Grapesoda

from the phony hate rag the WSJ


California's Man-Made Drought

The green war against San Joaquin Valley farmers.

Updated Sept. 2, 2009 12:49 p.m. ET (note the date..... this has been ignored by the demos for 6 years)


California has a new endangered species on its hands in the San Joaquin Valley?farmers. Thanks to environmental regulations designed to protect the likes of the three-inch long delta smelt, one of America's premier agricultural regions is suffering in a drought made worse by federal regulations.

The state's water emergency is unfolding thanks to the latest mishandling of the Endangered Species Act. Last December, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service issued what is known as a "biological opinion" imposing water reductions on the San Joaquin Valley and environs to safeguard the federally protected hypomesus transpacificus, a.k.a., the delta smelt. As a result, tens of billions of gallons of water from mountains east and north of Sacramento have been channelled away from farmers and into the ocean, leaving hundreds of thousands of acres of arable land fallow or scorched.

For this, Californians can thank the usual environmental suspects, er, lawyers. Last year's government ruling was the result of a 2006 lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and other outfits objecting to increased water pumping in the smelt vicinity. In June, things got even dustier when the National Marine Fisheries Service concluded that local salmon and steelhead also needed to be defended from the valley's water pumps. Those additional restrictions will begin to effect pumping operations next year.


The result has already been devastating for the state's farm economy. In the inland areas affected by the court-ordered water restrictions, the jobless rate has hit 14.3%, with some farming towns like Mendota seeing unemployment numbers near 40%. Statewide, the rate reached 11.6% in July, higher than it has been in 30 years. In August, 50 mayors from the San Joaquin Valley signed a letter asking President Obama to observe the impact of the draconian water rules firsthand.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has said that he "doesn't have the authority to turn on the pumps" that would supply the delta with water, or "otherwise, they would be on." He did, however, have the ability to request intervention from the Department of Interior. Under a provision added to the Endangered Species Act in 1978 after the snail darter fiasco, a panel of seven cabinet officials known as a "God Squad" is able to intercede in economic emergencies, such as the one now parching California farmers. Despite a petition with more than 12,000 signers, Mr. Schwarzenegger has refused that remedy.

The issue now turns to the Obama Administration and the courts, though the farmers have so far found scant hope for relief from the White House. In June, the Administration denied the governor's request to designate California a federal disaster area as a result of the drought conditions, which U.S. Drought Monitor currently lists as a "severe drought" in 43% of the state. Doing so would force the Administration to acknowledge awkward questions about the role its own environmental policies have played in scorching the Earth.

As the crisis has deepened, the political stakes have risen as well. In late August, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack came to the devastated valley to meet with farmers and community leaders. Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein has pledged to press the issue with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. "There are 30 lawsuits on the biological opinions and two separate opinions, one for the smelt and one for the salmon," Ms. Feinstein said, "The rules need to be reconsidered."

The Pacific Legal Foundation has filed a lawsuit on behalf of three farmers in the valley, calling the federal regulations "immoral and unconstitutional." Because the delta smelt is only found in California, the Foundation says, it does not fall under the regulatory powers provided by the Constitution's Commerce Clause. On a statutory basis, the Fish and Wildlife Service also neglected to appropriately consider the economic devastation the pumping restrictions would bring.

Things in California may have to get so bad that they endanger Democratic Congressional incumbents before Washington wakes up, but it doesn't have to be that way. Mr. Salazar has said that convening the God Squad would be "admitting failure" in the effort to save the smelt under the Endangered Species Act. Maybe so, but the livelihoods of tens of thousands of humans are also at stake. If the Obama Administration wants to help, it can take up Governor Schwarzenegger's request that it revisit the two biological opinions that are hanging farmers and farm workers out to dry.


EPA Regulations Cause Drought in California - WSJ

aka123

AKA there is a river..





..and not all of its water is channeled to farmers. AKA there is still river. Although smaller river as much of its water is channeled to farmers.

What are the future expectations for California? Those are at least soil salinization (this is for sure), probably some ecosystem disaster and partial (human) abandonment of the area. At least farming goes fuckt up because of soil salinization. But sure, fuck up everything else too before that.

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Sly

I remember reading that article when it first came out.

When I lived in San Diego it really only rained for one month a year, February-March. Some years it barely rained at all. Other years were decent, but outside of that one month stretch it simply did not rain. Yet everyone on my street had nice green yards. I always thought it was the most bizarre thing. I had my sprinklers turned down because I thought it was stupid to be wasting that much water in the desert.

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slapass

Charge the farmers for the water like they do everywhere else in the US and see how it goes.

Grapesoda

the cally politicians have been very busy opening the boarders and making sure the homeless have all their needs met to bother with anything as stupid and meaningless as the states water supply

Barry-xlovecam

The Wall Street Journal use to be a respected business publication before Rupert Murdoch and his Newscorp editorialized it ... Now, it's become a POS. "Rant rag"

Harmon

Somebody ban this clown

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Rochard

That article is from 2009.

We are going to have a serious problem in California, and the only solution to this is Desalination. The ocean is rising, we need water, do the fucking math. California is right next to the Pacific - Let's take as much water as we want. If the Middle East can build entire cities in the desert using Desalination, why can't California? Don't tell me we can't or it's too expensive; We already multiple plants built and more being built.

Problem solved.

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Grapesoda

2MuchMark

Hi Rochard,

It seems like a good idea but it creates other problems. Reverse osmosis for ocean desalination takes a lot of energy for one, and since you're extracting all the salt from the water, the salt has to go back somewhere.

The big plant they are building in San Diego is estimated to process 100 million gallons of seawater water each day, produce about 50 million gallons of drinkable water (about 8% of what California needs), and 50 million gallons of salt. San Diego plans to pump that salt right back into the Pacific Ocean which according to Nasa, will cause big problems, quickly :

Salinity - NASA Science

It will also kill lots of marine life.


Unfortunately I don't see any other choice for California...

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Rochard

So basically one plant will produce 8% of what California needs. Wonderful. Build ten plants, and our problem is solved.

Of course there are downsides, but again they build entire cities in the desert in the Middle East and they seem to have it figured it out.

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Robbie

That's not true...they are also busy working on forcing people having sex on film to wear condoms and doing inspections of porn shoots and other very, very important stuff.

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aka123

Something I was just about to write, this salt issue I mean. There is also research going on about the health effects (on humans) of the desalinated water. As there is concern regarding that.

Also, the current issue is not small. As for example Gulf stream that keeps my country warm, is getting fucked up already. Although I don't know that could this desalinitation have effect on that current, but for others it can.

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aka123

These big cities are kinda young, at least in current form. And the earliest cities made by humans, got fucked up in Middle East because of soil salinization.

About the downsides, that is not very good attitude to just throw the problems aside with "Of course there are downsides". For example, it is a tad easier to just live elsewhere. There is no absolute necessity to live on "desert", especially in US. Desert cannot sustainable support very big human populations, no matter what magic tricks you pull from your sleeve.

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crockett

Or perhaps stop watering your fucking lawns and taking 15 min showers. People in southern Cali live in a desert.. They should start acting like they do..

aka123

Location appropriate dressing, transport and skin colour.

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crockett

It's not quite that much desert.. However it's pretty absurd how much water some people waste. Average water usage by person in Cali ranges from town to town from anywhere between 117 gals a day to 350 gals a day..

100/gal a day for a single person is already absurd but 350 gals in a fucking day on average is obscene. Cali's water problems are because the people there waste water in a place where there isn't water to waste..

I'm sure Rockhard's Mustang is nice and clean washed at least once a week. Has a nice green lawn ect..ect.. Now add that up across the 300 million people whom live there all getting water from the same water sources.. but yea it's all the evil farmers taking all the water..

aka123

Are you sure it is not litres? We have average 41 gallon per person per day water consumption. In here:




EDIT: Okay, it is fucking gallons. Unbelievable.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2...rnia.html?_r=0

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poncabare

Republicans are evil

crockett

Nope it's gallons..



California Drought: Database shows big difference between water guzzlers and sippers - San Jose Mercury News

slapass

They use 80% of the used water. Yes, 50% runs off so it is 40% of the total with people using the other 10%. So where would you make cuts if you had a water issue? The 50% is being pursued as I understand it. So farmers would be quicker and on the list.

aka123

Even the smallest water consumption is about double than we have in here. So, cutting the consumption into half, 1/3, 1/4, 1/5, etc. comes at first into mind.

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Sly

Farmers provide food that the state, our country, and the world needs. They may use a lot of water, but they have a very unique geography and forcing them to take cuts so that people in a desert can have a green lawn makes no sense at all.

With that said, I'm sure there are better irrigation systems available that can help farmers save water as well. Necessity breeds innovation.

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aka123

Irrigation in any substantial amounts leads to soil salinization. California is not good place for sustainable farming, at least with many current plants and or methods. Even if you would improve the methods, some plants are not just sustainable for that area.

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2MuchMark

Yup from what I understand, California is already diving head-first into building lots of these plants. I don't think they really have a choice now.

What is fucked up about this is that the drought is obviously caused by global warming, but republicans will never, ever, accept the evidence.

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2MuchMark

Really? Interesting... I hadn't heard about that.

That's exactly right.


True - a 15 minute shower could be reduced to 5 minutes for sure.

When it comes to watering lawns though, this reminds me of a much bigger problem. Without water, a lot of the green parts of California will die off. Those dead plants that used to absorb CO2 from the atmosphere will no longer be able to do it. Even worse, those now-brown areas will catch fire sooner or later and release CO2 and soot into the atmosphere, making a bad problem even worse.

Fuck you big oil.

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Robbie

Wow.

When it's freezing cold...guys like you always assure us that local weather has NOTHING to do with "global warming".
But when it's something bad that fits your agenda...hurricane, tornado, drought...then suddenly it's: GLOBAL WARMING

Funny how that works isn't it?

Are we also to assume that the biggest drought the U.S. ever saw that created the Dustbowl in the heartland of the U.S. (and also YOUR country of Canada) was also caused by "global warming"? Back in the 1930's?

I think you alarmists should all go back to elementary school and learn fucking history.

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crockett

You still haven't figured out that Global Warming is just a name and that it is based on a trend of the planet not what the weather happens to be in Denver this year or what it was in FL last year.

The Earth's temperature is rising and that is called Global Warming. Just because it snows in Alaska doesn't mean there is no Global Warming. Added to this the rising temperature of the earth effects the oceans which cause more extreme weather. IE it might snow a fuck load in Denver and have hardly any in Cali..

Seriously you just go on and on with the same non sense with out ever educating yourself.. So how are those magic plankton doing on the co2 these days? Has your famous scientist had any breakthroughs? You know that "one" guy out of thousand whom said the oppiste of everyone else but for some reason you believe him over the thousands of other sources.

Also the fucking Dust bowl of all things was created in part by man whom over farmed the land and destroyed the top soil. It was a major fucking effort by the US govt to fix that problem and educate the farmers on how to rotate their crops.. That was of course back before we had idiots in our govt whom denied science and actually had fucking brains.

Robbie

crockett, the Dust part of the Dust Bowl WAS because of bad farming practices. The worst drought in U.S. history that caused all the dryness wasn't.
Guys like Mark ignore that.

Both of you never learned any history if you both also IGNORE the FACT that we are coming out of an Ice Age and the Earth is warming up again to BETTER temps.

History crockett. Learn it.

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Robbie

Here ya go: Study: Plankton's absorption of CO2 higher than assumed - latimes

Nothing "magic" crockett. Just science.
Unfortunately not the science that you want to hear with your alarmist convictions.

I've said it to you over and over. The climate models that were used over 15 years ago to come up with the lastest "global warming" were based on flawed data.

None of it took into account what the Earth itself does as far as adaptation.

Garbage in...garbage out.
But in the meantime...a multi-billion dollar industry sprung up with people all over the world making fortunes with "carbon credits" and failed green energy companies that made millions from govt. subsidies.
And they, and all the scientists who depend on the grants that fund their high salaries absolutely have no financial interest in bringing the whole "man-made global warming" farce to an end.

Thankfully, there are plenty of sheeple who can't think for themselves and will believe whatever the govt. tells them to.

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MaDalton

farming aside - households in California still use 2-3 times more water per day than an average european household

i would think that leaves a lot of room for cutting that down

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Robbie

~insert joke about Europeans never bathing here~



Just kidding. How's business going? I thought you were going to be in Vegas back in Jan. but I never saw you there.

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dyna mo

desalination is not at all a solution. in fact, there are only a handful of them actually permitted in the entire state and they are all very small, there are only plans for more, again, very small ones, none in construction and no big desal plants in the pipeline.

there's huge reasons for that, mostly because it would add to the problem, which is water management. fuckwads in sacramento can't even manage what we've got or could have had, adding environmental nightmares like expensive to run desal plants only excaberates the problems.

dyna mo

the solution is a multi-pronged approach that requires very little dollars or impact on the environment and communities,

MaDalton

i knew someone would come up with something like that

and no, have not been to Vegas this year, i was still pissed from the year before where almost no one followed up on what was discussed there.

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2MuchMark

That's not how it works, but the fact that you connect things in that way, is what is funny. And sad.


The dust storms of the 30's were not a natural disaster. They were caused when farmers in these places dug up the natural prairie grass and replaced it with wheat in the decades before. The wheat could not survive drought like the prairie grass could, so it died, exposing the bare dry dusty earth, which blew into the dust storms.

While all of causes of the California Drought are still to be found, Global Warming is a significant factor. Warming increases the rate of evaporation, increases the need for irrigation and groundwater pumping, and reduces snowpack. Droughts like this can also be self-sustaining, as drier soils lead to higher temperatures. The warmer weather has reduced the amount of snow in the snowpacks, reduced the accumulation of snow, and caused what was there to melt earlier than usual.

Of course California has had other droughts in the past, but this one is pretty severe, and climate change has made the current drought much worse.

How unusual is the 2012–2014 California drought? - Griffin - 2014 - Geophysical Research Letters - Wiley Online Library



I think people should stop dismissing scientists and science because a right-wing talking head on TV is paid by to tell you to do so.

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dyna mo

i've quoted this in it's entirety along with bolding in the worst of it because it's all absolutely and completely wrong conjecture.

dyna mo

The report, "Causes and Predictability of the 2011-14 California Drought," was released today by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)

The study compares drought observations with 160 climate model simulations to tease out the most important factors controlling the drought. The researchers plan to submit the work to the Journal of Climate, Seager said.

"There is no question global warming continues to unfold," said Marty Hoerling, study co-author and a researcher with NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. "The three-year drought is not related to the overall warming, but [droughts in California] are something that happens time and time again."


In the new study, scientists determined that the high-pressure system, dubbed the "ridiculously resilient ridge" by a California forecaster, continued through the 2013-2014 winter because of these favorable ocean temperatures. The pool of warm water generates atmospheric winds that form patterns of high and low pressure (called planetary waves) that can get stuck off western North America as a high-pressure ridge.

The ridge and its accompanying drought are opposite the conditions that climate models predict under global warming, lead study author Richard Seager, a professor at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in New York, said today

dyna mo

this is the porn industry so i never think of shame around here but you should be ashamed of yourself for making shit up about a serious problem just so you can point your finger at others.

Barry-xlovecam

Water is a 100% recycled resource spilled on the ground it perks to the aquifer evaporated it comes down as rain (somewhere eventually). So, there is no less water just more use.

California only has enough water for 75% of it's people and needs. Simple: You ration water use or evict 25% of the population -- end of story.

California could give tax credits to homeowners that rip out their landscaping and gravel or green asphalt their lawns -- that will go over big

dyna mo

the state has launched a new ad campaign, brown is the new green, trying to make it cool to have a brown yard. !

Robbie

Well, it looks like the report of the NOAA has shown Mark Prince to be absolutely WRONG again.

The fervor and blind sheeple-ness that he can exhibit towards his "beliefs" is like watching a crazy religious person.

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Dvae

What evidence, wheres your proof Mark?
It seems more likely overuse is a larger contributor factor if it's true that as someone posted 117 to 350 gallons a month per single person.

If I look at my last water bill I used 3000 gallons per quarter thats for one person. I take one 3 minute or less shower per day and then do all the other activities that involve water but I don't waste any water. I hardly ever wash my car, I don't water my lawn.

But you're so invested in this Global Warming BS that you can't see anything else as a possilbe cause of the problem.

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Arguing with a troll is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig, after a couple of hours you realize the pig likes it.

Dvae

Isn't it ironic how Mark wants proof when it comes to the Baby Jesus etc.
But Global Warming he doesn't need any proof. And if you don't agree with him you're the crazy person.

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Arguing with a troll is a lot like wrestling in the mud with a pig, after a couple of hours you realize the pig likes it.

crockett

So no new news from Plankton guy since 2015.. No new studies..just what was already dismissed 2 years ago? ie that this was actually going to cause even further problems because the plankton which like the C02 are not good plankton to have.. They are invasive type which other animals whom feed off of other plankton do not eat.