No matter what you have read or seen so far on California’s historic Central Valley drought, you probably haven’t been touched by it as much as you will be by the following video from the New Yorker.
Terribly sad.
Home » Posts tagged 'california drought'
Tag Archives: california drought
California Has Never Experienced A Water Crisis Of This Magnitude – And The Worst Is Yet To Come
California Has Never Experienced A Water Crisis Of This Magnitude – And The Worst Is Yet To Come
Things have never been this dry for this long in the recorded history of the state of California, and this has created an unprecedented water crisis. At this point, 1,900 wells have already gone completely dry in California, and some communities are not receiving any more water at all. As you read this article, 100 percent of the state is in some stage of drought, and there has been so little precipitation this year that some young children have never actually seen rain. This is already the worst multi-year drought in the history of the state of California, but this may only be just the beginning. Scientists tell us that the amount of rain that California received during the 20th century was highly unusual. In fact, they tell us that it was the wettest century for the state in at least 1000 years. Now that things are returning to “normal”, the state is completely and total unprepared for it. California has never experienced a water crisis of this magnitude, and other states in the western half of the nation are starting to really suffer as well. In the end, we could very well be headed for the worst water crisis this country has ever seen.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California Water Wars Escalate: Government Orders Massive Supply Cuts To Most Senior Rights Holders
California Water Wars Escalate: Government Orders Massive Supply Cuts To Most Senior Rights Holders
Just two weeks after California’s farmers – with the most senior water rights – offered to cut their own water use by 25% (in an attempt to front-run more draconian government-imposed measures), AP reports that the California government has – just as we predicted – ignored any efforts at self-preservation and ordered the largest cuts on record to farmers holding some of the state’s strongest water rights. While frackers and big energy remain exempt from the restrictions, Caren Trgovcich, chief deputy director of the water board, explains,“we are now at the point where demand in our system is outstripping supply for even the most senior water rights holders.”
With “the whole damn state out of water,” AP reports State water officials told more than a hundred senior rights holders in California’s Sacramento, San Joaquin and delta watersheds to stop pumping from those waterways.
The move by the State Water Resources Control Board marked the first time that the state has forced large numbers of holders of senior-water rights to curtail use. Those rights holders include water districts that serve thousands of farmers and others.
The move shows California is sparing fewer and fewer users in the push to cut back on water using during the state’s four-year drought.
“We are now at the point where demand in our system is outstripping supply for even the most senior water rights holders,” Caren Trgovcich, chief deputy director of the water board.
The order applies to farmers and others whose rights to water were staked more than a century ago. Many farmers holding those senior-water rights contend the state has no authority to order cuts.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
“Mad Max: Fury Road” Is a Resource-Conscious Blockbuster for Our Time
“Mad Max: Fury Road” Is a Resource-Conscious Blockbuster for Our Time
Who ruined Mad Max’s world? The new film isn’t afraid to lay blame — and suggest a way forward.
When the first Mad Max was released back in 1979, the era’s reigning existential threats were nuclear winter and, to a lesser extent, peak oil. Set in a not-too-distant dystopian future and against the harsh backdrop of rural Australia, viewers’ ability to map their own fears onto the screen was crucial to that film’s success.
The film doesn’t just rebuke the greedy.
Although the fears have changed, you could say the same thing about Mad Max: Fury Road, the series’ long-awaited fourth installment. Released this month in the midst of California’s historic drought and increasingly bleak studies about the likelihood of catastrophic climate change, the film plays more on viewers’ anxieties about a carbon bomb than a nuclear one.
Director George Miller’s pitched focus on resources reflects today’s embattled context to a tee. Mad Max is not only a rollicking, white-knuckle action flick on spiked 6-foot wheels. It also carries an important and all-too-timely message, shouted defiantly by no less than an aged, graffiti-scrawling woman wielding a shotgun: “You cannot own a human being!” nor the planet on which they live.
Miller’s eponymous antihero, Max Rockantansky (Tom Hardy), inhabits a parched dystopia created by dual resource crises. Invoking political strategist James Carville, the movie’s opening-by-way-of-background announces, “It’s the oil, stupid,” briefing viewers on the water wars, oil shortage, and subsequent state suppression that jolted humanity into chaos. As the world’s supplies of fossil fuels and water dwindle, its citizens are reduced to a single instinct: survival.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
The California Water Shortage: A Case for Aesthetic Ecosystem and Ecological Design
The California Water Shortage: A Case for Aesthetic Ecosystem and Ecological Design
A reservoir showing the effect of drought conditions in California
In recent news, there has been significant coverage of California’s struggle with its below average precipitation in the past several years. Yes, they call it a drought.
Governor Jerry Brown and California State Water Resources Control Board have come forward with restrictions on water use, primarily in urban and suburban areas.
People are ripping up lawns.
Landscape designers are drooling (not too much) over the opportunity to redesign so many areas for better water conservation. Many are replacing lawns with cookie-cutter designed ‘xeriscapes’ or ‘desertscapes’ such as this one.
Urbanites are pitted against agrarians saying the other is more responsible.
One recent interview on NPR highlights cemetery caretakers wondering “if cemeteries, particularly for veterans, shouldn’t play by different rules than, say, a suburban lawn”?
And now, there’s a struggle between allowing salmon to spawn and the ability of Bay area residents to drink water that doesn’t taste funky.
This is where I follow up with saying, ‘The end is near!’
OK so perhaps I’m making light of the situation a bit. This is a serious situation. But we have gotten ourselves into this mess. We have been deliberately diminishing our water resources in the western US for a long time.
It’s just that the thought of water scarcity is a bit more evident now.
The good news? We’ve gotten ourselves into this mess, and we can get ourselves out. But it won’t be easy and it won’t be painless. Those in California are already beginning to feel the pain.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
Water Wars Officially Begin In California
Water Wars Officially Begin In California
A century of government meddling has turned the issue of water rights on its head, and further centralized control of waterways in local, state, and federal governments; and, as Acuweather reports, with the state of California mired in its fourth year of drought and a mandatory 25% reduction in water usage in place, reports of water theft are becoming increasingly common. With a stunning 46% of the state in ‘exceptional’ drought, and forecast to worsen, huge amounts of water are ‘going missing’ from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta and a state investigation was launched. From illegally tapping into hydrants in order to fill up tanks to directly pumping from public canals, California continues toformulate new strategies to preserve as much water as possible and fight the new water wars that are emerging.
Homeowners in Modesto, California, were fined $1,500, as Accuweather reporrs, for allegedly taking water from a canal. In another instance, thieves in the town of North San Juan stole hundreds of gallons of water from a fire department tank.
In Madera County, District Attorney David Linn has instituted a water crime task force to combat the growing trend of water theft occurring throughout the state and to protect rightful property owners from having their valuable water stolen.The task force will combat agriculture crime through education by instructing farmers how to prevent crime before it occurs, Linn said in a news release back in March.
“Since the business of Madera is agriculture, I intend to make its protection a top priority,” he said.
Jennifer Allen, spokesperson for the Contra Costa Water District in Concord, about 45 minutes from San Francisco, said it’s not uncommon for her agency to receive reports of water theft, but as the drought has continued, she said there has been an uptick in reports.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years – Bloomberg
California’s ‘Hot Drought’ Ranks Worst in at Least 1,200 Years – Bloomberg.
Record rains fell in California this week. They’re not enough to change the course of what scientists are now calling the region’s worst drought in at least 1,200 years.
Just how bad has California’s drought been? Modern measurements already showed it’s been drier than the 1930s dustbowl, worse than the historic droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. That’s not all. New research going back further than the Viking conquests in Europe still can’t find a drought as bad as this one.
To go back that far, scientists consulted one of the longest records available: tree rings. Tighter rings mean drier years, and by working with California’s exceptionally old trees, researchers from University of Minnesota and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute were able to reconstruct a chronology of drought in southern and central California. They identified 37 droughts that lasted three years or more, going back to the year 800.
None were as extreme as the conditions we’re seeing now.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
NASA Warns California Drought Could Threaten U.S. Food Supply: “There will be some definite changes” | Dave Hodges – The Common Sense Show
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory has sounded a stark warning over California’s sustained drought, publishing its latest findings where satellite surveys show a rapidly depleting groundwater supply.
And with California as the United States’ most valuable agricultural state, and thus key to America’s food supply (and much of the world’s as well) that could mean drastic consequences for food commodity prices and potential shortages.
The Nature Climate Change journal carried the report, which Think Progress summarized:
A new Nature Climate Change piece, “The global groundwater crisis,” by James Famiglietti, a leading hydrologist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, warns that “most of the major aquifers in the world’s arid and semi-arid zones, that is, in the dry parts of the world that rely most heavily on groundwater, are experiencing rapid rates of groundwater depletion.”
The groundwater at some of the world’s largest aquifers — in the U.S. High Plains, California’s Central Valley, China, India, and elsewhere — is being pumped out “at far greater rates than it can be naturally replenished.”
The most worrisome fact: “nearly all of these underlie the word’s great agricultural regions and are primarily responsible for their high productivity.”
NASA’s satellite map shows the loss of height just in the past three years:
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
California – A Food Powerhouse in Peril | Erico Matias Tavares | LinkedIn
California – A Food Powerhouse in Peril | Erico Matias Tavares | LinkedIn.
Now in its third year, the drought in California has forced local farmers to switch their water use from rivers and reservoirs, which are at historic low levels, to underground sources. This has mitigated substantial production losses, but given that underground reservoirs take a long time to replenish, if the drought continues the food situation in California might get much more dicey.
Food export data provided by the US Department of Agriculture for 2012, that is, before the current drought started to bite, can provide a sense of what is at stake. [Note: while a State’s actual agricultural export value cannot be measured directly, the USDA provides estimates per major food variety based on farm cash-receipts data]. The following table shows the crops where California was ranked either #1 or #2 based on 2012 export values:
Source: USDA.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
