cuts in water availability to farmers and feedlot operators in the Central Valley. Expect your avocados, apricots, walnuts, table grapes, raisins and almonds to be a lot more expensive.
Droughts can be dealt with. California’s demise lies squarely on the shoulders of decades of hard left policies.
You got it. The governors of California especially Jerry Brown have known about the coming water shortage. Rather than build those desalinization plants to keep the people of Kalifornia watered, he has frittered his tax money away.
“And poured it down the river for salmon and smelt, instead of growing crops and sustaining people”
BINGO.
For those not familiar with California’s water history, they actually had the solution but threw it all away. Colossal idiots. A quick history lesson from Victor Davis Hanson:
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_california-drought.html
“Really leery of the latest doom and gloom claims....IIRC, the satellite data being used to make these predictions has only been collected for around 2 decades....statistically, there is nothing to compare it to, therefore any predictions coming from said data is really irrelevant.”
Yeah.
Sky is falling.
Meh. I say we clean it out and make it part of Texas. If CA were full of Texans, it would be way better.
Maybe God thinks Cali has gotten a little too uppity?
And more water is essentially exported to China as alfalfa than humans consume in the entire state, including pools and landscaping.
Gee, if only there was a technology that could make all that water to the west drinkable.
The Liberals always worried about “peak oil,” but did nothing about “peak water.”
People will only care, or even become aware, when they turn on the tap and no water comes out.
“When is anyone in CA going to address this??”
Amazingly, it doesn’t seem to be on their radar screen... at all. Most Californians, liberals as they are, probably believe the federal government will simply confiscate other states’ water and give it to them. After all .. they’re California, and it’s owed to them.
Drought in Cali
Move to Bali
Who gets the electoral votes?
Mixeco?
California is out of water and has a huge coastline bordering an ocean. It has the technology to built nuclear plants on the coast that can convert sea water to fresh water at night and provide electrical energy during the day. This is clean energy that is not dependent on sunshine or wind.
Yeah, let's spend billions on a train to nowhere.
Sorry, these idiots deserve their fate.
People have misunderstandings about water and agriculture. There is a thing called the ETAW. There is water diverted, water applied, water evaporated, water transpired through leaves, water runoff back to the streams, water deep percolated and finally, water actually consumed by the plant which makes its way into someone or something (livestock’s) stomach. The aim of irrigation efficiency is to: (1) minimize loss to evaporation and leakage from diversions to point of application by use of pipes or gunnited ditches; (2) reduce evaporation by wheel line sprinkler, pivot, drip or flood - whichever is most appropriate for soil and wind; and (3) eliminate runoff/percolation by diverting only the minimum needed. The big issue here is the mass amount of “environmental water” that is released to run to the sea, the refusal to construct new dams and storage facilities and the movement to remove existing dams like the four on the Klamath.
Too bad the idiots cancelled a big portion of the proposed dams and reservoirs in the California Water Project in the 1980’s and on, this might have been preventable. But not the Greens wouldn’t have it.
In addition how many millions of acre feet of water has been flushed down the drain to “save” the Delta Smelt and other fish?
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