[trimbo]

1000 word opinion piece and not one mention of the Delta Smelt?

The author is right though, this climate is the norm. A better way to put it is that California has always been in drought. So when politicians say "drought", they actually mean "deficit". There's more than enough rain and snowpack, but we're not collecting enough of it to meet demand. We could collect more--at great expense--or use less.

As i mentioned with my opening quip, something like 50% of the water that we could collect is allowed to run into the sea. The somewhat infamous reason for this is the endangered Delta Smelt. The truth though is that there's actually no limit to the water that would be used. Growers would still be demanding more. We allow the creation of billionaires on water rights here, through the growing of insanely water-needy crops like almonds[1].

Whenever this subject comes up, I recommend reading "Cadillac Desert". It really opened my eyes about the history and politics of water in the West. The "drought" talk is all kind of a scam, and it's good to see articles that kind of hit on that.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Resnick

[eweise]

Maybe no mention of delta smelt because Sonoma doesn't get its water from the delta.

[trimbo]

I was wrong, I glossed over the "migrating fish" reference here:

> But Central Valley lawmakers are hopping mad that the governor didn’t declare drought statewide, because they want the rules bent to allow the opposite — more water from reservoirs to grow their crops, less for urban residents and migrating fish.

[thaumaturgy]

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 California punctuated by extremely dry periods [3]. This is really bad news for a couple of reasons: Sierra snowpack accounts for around 70% of the state's overall water storage, which means it would need to double its total liquid water storage (and where is that supposed to go?), and agriculture is an important part of California's economy and contributes significantly to national food production, but also uses 80% of the state's water supply.

And then there are the aquifers. Subterranean water has been pumped out faster than it has refilled for decades [5], and wells have had to be dug deeper and deeper. In 2016, some communities ran entirely out of water because they were built on underground water supplies that had gone dry. Some of this water storage can't be replenished, because the substrate that stores the water gets compressed as water is extracted and then can't store water again.

Considered altogether, it is currently impossible to collect enough warm water to meet the state's needs.

I love California but the long term water outlook for the state might be enough to get me to move elsewhere. It's very grim.

[1]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/03/02/sierra-snowpack-at-61...

[2]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...

[3]: https://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/california-extreme-climat...

[4]: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2016/3062/fs20163062.pdf [pdf]

[5]: https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/droughts-exposed-cal...

[Teknoman117]

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 like an awful nice way of powering your 40 MW desalinization plant...

[thaumaturgy]

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 expensive, in both up-front and ongoing costs, and the predicted intermittent wet years are going to make the economics of desalination tricky. And then there's the environmental impact; it's a good bet that 40 years from now, the state will be even drier than it is now, and 40 years of brine dumped up and down the coastline may have more severe consequences than we are anticipating. (To their credit, the Carlsbad project has made a large effort to remediate this with the construction of 60 acres of wetlands.)

For perspective, the Carlsbad plant is the largest in the western hemisphere and it produces enough water for 400,000 residents in one county. It is, aptly, a drop in the bucket.

[Chris2048]

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?

[Xylakant]

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.

[saagarjha]

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

[Dylan16807]

> I hope we start rolling out desalination at scale before things get dire.

Desalination is easy for household water but probably not practical for farming.

But running out of household water is almost entirely a political and allocation problem to begin with.

So while desalination is one way to prevent dire situations, there's no reason to even have dire situations.

[itsoktocry]

>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.

[Teknoman117]

(which is why I mentioned nuclear power in my comment)

It's sad because it's probably the only thing that'll save us at this point, but it seems to be political suicide. Most of the problems surrounding it are solvable if we desired to solve them. (By 'desired' I mean funding research at an actionable level even though the current regulatory hurdles are expensive)

On a side note, I wonder what the energy consumed mining and refining uranium versus the power that can be generated from it is compared to getting the resources for photovoltaics or the neodymium you need for practical wind turbines.

[drran]

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

[rjmunro]

"Just create shadows"?

What does that mean?

[drran]

Launch a drone to spread sulfur dioxide in mesopause above mountains at winter, to create highly reflective clouds, to create shadow.

https://m.economictimes.com/news/science/sulphuric-acid-clou...

[mandelbrotwurst]

Yeah, I’ve only read part of that book but it’s quite good. There’s also a long PBS documentary based on it that came out in the ‘90s (maybe ‘95?) available on YouTube.

[eigen]

4 hour version.

https://youtu.be/PR2BSGQt2DU

[npsimons]

> through the growing of insanely water-needy crops like almonds[1]

Deal with beef and dairy first, then we can talk about almonds: https://www.truthordrought.com/almond-milk-myths

[thaumasiotes]

> 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 average rainfall.

That's not a drought. We're significantly above average over just the last two years. (As of years ago.) How can ABOVE-average water supply be an emergency?

[stouset]

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 extended dry periods.

Further, we need the vast majority of this moisture to come as snowpack in the year it does fall, so it can be naturally distribute throughout the warmer months. When most of that water arrives in the spring and summer, it quickly runs off. As things get drier, this problem worsens since the ground becomes less able to absorb moisture in the short term.

[thaumasiotes]

> 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 extended dry periods.

It's a pretty old technology known as a "reservoir".

[zasz]

Reservoirs are expensive. The commenter you are replying to was careful to use the phrase "economically plausible."

[rufus_foreman]

Here's a list of dams and reservoirs in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in....

You'll note that there was one completed in the 2010s and one in the 2000s. There were 33 completed in the 1920s.

The US produces 30 times as much as it did in 1920, in real terms. It is "economically plausible" for a nation 30 times richer than it used to be to produce some tiny fraction of the infrastructure it used to produce.

Californians might not want to build reservoirs, Californians might be too incompetent to build reservoirs, Californians might prefer blaming a snowpack that melts out slightly earlier to building reservoirs, California might prefer saving snails and slugs to building reservoirs, but California, undeniably, has the money to build reservoirs.

[stouset]

Has it occurred to you that we already built ones where they're geographically and economically feasible, and that's why we've slowed down their construction?

Reservoirs require land with natural geographic boundaries (such as valleys), will displace any human populations in them, and will completely destroy whatever existing flora and fauna exists in there. Perhaps Californians are trying to wrangle with the idea that destroying ecosystems at great financial expense to deal with the problems caused by destroying other ecosystems isn't the right way to approach problem-solving.

[thaumasiotes]

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.

[IgorPartola]

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.

[piva00]

Available free running water is cheap. Building reservoirs, with all their environmental and social impacts, is not cheap.

[pvaldes]

> 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