Lake Tahoe hits a critically low water threshold

https://www.sfgate.com/renotahoe/article/Lake-Tahoe-drought-water-rim-algae-16533020.php

by Stratoscope • 5 years ago

108 68 5 years ago

woeirua• 5 years ago

At the rate we're going there will eventually be armed conflict in the western US over water. Large municipalities and maybe even the federal government need to put together a plan to buy out farmers after we have to turn off their taps for good. Ground water will only go so far. At some point we will have to acknowledge that some areas are just never going to be sustainable for agriculture ever again.

Diederich• 5 years ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_water_wars

But yeah, it's going to get a lot worse.

twiddling• 5 years ago

and a plug into: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadillac_Desert

thehappypm• 5 years ago

Or, in a more optimistic approach, the market will take over here. Private water delivery companies? Agricultural advances to use less water? Prices for water-hungry crops going up, shifting consumers to cheaper alternatives?

nradov3• 5 years ago

The problem is that water rights are covered by State constitutions and statutes. Introducing markets would require changing those laws and seizing water rights. That might require making huge compensation payments to existing rights holders. Politically it's just extremely difficult.

In general US agriculture is extremely wasteful of water. We could drastically cut water consumption by adopting farming techniques used in Israel, but food costs would increase.

twobitshifter• 5 years ago

The market is always too late in constraining resources often running counter to it. Higher prices for water will lead to more water being mined. High oil prices led to deep water drilling, fracking, and tar sands.

ZetaZero• 5 years ago

Cities have been buying out farms for years now. They can buy a single farm with water rights, then drain the aquifer over the next 10-20 years. Every other family that depends on that aquifer gets screwed, with wells that dry up.

The western water laws are enshrined in states constitutions. It's going to get a lot worse before the laws are changed.

Just one example: https://www.elpasotimes.com/story/news/2016/07/06/el-paso-wa...

gmadsen• 5 years ago

it is not impossible to bring water through pipes, or invest heavily in desalination

AnimalMuppet2• 5 years ago

But to bring water through the pipes, you have to have water at the other end of the pipe. That's rare out west, and getting more rare.

api2• 5 years ago

What's the prospect for building large pipelines from places with abundant water? It would be extremely costly up front but infrastructure like that can last over a century fairly easily.

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

I wonder about that too but is it even possible to do such a thing on the scale that’s needed? Also, are there places that have enough water to supply the West or would they dry out too?

withinboredom• 5 years ago

Afghanistan did it thousands of years ago. Some of them still work. They are called a Karez IIRC.

coryrc• 5 years ago

Where's this place with excess fresh water on the level of what California wastes growing alfalfa in the desert?

raldi4• 5 years ago

Or we could just stop exporting almonds to other countries.

https://www.motherjones.com/wp-content/uploads/LA-vs-Exports...

Rebelgecko2• 5 years ago

An individual almond contains only a small portion of the water used to grow it, so presumably the vast majority of the water used to grow almonds in California actually stays in California.

gremlinsinc3• 5 years ago

Here's an idea, charge 5x the amount for water for farms than we do residential, (or any industrial/commercial purpose) and if you pollute the water ways you pay 3x the cost to fix it, and if it isn't fixable you pay some really exorbitant (might as well go out of business fee).

Sure prices will go up on goods from those water ways, but maybe they won't..maybe they'll do better more environmental farming to preserve water, like vertical farming.

hyperion2010• 5 years ago

Time for my usual WITWUS post.

We have know this for more than 140 years [0].

I strongly recommend that everyone living in the western United States read at least the introduction[1] to Beyond the Hundredth Meridian[2]. The introduction is more relevant now than it was when it was written 67 years ago, itself 75 years after the publication of Lands of the Arid Region.

Previously:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27910098

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18098899

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26964166

0. https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf LANDS OF THE ARID REGION John Wesley Powell 1878

1. https://erenow.net/modern/beyond-the-hundredth-meridian/1.ph... Bernard DeVoto 1954

2. Beyond the Hundredth Meridian: John Wesley Powell and the Second Opening of the West ISBN:9780140159943 Wallace Stegner 1954

imperialdrive• 5 years ago

https://www.npr.org/2015/05/28/408295800/the-water-knife-cut...

Listened to this book describing what you predict while driving across the Central Valley... It sure does feel like just a matter of time.

jmugan• 5 years ago

That is a great book.

snarf21• 5 years ago

Yeah, and the midwest will be next. Agriculture at scale has really destroyed our aquafiers.

reducesuffering• 5 years ago

Is there a map somewhere that illustrates areas with different water availability? I don't think average rainfall is quite the metric as places like Michigan have access to the Great Lakes. I'd want to compare places with low or high natural water.

1970-01-01• 5 years ago

Can we at least pick up the trash while it's exposed?

brink• 5 years ago

Lake Tahoe's water levels fluctuate a lot.

genericuser314• 5 years ago

Here's a chart of Lake Tahoe water levels since 1900: https://www.usgs.gov/center-news/water-science-lake-tahoe-ba....

HPsquared• 5 years ago

Looks like it has reached this level quite a few times, but perhaps more often in recent years.

mywittyname• 5 years ago

The 1930s was the Dust Bowl. The 1988-89 drought, while not as severe as the Dust Bowl, was the costliest in terms of economic damage and hit most of NA. As you can see by that chart, it took five or more years to recover from it.

It's also possible to see that the region never really recovered from the 2002 drought. Droughts are getting ever more frequent and the region isn't getting enough time between them to recover.

ericbarrett2• 5 years ago

From this chart alone, it appears that the water in the lake (or its sources) is drawn down much faster in modern times during dry years—the slopes of the downturns get steeper and steeper each decade.

winternett4• 5 years ago

I think ClickBait is what is driving the drought, and even other cases of public anxiety more than anything else right now.

It's unfortunate that major news outlets feel the need to capitalize on fear to generate profit now more than ever. The anxiety drives people to flood supermarkets and over-buy goods, which pleases advertisers, and it's a constant cycle of fear that can lead to major safety problems for us all during a real crisis.

Fear mongering is now even present in major news sources, this constant process of sensationalizing issues without proper historical context diminishes the value of rational and trust-worthy news reporting that used to truly solve societal problems in the past... We should hold news outlets accountable for over-sensationalism like how CNN and others are reporting on this drought cycle... :/

jeffbee• 5 years ago

That's a chart from 1900 to 2017. It lacks the current data. According to current provisional data, the lake level was lower in 2016 than it is today.

https://nwis.waterdata.usgs.gov/usa/nwis/uv/?cb_00065=on&for...

js2• 5 years ago

This is a well-written article. It contains no fear mongering. It defines what critically low means (below the level of the rim) as well as the impacts both on Tahoe and communities downstream that use the level above the rim as a reservoir. It provides historical context and discusses that it is not uncommon for Tahoe to reach this level, mentions the Dust Bowl, etc.

HN is apparently going to have a separate meta-discussion about climate. (Which is fine, but it’s worth a click-through to read the article. I’m glad I did!)

spaetzleesser2• 5 years ago

This weekend I kayaked on Lake Mead near Las Vegas. The water levels are also super low. When you look at the lines where the water levels used to be it’s unbelievable how much it has shrunk. Unless something fundamentally changes the West is in serious trouble between droughts and fires.

I wonder if there will be massive infrastructure projects to pump water from areas with abundant water. If that’s even possible. Pretty much similar to the way Hoover Dam was built to make living out in the desert feasible.

gregwebs2• 5 years ago

Tahoe is relatively protected from water diversion because it is up high in the mountains: there isn't that much agriculture to divert water for and there isn't a large population either.

The water problems of California are mostly felt in the central valley where the most agriculture is. A much larger lake, Lake Tulare, disappeared from there over 100 years ago due to agriculture, dams, and water diversion.

cudgy4• 5 years ago

The higher up you are the more people down below that want your water. Pretty sure that there are demands on Lake Tahoe as part of the Truckee River and downstream interests.

gregwebs2• 5 years ago

How much does that actually effect Tahoe? I Would assume that an alpine outflow is always taking the maximum amount of water that it can regardless of downstream usage. And that it only matters if alterations are made to outflows or if other new diversions are made.

genocidicbunny• 5 years ago

Tahoe supplies the Truckee river which is part of the water supply for agriculture near Reno and Carson city. So even Tahoe's got demands placed on it.

jbverschoor• 5 years ago

Tahoe Valley

KingOfCoders• 5 years ago

Looks like Half Life 2.

rini17• 5 years ago

The mud should be mined and used as fertilizer, not left to dry and get blown by wind. But it seems to be too polluted.

Lake Tahoe hits a critically low water threshold

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