Climate Change Is Already Here, Says Massive Government Report

fangblackbone wrote:
Behold the power of the agriculture lobby.

You know it is hilarious the disconnect as I drive down the 5 through the central valley seeing all these signs blaming democrats and "congress" for "another congress created dustbowl".

No, you friggen moron!. It is a drought created dustbowl but don't let mother nature get in the way of seeing past your nose.

It's a well known fact that liberals are stingy with the use of their weather machine.

fangblackbone wrote:
Behold the power of the agriculture lobby.

You know it is hilarious the disconnect as I drive down the 5 through the central valley seeing all these signs blaming democrats and "congress" for "another congress created dustbowl".

No, you friggen moron!. It is a drought created dustbowl but don't let mother nature get in the way of seeing past your nose.

I actually agree with the sentiment. It's Congress' fault for not regulating water usage nationwide, forcing a lower carbon footprint, creating incentives for alternative energy (allowing citizens to sell extra power generated by their solar panels that were effectively free after incentives), or advocating alternative food sources (insects are much better to raise from a cost and ecological perspective). I blame the Democrats for being corporate mouthpieces and ignoring conservation and environmental issues. The Democrats have allowed the Republicans to drag the country further and further to the right. To the point where a center right politician like Obama is mocked for being a socialist. The Democrats failed to pull the country towards sanity, but not only that, they failed to even stand their ground and have been continuously pulled to the right.

So, yeah, I agree with that billboard but for all the "wrong" reasons.

You would also think that water towers would be much more common.
And funding for desalinization research would be through the roof!

fangblackbone wrote:

You would also think that water towers would be much more common.
And funding for desalinization research would be through the roof!

I also didn't mention things like fracking and coal mining that ruin the ground water. There are thousands of things we could be doing to help reduce these problems, thousands of things we could be doing to help prevent future problems that will be worse, and thousands of things we could have done to keep us from getting to this point in the first place.

Almost forgot that indoor farming saves 99% of the water.

Other things that it might be good to stop watering: golf courses, cemetery lawns. Like: seriously, if it's not growing even hideously inefficient food...

What are the California HOAs going to do that mandate you keep your lawn green?

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

Nomad wrote:

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

But it's not the cities, it turns out. It's the food we eat. It's the fact that we get excited about cheap gas prices when that comes at the cost of hydrofracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/earth/hydrofracking-could-strain-western-water-resources-study-finds.html?_r=0

In the world we're about to live in everyone is going to have to sacrifice, of course. Point a finger at cities and someone else can point a finger back at people who eat meat, have "too many" kids, buy too many electronics. But the quickest way to cut our water usage, judging by the articles linked here, is to change our diets. To eat food lower on the food chain and eat food that's less water-intensive. That's a fairly simple thing to do if we have the will to do it.

DSGamer wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

But it's not the cities, it turns out. It's the food we eat. It's the fact that we get excited about cheap gas prices when that comes at the cost of hydrofracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/earth/hydrofracking-could-strain-western-water-resources-study-finds.html?_r=0

In the world we're about to live in everyone is going to have to sacrifice, of course. Point a finger at cities and someone else can point a finger back at people who eat meat, have "too many" kids, buy too many electronics. But the quickest way to cut our water usage, judging by the articles linked here, is to change our diets. To eat food lower on the food chain and eat food that's less water-intensive. That's a fairly simple thing to do if we have the will to do it.

That is all well and good, but irrigating thousands of acres of desert for agriculture and aesthetics has to be reconsidered at some point. All of the things you mention happen in other parts of the world with no water issues to speak of, and it may have something to do with humans being a little too confident in their ability to terraform deserts into farmland with no adverse effects over time.

Nomad wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

But it's not the cities, it turns out. It's the food we eat. It's the fact that we get excited about cheap gas prices when that comes at the cost of hydrofracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/earth/hydrofracking-could-strain-western-water-resources-study-finds.html?_r=0

In the world we're about to live in everyone is going to have to sacrifice, of course. Point a finger at cities and someone else can point a finger back at people who eat meat, have "too many" kids, buy too many electronics. But the quickest way to cut our water usage, judging by the articles linked here, is to change our diets. To eat food lower on the food chain and eat food that's less water-intensive. That's a fairly simple thing to do if we have the will to do it.

That is all well and good, but irrigating thousands of acres of desert for agriculture and aesthetics has to be reconsidered at some point. All of the things you mention happen in other parts of the world with no water issues to speak of, and it may have something to do with humans being a little too confident in their ability to terraform deserts into farmland with no adverse effects over time.

Absolutely. In a world where we're talking about a megadrought I don't see how we can, in good conscience, consider it reasonable to continue with things like lawns and golf courses. Literally everyone will have to make sacrifices. But it appears that the #1 problem in the southwest is the food we grow and, by implication, the food we consume.

DSGamer wrote:
Nomad wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

But it's not the cities, it turns out. It's the food we eat. It's the fact that we get excited about cheap gas prices when that comes at the cost of hydrofracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/earth/hydrofracking-could-strain-western-water-resources-study-finds.html?_r=0

In the world we're about to live in everyone is going to have to sacrifice, of course. Point a finger at cities and someone else can point a finger back at people who eat meat, have "too many" kids, buy too many electronics. But the quickest way to cut our water usage, judging by the articles linked here, is to change our diets. To eat food lower on the food chain and eat food that's less water-intensive. That's a fairly simple thing to do if we have the will to do it.

That is all well and good, but irrigating thousands of acres of desert for agriculture and aesthetics has to be reconsidered at some point. All of the things you mention happen in other parts of the world with no water issues to speak of, and it may have something to do with humans being a little too confident in their ability to terraform deserts into farmland with no adverse effects over time.

Absolutely. In a world where we're talking about a megadrought I don't see how we can, in good conscience, consider it reasonable to continue with things like lawns and golf courses. Literally everyone will have to make sacrifices. But it appears that the #1 problem in the southwest is the food we grow and, by implication, the food we consume.

Is it wrong that I read that in Don LaFontaine's voice?

double post for goodness.

Nomad wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

But it's not the cities, it turns out. It's the food we eat. It's the fact that we get excited about cheap gas prices when that comes at the cost of hydrofracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/earth/hydrofracking-could-strain-western-water-resources-study-finds.html?_r=0

In the world we're about to live in everyone is going to have to sacrifice, of course. Point a finger at cities and someone else can point a finger back at people who eat meat, have "too many" kids, buy too many electronics. But the quickest way to cut our water usage, judging by the articles linked here, is to change our diets. To eat food lower on the food chain and eat food that's less water-intensive. That's a fairly simple thing to do if we have the will to do it.

That is all well and good, but irrigating thousands of acres of desert for agriculture and aesthetics has to be reconsidered at some point. All of the things you mention happen in other parts of the world with no water issues to speak of, and it may have something to do with humans being a little too confident in their ability to terraform deserts into farmland with no adverse effects over time.

There is a little bit of ignorance about California's environment here. Remember that California is very big and straddles a lot of very different climates. Nobody would call Oregon a desert, and the upper third of California has almost identical weather to Oregon (Eureka, CA average annual rainfall of 40.31 inches, Eugene, OR average of 46.15 inches). Additionally, the fertile Great Valley that makes California the agricultural power house it is isn't (or maybe now that climate change is occurring we should say "wasn't" check back in twenty years) a desert. Even further south where the rainfall has always been less prevalent, but west of the mountains the climate is Mediterranean, not desert. It's perfectly reasonable to grow things in a Mediterranean climate. Orange County, for example, gets 15.48 inches of average rainfall. Not a huge amount, but not nothing. When people think of California as being a desert they somehow picture an entire state that looks exactly like Barstow (5.27 inches) and that's just not true.

Most importantly, let's go back to those Mountains. The California deserts are the most common type of desert. The type where tall mountain ranges pull the moisture out of humid winds and induce rain and snowfall in the mountains, casting a long shadow behind them of lower precipitation. You can go to Google Maps right now and see evidence of this effect in every pixel. On every mountain range the mountains are green (even with the record breaking drought), including the entire western foothills and a bit of the very topmost on the East. West of the Mountains are sort of green, east of the Mountains completely brown. This is important because the deserts that do exist in California exist not because the state doesn't get enough rainfall (prior to a dozen years ago), but because it gets that rainfall in a strangely distributed way. Now those mountains aren't very good places for farming, steep land, high altitudes, difficult to export the food. Which is why over the past 300 years complex irrigation systems have been created to redistribute the melt from acres and acres and acres of multiple feet of snow throughout the state.

Now that's not to say that California doesn't do farming in the actual desert. You can head back to Barstow on google maps and see the iconic circular CA farms, caused by the shape the rolling sprinkler system creates. That sort of stuff is ridiculous, and it's definitely the first set of things that should be removed when dealing with this issue, but that style of farming is a small, small minority of the actual agricultural output of the state. The story of the California drought is a very complicated one that tells the tale of the--hopefully temporary--desertification of a host of different climates and micro climates that were until recently fertile and productive. Looking at the fifth of the state that was already desert and using that as an excuse to dismiss the 80% of the state that is becoming a desert is... not a very accurate way to portray the story.

Very nice summary, Yonder.

Another option for Californians - move to Texas where there's also a drought but the government is way, way more pliable about ignoring it (and zoning, construction, housing issues) for business reasons.

This seems to be a very popular option at the moment.

I agree with all of that Yonder, but I don't see how it addresses the point that if you want to change California water consumption trends you need to start with agriculture, which uses 80% of the water. Otherwise you are putting a bandaid on a papercut while your leg is chopped off.

I would also point out that some crops thrive in a irrigated desert environment. (hint: wine, which is a pretty big agricultural export for CA)

Yonder wrote:
Nomad wrote:
DSGamer wrote:
Nomad wrote:

I think it's been said before, but complaining about water shortages when you build huge cities, golf courses, and farms in what amounts to desert areas and expect to pipe water in indefinitely is a little crazy.

But it's not the cities, it turns out. It's the food we eat. It's the fact that we get excited about cheap gas prices when that comes at the cost of hydrofracking.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/02/science/earth/hydrofracking-could-strain-western-water-resources-study-finds.html?_r=0

In the world we're about to live in everyone is going to have to sacrifice, of course. Point a finger at cities and someone else can point a finger back at people who eat meat, have "too many" kids, buy too many electronics. But the quickest way to cut our water usage, judging by the articles linked here, is to change our diets. To eat food lower on the food chain and eat food that's less water-intensive. That's a fairly simple thing to do if we have the will to do it.

That is all well and good, but irrigating thousands of acres of desert for agriculture and aesthetics has to be reconsidered at some point. All of the things you mention happen in other parts of the world with no water issues to speak of, and it may have something to do with humans being a little too confident in their ability to terraform deserts into farmland with no adverse effects over time.

There is a little bit of ignorance about California's environment here. Remember that California is very big and straddles a lot of very different climates. Nobody would call Oregon a desert, and the upper third of California has almost identical weather to Oregon (Eureka, CA average annual rainfall of 40.31 inches, Eugene, OR average of 46.15 inches). Additionally, the fertile Great Valley that makes California the agricultural power house it is isn't (or maybe now that climate change is occurring we should say "wasn't" check back in twenty years) a desert. Even further south where the rainfall has always been less prevalent, but west of the mountains the climate is Mediterranean, not desert. It's perfectly reasonable to grow things in a Mediterranean climate. Orange County, for example, gets 15.48 inches of average rainfall. Not a huge amount, but not nothing. When people think of California as being a desert they somehow picture an entire state that looks exactly like Barstow (5.27 inches) and that's just not true.

Most importantly, let's go back to those Mountains. The California deserts are the most common type of desert. The type where tall mountain ranges pull the moisture out of humid winds and induce rain and snowfall in the mountains, casting a long shadow behind them of lower precipitation. You can go to Google Maps right now and see evidence of this effect in every pixel. On every mountain range the mountains are green (even with the record breaking drought), including the entire western foothills and a bit of the very topmost on the East. West of the Mountains are sort of green, east of the Mountains completely brown. This is important because the deserts that do exist in California exist not because the state doesn't get enough rainfall (prior to a dozen years ago), but because it gets that rainfall in a strangely distributed way. Now those mountains aren't very good places for farming, steep land, high altitudes, difficult to export the food. Which is why over the past 300 years complex irrigation systems have been created to redistribute the melt from acres and acres and acres of multiple feet of snow throughout the state.

Now that's not to say that California doesn't do farming in the actual desert. You can head back to Barstow on google maps and see the iconic circular CA farms, caused by the shape the rolling sprinkler system creates. That sort of stuff is ridiculous, and it's definitely the first set of things that should be removed when dealing with this issue, but that style of farming is a small, small minority of the actual agricultural output of the state. The story of the California drought is a very complicated one that tells the tale of the--hopefully temporary--desertification of a host of different climates and micro climates that were until recently fertile and productive. Looking at the fifth of the state that was already desert and using that as an excuse to dismiss the 80% of the state that is becoming a desert is... not a very accurate way to portray the story.

I think there is a little bit of ignorance about land area here.
If you look again, my post said thousands of acres. That describes a large but very very conservative estimate of the amount of land that has been terraformed out of effective desert.
California by itself is 101 million acres. Then you include states like Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada and you can see how thousands of acres does not come close to describing all of the whole land mass.
I specifically said desert area. People are wasting staggering amounts of water each year for aesthetics and agriculture in desert regions, and then scratching their collective heads when we experience consecutive years of drought.

It's worth noting that a good portion of the water in Southern California comes from the Colorado River as well. So desert agriculture in CA doesn't necessarily rely on CA rainfall.

LeapingGnome wrote:

I agree with all of that Yonder, but I don't see how it addresses the point that if you want to change California water consumption trends you need to start with agriculture, which uses 80% of the water. Otherwise you are putting a bandaid on a papercut while your leg is chopped off.

Sure, that background is important because it helps aim how water rationing should be aimed. Now that climate change is really taking off we do have to accept the possibility that this is a long term (30+ years) development, but there is a really good chance that one or five years from now it will start to rain again and California will return to the natural and sensible agricultural power house it was 13+ years ago. The strategy for the state right now should be going into a sort of hibernation, preserving long-term agricultural capability and abandoning all short term production.

Water should be cut off in this order:

1. Decorative fountains/waterfalls. Spraying water up into the hot dry air makes it all go bye-bye.
2. A state law should strike down all county/city/HoA rules regarding how green your grass is based on aesthetics. Brown lawns which are judged to be a fire risk can still be illegal, but they have to be replaced with rocks/astroturf/whatever, not watered.
3. Any agricultural products that have a short (3- years) cycle from planting to harvesting, and that are plentiful in other parts of the country. (For example, growing corn for commercial purposes), alfalfa, etc, etc. Temporary subsidies from the state government to help companies pay higher transportation fees to import animal feed, etc, etc from farther away)
4. Agricultural products that have short (3- years) cycles, but that are much better grown in California due to soil/sunlight/etc/etc, but that are in the desert regions (not because that's inherently bad in times of normal rainfall, hey, you have all that extra mountain water that would have fallen on the desert anyways, may as well pipe some of it East rather than West) but because in a time like now the drier air East of the Mountains means you'll lose more water to evaporation than the same crops planted in slightly less arid reasons.

If you've done all of that you should have drastically cut your water usage, to the point where other infrastructure improvements (power and desalinization, maybe pipelines from the north and east if that is somehow cheaper, large subsidies on enclosing agricultural land in greenhouses, better water reclamation and reprocessing) hopefully you can stop right here and wait for the rain to come back. If not...

5. Restrict all non-dairy cows to minimum herd management to preserve the genetic material. You're importing all their feed for all cows now, right?
6. Agricultural products that have a short (3- years) cycle, regardless of how well they grow in CA compared to elsewhere in the country.
7. Restrict all dairy cows to minimum herd management sizes.
8. Cows have to leave for greener pastures, literally.
9. Welp, sorry wineries, we had a good run.
10. Goodbye to the orchards too.

California needs to sacrifice more children.

This is what happens, folks, when you stray from religion.

Awwww.... I thought you were referencing's South Park's harvest episode.

complexmath wrote:

It's worth noting that a good portion of the water in Southern California comes from the Colorado River as well. So desert agriculture in CA doesn't necessarily rely on CA rainfall.

This drought is bigger than CA from what I understand, and that river water comes from rainwater at some point, right?

Yonder wrote:

Welp, sorry wineries, we had a good run.

Breweries too, I bet. Sierra Nevada, I will miss you.

Nevin73 wrote:
Yonder wrote:

Welp, sorry wineries, we had a good run.

Breweries too, I bet. Sierra Nevada, I will miss you.

Most breweries would probably be crushed in my iron fist on step 3. What have I become?

Yonder wrote:

The strategy for the state right now should be going into a sort of hibernation, preserving long-term agricultural capability and abandoning all short term production.

The strategy for the state should be to stop exempting agriculture from water conservation efforts and breaking century plus old water rights for farmland.

California's cities have figured out how to become much more efficient in their use of water. For example, Los Angeles uses less water today than it did in the 1970s even though there's a million more people living there. Across the state urban water use has remained flat for the past 20 years while city populations have increased.

There's no reason California farmers can't do the same. Requiring them to pay market prices for water would be a huge first step. They would quickly figure out the most profitable crops to raise and how to do so with the least amount of water possible.

But any change will be politically painful. The political structure of California is such that the inland agricultural areas are staunchly Republican while the coastal urban centers are mostly Democratic (Orange County and San Diego being the exceptions). That means any attempt at a solution will be viewed through the partisan lense of Hollywood sodomites and San Francisco hippies trying to bankrupt the good, honest, patriotic farmers of the San Fernando Valley. And that's before the farmers launch a national fear campaign that any change in California will mean skyrocketing grocery store prices and shortages of fruits and vegetables.

OG_slinger wrote:
Yonder wrote:

The strategy for the state right now should be going into a sort of hibernation, preserving long-term agricultural capability and abandoning all short term production.

The strategy for the state should be to stop exempting agriculture from water conservation efforts and breaking century plus old water rights for farmland.

That's an entirely different argument, though. If you took all of the pro-growth, pro-family accelerators out of the tax code and law you'd have a completely different situation. Food prices would rise, people would have to adjust in much more dramatic ways. We've been borrowing against our future, ostensibly. The future is here now.

DSGamer wrote:
OG_slinger wrote:
Yonder wrote:

The strategy for the state right now should be going into a sort of hibernation, preserving long-term agricultural capability and abandoning all short term production.

The strategy for the state should be to stop exempting agriculture from water conservation efforts and breaking century plus old water rights for farmland.

That's an entirely different argument, though. If you took all of the pro-growth, pro-family accelerators out of the tax code and law you'd have a completely different situation. Food prices would rise, people would have to adjust in much more dramatic ways. We've been borrowing against our future, ostensibly. The future is here now.

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/7jXT6et.jpg)

DSGamer wrote:

That's an entirely different argument, though. If you took all of the pro-growth, pro-family accelerators out of the tax code and law you'd have a completely different situation. Food prices would rise, people would have to adjust in much more dramatic ways. We've been borrowing against our future, ostensibly. The future is here now.

It was just an alternative way to deal with the issue than Yonder's proposal to effectively shutter an industry that employs several hundred thousand Californians directly (and even more indirectly) and that basically constitutes the entire economy of the Central Valley.

What's clear, though, is that how the state has handled water and water rights for 150+ years isn't going to cut it moving forward.