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Source: NY Times
Mapping the Spread of Drought Across the U.S.
April 6, 2015 11:00am by Barry Ritholtz
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I live where it is dark orange, second worst. Beautiful warm sunny days and nearly all neighbors comment, “nice day, wish it would rain” or “looks like it may rain Tuesday”. Have cut back landscape irrigation to 10 minutes once a week if there is no rain and feel guilty at that – both for water waste and thirsty plants. Tell those plants if they can’t live on that, then go ahead and die.
And yet, there are towns with no water meters to charge for individual water use.
And there are ancient – by CA standards – water rights in place that allow almond and rice growers to pump away.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/04/01/us/water-use-in-california.html
If its yellow, let it mellow.
I live dark orange too. I went through this in the late 70’s. “If it’s yellow…. You did too. That was before the internet and prior to very aggressive information sources available to all who wished to look. Today I’m less inclined to personally try and save ma and pa California farmer by drinking beer produced out of state on the Northwest Coast and more inclined to think that we need to do to water what has been done to automotive and utility energy efficiency.
“Climate models project increasing days of extreme rainfall in the Northwest, Midwest, and parts of the Northeast.”
http://www.climate.gov/taxonomy/term/5454/feed
So why can’t California pipe some water down from Oregon and Washington?
The complex mess of legal water rights in the West aside, the pacific northwest is facing its own drought conditions and they appear to be growing.
The climate models I’ve seen are predicting that the PNW will continue to adequate rain yearly levels but in less helpful (to humanity) bunches; e.g., summers will expand and become rainless for up to 5 months with winter rains coming in deluges that are too warm to create much snowpack.
I find it ironic that so many legislators in states affected deny that climate change is aggravated by humans. I guess they’re too tied to the fossil fuel industry to think.
I don’t see our compadres south of the border with any drought problem. Maybe they can provide water for the millions of illegals in the impacted areas.
Maybe illegal immigrant policy change trumps climate policy change over the short term.
Maybe this type of drought has happened many, many times before over the past few hundred years.
Maybe, Man plans and God laughs.
Maybe, it is much angst about nothing over the big picture?
Another dark orange resident here, who also lived through the “let it mellow” time in the late 70s. I’m a bit perplexed about why we’re not talking more about desalination (lots of solar opportunities to do this), pipelines, canals, and other approaches to mediate what we’re going through.
I’ve recently retired from 40 years of pipe fitting including 20 years in ultra pure fields where DI water is integral. I have some practical experience. Energy costs and infrastructure costs are steep for the best practices that are long term rational. You would conceivably be looking at parallel potable/non potable systems, cross connection hazards, transportation and storage costs, and large gaps between what you’d like to have and what nature has provided in the past and may or may not provide in the future, etc. First you have to prove that this is something that we can’t wait out. Nothing like a seriously motivated public to kick it off. We are not there yet. Then you have to decide how much disruption is OK and how much you want to spend. This is just barely started.