Originally published at: A close look at declining water reserves in the west | Boing Boing
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The Earth is thirsty, and pissed off.
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What isnt done in many regions of the world, it to put the water that was used back where it was obtained from.
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With these historic lows, now is the time to increase the capacity of these low reservoirs while it is “easy” to do so, in anticipation of the next drought.
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Droughts are a lie started by Big Water and perpetuated by the lamestream media.
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Predictably, this makes me hella thirsty.
That isn’t always compatible with migratory fish survival. Many populations are dependent upon the pulse of high water in the rainy season or snowmelt in order to flush yearling fish downstream or to turn impassible waterfalls into passable ones. If that high water period is used instead to fill reservoirs, it severely depletes those populations.
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That’s been the Republican response, but if you aren’t getting enough rain during the wet period, that doesn’t help any. There’s no longer any play in the system, no excess to store.
Yeah. Not just that, but it has broad impacts on ecosystem and waterway health. There’s a minimum amount of water that needs to flow through rivers for multiple reasons - even discounting fish and river-side ecosystems, we’re hitting the point where there’s concern about water levels dropping low enough that where rivers meet the sea, salt water will infiltrate upstream, getting into groundwater, etc. It’s a big point of controversy with plans to pump water from the Sacramento river to Southern California. (Especially since Southern California relies entirely on imported water but still hasn’t started the kind of harsh water-rationing efforts Northern California has…)
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This thread gives me an amplified feeling of the same dread I get in the truck-eating bridge videos. Everyone sees the disaster coming, most of us have ideas about what could stop it, yet the truck just keeps going forward.
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The Salinas River valley is grappling with that. Seawater is infiltrating the groundwater aquifer, and that’s potentially disaster for agriculture, which is kind of a big deal there.
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Indeed. I heard that the water was going to be reinstated in August.
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Maybe, perhaps, planting large metropolitan centers into the middle of historic deserts was a sort of bad idea? Maybe?
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For years we figured we’d move back to Austin. But 8? or 10? years ago, Lake Travis dropped way down and Austin had to pipe in their water from downstream, at a very hefty premium. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened since but I’m no longer in a hurry to move back to TX (not even to vote against Cruz).
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When Trump came to California and complained that were were letting the water run into the sea, that really pissed me off, because of the degree to which it was so lazily ignorant of what’s going on. People focused on his “raking the forest” comments, but that was worse.
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I mean, the Colorado is already a seasonal stream where it flows (sometimes) into the Sea of Cortez thanks to dewatering. That’s one of the biggest rivers in western North America, and there are times it doesn’t make it all the way to the ocean.
We are a long way off from even basic water conservation. We waste incredible amounts of water in uncovered irrigation canals and large surface-area reservoirs just with evaporation.
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The 2017 climate report had some of the scariest rainfall predictions I have seen for the Southwest, and they are coming true.
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Two issues not yet mentioned:
- Google Cloud (and others, including plain Google) operate data centers in places like Salt Lake City, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and New Mexico, all drought-stricken. These use 1-5 million gallons of water per day. Whether the record lows in the Great Salt Lake are connected or not, the optics are pretty bad. Gawds, people, wake up!
- Coal fired power plants have been draining the water from under New Mexico and Arizona for decades. They take the water from rivers–including the Colorado–and from aquifers under the reservation and use it to make power for LA, PHX, Vegas, etc., while leaving the pollution for the natives (literally, Navajos). This is on the order of 125-190 million gallons of water daily in the Southwest alone. Coal uses 500 - 600 gal per MWh in closed-loop systems and 20,000 - 50,000 gal per MWh in open-loop systems. Ironically, those cities’ power use plays a major role in their existing and impending water shortages.
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I get mad driving through California’s agricultural areas, looking at the wholly unnecessary and egregious water wastage. A lot is going to change whether farmers like it or not because we’re now at a point where it’s impossible to continue doing things the way they’ve always been done.
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Rest assured that they will blame the ‘Other’ and vote for whoever tells them it isn’t their fault.
If that doesn’t work then they will get angry and violent. Well, more angry and violent.
And then when everything dries up they will demand a bailout and support from the hated big government.
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