The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013-2014

http://www.weatherwest.com/archives/1797

by pc • 12 years ago

96 67 12 years ago

johndolan• 12 years ago

When you really stop to think about it, the amount of things in our lives that depend on the weather are overwhelming.

Dewie2• 12 years ago

My electricity bills seem to have been more expensive last summer than last winter (obviously no heating in the summer, and no cooling), which I suspect is because of less precipitation (though I haven't looked into it).

alwaysdoit• 12 years ago

What I don't understand is how we have gotten to the point where we are living paycheck to paycheck in terms of water consumption. We know that it varies from year to year... why don't we have some sort of cushion with which to plan ahead?

frandroid• 12 years ago

Look towards farmland...

NoPiece4• 12 years ago

It is too politically expensive and difficult to build dams and reservoirs in California's eco-sensitive environment. There were more dams and reservoirs built in the 70s (18) than the 34 years since (11). Also, a lot of the easy/obvious sites have already been built.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dams_and_reservoirs_in_...

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

That doesn't say a lot by itself; it's not crazy to imagine that additional reservoirs become less worthwhile as your stock of existing reservoirs grows.

kderbe2• 12 years ago

Your Wikipedia link says there are over 1,400 named dams in California (and presumably more unnamed ones). But the list you are reading from contains less than 250 of them, so you are probably under-counting.

A thousand dams and reservoirs sounds to me like an awful lot already.

thaumasiotes3• 12 years ago

We do -- they're called reservoirs.

_fs• 12 years ago

Well to be fair, we are not living paycheck to paycheck. Are water reservoirs and dams function as our emergency fund. We have (had) years of water stored within these reservoirs. And many years in unregulated groundwater. The problem is, even if you plan a large emergency fund, during an epic drought, the emergency fund is eventually going to run dry.

plorkyeran• 12 years ago

We're three years into a drought and there's still some water in the reservoirs. Perhaps the cushion was too small, but it clearly existed.

cjensen• 12 years ago

We have an enormous cushion and can survive multiple drought years. The current water restrictions are just mild precautions against the chance that this will be a multi-year drought.

Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level. In the 1970s, the multi-year drought got to the point where the restrictions were "do not use more than 50 gallons per person per day."

cpa• 12 years ago

Who uses 50 gallons per person per day? People with a swimming pool? A 10 minute shower is ~25 gallons, so how on Earth can 50gallons/person/day can be a "restriction"? (not being a judgemental asshole, but I'm not honestly dumbfounded)

Dewie2• 12 years ago

Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level.

Which seems a bit like trying to minimize global warming by telling people not to use gass-based ovens; a relatively petty concern.

Which seems to suggest that this drought really isn't an issue at all.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

The current water restrictions are just mild precautions against the chance that this will be a multi-year drought.

The current drought has already had both lower rainfall in the worst years and more years below the long-term average than the multi-year drought of the 1970s.

Right now we are at the "please let your lawns get a bit brown" level. In the 1970s, the multi-year drought got to the point where the restrictions were "do not use more than 50 gallons per person per day."

Actually, the kind of mandatory limits imposed in the 1970s drought are also being imposed in many places in this drought, although the bigger effect is on the bigger use of water (and bigger increase in the use of water since the 1970s), agricultural uses. see, e.g. http://www.usbr.gov/mp/PA/water/

Retric2• 12 years ago

This is the third year of unusually dry conditions, so reserves where already somewhat low to begin with.

Dams generally store water from excess years to be used in lean ones, but like anything there is major cost benefit analysis going on. Usually, they trade some power generation capacity for water in lean years, but they can't let dams get to low or you risk structural problems.

More importantly, one of the major, but less talked about issues is evaporation. http://pubs.usgs.gov/sir/2006/5252/section2.html

Suppose you built a standby hover just to store water. Assuming you found a usable location and outside of the direct costs for construction and ~125,600 acres of land. It's going to cost you 791,000 acre-ft/yr * (1 acre-ft ~= 325,851 U.S. gal) = 257 BILLION gallons of water every year just for a standby. Considering water is already in short supply in good years it's just not worth it.

dragonwriter2• 12 years ago

What I don't understand is how we have gotten to the point where we are living paycheck to paycheck in terms of water consumption.

We have systems that address variability and provide reserves for it, and a few low years can be handled without people noticing -- California's had more than a few low years. While 2013-2014 has been the worst year, its not the one bad year that is the problem.

trhway2• 12 years ago

that is kind of disconcerting here is that there are clear winners in the drought - people who have water rights and who sell these rights at record prices as it is just much more profitable to sell the rights than to put that water to productive use. I wouldn't be surprised if these people haven't had any effect on the state water politics.

On the other side, once price gets high enough, some enterprising folks will charter some big tugboats and start towing icebergs to CA :)

hnnewguy• 12 years ago

much more profitable to sell the rights than to put that water to productive use

But this is exactly what selling the rights does: passes the rights on to someone who can put the water to better use.

trhway2• 12 years ago

if somebody can use it better why would you get assigned rights to the shared state resource like water in the first place? It is not like the water is collected on your land or pumped from your well (such cases would have at least some logic behind it)

mjcohen• 12 years ago

My wife and I had an argument about whether we would ever move from our paid-for house in zip 90045. I said if the drought gets bad enough, she said never. Hope we never have to decide, but I am worried.

jamesaguilar• 12 years ago

I don't get it. Why would you think about moving just because you can't wash your car or water your lawn for a couple of months?

swartkrans• 12 years ago

The drought could get much worse than disrupting home irrigation. Depending on how bad it gets, the price of water could rise and force people out, leaving them with no choice but to leave. I don't know what that would look like or how it would affect households already economically strained with limited capacity to move, but I doubt it will be a good situation.

The disruption to California's ability to produce food will also affect people outside of the state, raising prices.

There's probably water around to import if the price is right if it came to that, so I think it just becomes a question of market forces and how the drought will impact California's economy and the country. I don't think many people are going to die of thirst, although that is a real possibility for immigrants who cross the border illegally who may encounter less water because of the drought.

pacala• 12 years ago

There are droughts and droughts. Some suspect a 150 years drought led to the collapse of Maya civilization.

Our results show rather modest rainfall reductions between times when the Classic Maya Civilization flourished and its collapse -- between AD 800-950. These reductions amount to only 25 to 40 per cent in annual rainfall. But they were large enough for evaporation to become dominant over rainfall, and open water availability was rapidly reduced. The data suggest that the main cause was a decrease in summer storm activity

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120223142455.ht...

Studies of] Yucatecan lake sediment cores ... provide unambiguous evidence for a severe 200-year drought from AD 800 to 1000 ... the most severe in the last 7,000 years ... precisely at the time of the Maya Collapse.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Maya_collapse#Drought_t...

phkahler2• 12 years ago

I always come back to air traffic. Did patterns change significantly in the last few years? I could swear the weather here in MI changed a bit after delta bought northwest and made Detroit a non-hub. But that's just anecdotal. Does anyone study weather pattern correlation with air traffic routes?

stfp• 12 years ago

Wat

honestcoyote• 12 years ago

As you might remember, there were a few days after 9/11 when all air traffic nationwide was grounded. Some scientists took it as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to examine what effect air traffic might have on climate.

Here's an article in Nature talking about it.

http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081231/full/news.2008.1335.h...

phkahler2• 12 years ago

Thanks for the link. I was well aware of that week. Michigan skies were exceptionally deep blue and cloud free - all week. I am also aware that NASA recorded an increase in the daily temperature range (details escape me). My question getting modded down to -4 is an amazing example of... something. People thinking climate is all about CO2? I dunno, but I'm gonna go follow that nature link. Thanks again.

pinaceae• 12 years ago

right. that's why all other major airline hubs report droughts as well. globally.

kderbe2• 12 years ago

The Oakland Museum's Gallery of California Natural Sciences has some great installations highlighting California's water management and usage. I was taken aback by how much of California's total rainfall is captured and diverted for human consumption. It's well worth a visit to learn about all the infrastructure California already has for managing water and coping with draught, and how severe this draught must be to overcome those safeguards.

sparkman55• 12 years ago

I'd argue that California's water management infrastructure is doing a great job. For example, the Crystal Springs reservoir, which supplies San Francisco, has remained nearly full [1], and municipalities haven't undertaken rationing or other drastic measures beyond "rat out your neighbors if they are watering the sidewalk."

This means that not only is the reservoir system keeping water in the taps of California's 38 million residents, but at least some of it is also keeping enough of a reserve to deal with catastrophes like an earthquake severing the pipelines that supply water to the San Francisco Bay Area.

[1] http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cgi-progs/queryMonthly?CRY

Teodolfo• 12 years ago

Anyone interested in managing water should read the book Living with Water Scarcity (free pdf here http://livingwithwaterscarcity.com/)

r0h1n• 12 years ago

Just a few days ago some HN commenters were saying it's perfectly fine to waste food in America because, hey, you can't really know how much food you'll really need while buying it. Someone ought to correlate what is the environmental impact on California from wasting 35 million tonnes of food annually.

aaronbrethorst• 12 years ago

It takes somewhere between 441-12,000 gallons of water to produce one pound of beef, depending on whether you want to believe the stats from the beef industry or an ardent environmentalist/vegetarian: http://www.gracelinks.org/blog/1143/beef-the-king-of-the-big...

My guess is that the real number is somewhere in between, but that still represents an order of magnitude more water consumption than producing plant-based foodstuffs.

The 35mm tons of wasted food is terrible, for numerous reasons, but we shouldn't stop there. There are a lot of things we can and should do to drastically reduce our water consumption. Like eating alternative foods.

Fwiw, I essentially haven't eaten beef in about 17 years. I eat a fair amount of poultry and fish, and occasionally eat pork, but I skip beef both for personal health and general environmental reasons.

Shivetya• 12 years ago

It is not so much water consumption that is the problem, it was the ridiculously subsidized price of water to this area that made it a problem. Locating water intensive farming away from a natural resource was only asking for problems.

Then to top it off with far too many people who want that picturesque green lawn and just throwing water on it.

The Extraordinary California Drought of 2013-2014

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