Global cooling

[swchandler]

How to turn our problems into a rag on Governor Jerry Brown. Arguably, Brown has done a pretty damn good job turning things around from where they were 4 years ago when he stepped in. Not near perfect by any means, but things are better now since the do nothing Republican minority has been caged and declawed.

Another whipping boy, Silicon Valley businesses, is eagerly belittled and blamed for California's problems and the growing financial inequality in the state. In the background of the article, you can sense the panting desire of wanting to let the oil industry loose to rape the countryside. Is Silicon Valley pillaging the environment? Hardly, but why focus on the truth?

[boggsman1]

Ha Ha Ha...NW nice post. Like a Louis Farrakan speech, it starts out making a ton of sense...then as you continue reading, the knives come out, blaming liberals, progressives, Gov Brown, Silicon Valley, Hollywood donors...and the usual righty whipping posts. It lost me when the business of desalinazation came up. As someone who is interested and invested in small farm agriculture, I can tell you that desalinization is more expensive than piping water from the East Coast straight to the Salinas Valley.
What a joke. Blame Blame Blame ...the mantra of the right. Reality is there are too many people living in a place that doesnt have a lot of water.

[techno900]

The left is in charge of California's future, so let's see how it plays out, then praise or scorn as needed.

[nw30]

[mac]

Left off the article posted by NW is the author's name, Joel Kotkin. He is a social scientist, perhaps not the best qualified to formulate informed opinions about water policy and climate change. Doesn't matter to the rabid. His web site: http://www.joelkotkin.com/content/004-biography Didn't see a CV either, did you.

I have forgotten more about California water than Kotkin will ever know. Let me take you through just a few of the mistakes in his rant.

Claim 1. We need to build more storage.

California has 1400 reservoirs. They are on all but a few designated wild and scenic rivers. But the water from those reservoirs has been over-promised, and building a new reservoir will not create more water, it will just move water around from one institutional entity to another on a given stream. The early reservoir sites that developed lots of water pretty cheaply have all been developed, and the cost for new reservoirs is astronomical.

Missing from most people's understanding is that, for the last 80 years, the snow pack in the Sierra's has been the most efficient and cheapest reservoir. We are losing that to climate change. The best alternative, among the poor and expensive alternatives for new storage, is groundwater. In fact, the water purveyors in Riverside and Orange Counties have done a marvelous job storing water in the ground (where, by the way, almost none of it evaporates), but the Central Valley has been a free fire zone, with bigger and bigger pumps pulling more and more water from deeper and deeper, at rates that aren't sustainable. In the process, the ground settles, roads break, bridges get bumpy at all their joints--and the ground settling actually reduces the ability of the ground to store water.

Claim 2. We should simply build desalinization plants. It would be nice if folks like Kotkin actually knew something about what has been done before they rev up the tin foil hat crew with simplistic ideas. Desalination is part of the groundwater management I referenced in the Riverside and Orange county example above. They are desalizing highly treated wastewater, which is then let infiltrate into the groundwater. Safe, and dramatically cheaper than desalinization of ocean water. The more salt you have to remove, the higher the cost. Simply physics--for those who actually studied it. There are shuttered desalinization plants in Australia, Santa Barbara County, and San Diego County. It is dramatically cheaper to reclaim water, or to buy land where water-thirsty crops (think cotton and seed alfalfa) are grown and take it out of production. It is pretty simple to find out the cost of desalinization--let's take the cost of the shuttered Santa Barbara plant, at just under $6/1,000 gallons. That is over $1200 per acre foot of water. Agricultural prices, and ability to pay, are one to two orders of magnitude less than that.

Claim 3. Jerry Brown is the anti-Pat Brown. Jerry would love to build tunnels that would increase the reliability of the delta as a source of water supply. There is a very complicated legal structure--encompassing an antiquated system of water rights that gives original water rights claims over uses that might have higher economic value, provisions in the Endangered Species Act, and limitations in funding set up by the Jarvis Gann with Proposition 218 that make it very difficult. If some stakeholders--fishermen and environmentalists--are ignored, litigation ensues. The steal the water folks that Kotkin identifies with have lost virtually all of those battles. They have also failed, in fifty years of trying, to muster the votes to change the legal structure.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture. Lots of opinions, no facts. Funny, he's also a conservative. There seems to be a pattern emerging.

[mac]

NW claims the Daily Beast is a liberal source. Conservative commentary by a 3:1 margin. (That's a ratio, in case you missed that lesson.)

[MalibuGuru]

Property taxes in Ca are 50% above most states already. How much higher should we go Mac?

[mac]

Sky is the limit if you desalinize.

Life is complicated. If you want to know something about water, try David Sedlak's book Water 4.0. http://www.sfgate.com/books/article/Water-4-0-by-David-Sedlak-5256981.php

or consult this group of engineers at Stanford: http://engineering.stanford.edu/news/glass-half-full

Put smart people in government, not idealogues.

[isobars]

[techno900]

I thought it might be interesting to see the history of the Mammoth Mountain annual snow fall totals. Make you own judgment regarding historical trends.

1969-70 244.5
1970-71 255.5
1971-72 268.5
1972-73 370.5
1973-74 306.5
1974-75 378.5
1975-76 197.5
1976-77 94.0
1977-78 487.5
1978-79 386.5
1979-80 444.5
1980-81 230.0
1981-82 502.5
1982-83 546.3
1983-84 273.3
1984-85 236.7
1985-86 432.6
1986-87 195.8
1987-88 230.0
1988-89 251.4
1989-90 214.3
1990-91 241.9
1991-92 226.0
1992-93 472.4
1993-94 275.1
1994-95 540.2
1995-96 321.2
1996-97 323.8
1997-98 451.4
1998-99 332.4
1999-00 382.7
2000-01 393.9
2001-02 299.6
2002-03 356.0
2003-04 348.9
2004-05 570.1
2005-06 578.5
2006-07 222.0
2007-08 333.5
2008-09 470.0
2009-10 557.9
2010-11 668.5
2011-12 263.0
2012-13 308.3
2013-14 238.0
2014-15 138.0