NASA: California Has One Year of Water Left

r.prince18
r.prince18 Members Posts: 1,353 ✭✭✭✭✭
edited March 2015 in The Social Lounge
Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.

In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state's water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.

"As our 'wet' season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows" Famiglietti writes. "We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too."

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On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.

"Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.

He criticized Californian officials for their lack of long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future droughts, beyond "staying in emergency mode and praying for rain."

Last month, new research by scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed to a "remarkably drier future" for California and other Western states amid a rapidly-changing climate. "Megadroughts," the study's authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099, and could each last between 10 years and several decades.

With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, "immediate mandatory water rationing" should be implemented in the state, accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable way—as opposed to the "excessive and unsustainable" groundwater extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.

Various local ordinances have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for California's "harrowing future" of more and longer droughts "will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon," Famiglietti writes. "Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin."



http://www.newsweek.com/nasa-california-has-one-year-water-left-313647
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Comments

  • BoldChild
    BoldChild Members Posts: 11,415 ✭✭✭✭✭
    They better figure out how to efficiently desalinate water in mass real quick.
  • DarcSkies
    DarcSkies Members Posts: 13,791 ✭✭✭✭✭
    SMMFH...

    I wonder why reverse osmosis is so difficult on a large scale? Or will we find out one day that the drinking water industry has been making that technology hard to acquire?

    You would think they'd put top scientists on this ? and make sure to follow through with a plan.
  • BEAM
    BEAM Members Posts: 2,560 ✭✭✭✭✭
    I've never liked LA anyway.
    That place is enormously overrated..
  • Chef_Taylor
    Chef_Taylor Members Posts: 26,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
  • Stomp Johnson
    Stomp Johnson Members, Writer Posts: 3,623 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited March 2015
  • Lou Cypher
    Lou Cypher Members Posts: 52,521 ✭✭✭✭✭
    With these climate changes, AK is going to be the most habitable place.
  • Mr.LV
    Mr.LV Members Posts: 14,089 ✭✭✭✭✭
    It is 90° degrees in LA today they broke a record high .
  • Chef_Taylor
    Chef_Taylor Members Posts: 26,584 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cain wrote: »
    @kat you need to read this before you move

    Kat movin to California????
  • SneakDZA
    SneakDZA Members Posts: 11,223 ✭✭✭✭✭
  • coop9889
    coop9889 Members Posts: 7,299 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Stiff wrote: »
    Crazy ?
    Crazy mexicans
    Racist police
    High ass cost of living
    An earthquake that could destroy the entire state that could happen at any moment
    and now : No water

    Why is California a thing?

    Have you ever been to LA or San Diego?

    There's your answer
  • leftcoastkev
    leftcoastkev Members Posts: 6,232 ✭✭✭✭✭
    edited March 2015
    In the meantime california bottled water companies tap into the water resources and export their product to other states for profit.

    If the drought was really that important, they'd stop or restrict/impose limitations right.....? of course not...money over everything.


    http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2014/08/bottled-water-california-drought

    Bottled-water drinkers, we have a problem: There's a good chance that your water comes from California, a state experiencing the third-driest year on record.

    .........

    Another reason we're drinking California's water: California happens to be the only Western state without groundwater regulation or management of major groundwater use. In other words, if you're a water company and you drill down and find water in California, it's all yours.

    .........

    Despite the fact that almost all US tap water is better regulated and monitored than bottled, and despite the hefty environmental footprint of the bottled water industry, perhaps the biggest reason that bottling companies are using water in drought zones is simply because we're still providing a demand for it: In 2012 in the United States alone, the industry produced about 10 billion gallons of bottled water, with sales revenues at $12 billion.

    As Gleick wrote, "This industry has very successfully turned a public resource into a private commodity." And consumers—well, we're drinking it up.
  • not this again!
    not this again! Members Posts: 2,059 ✭✭✭✭✭
    DarcSkies wrote: »
    SMMFH...

    I wonder why reverse osmosis is so difficult on a large scale? Or will we find out one day that the drinking water industry has been making that technology hard to acquire?

    You would think they'd put top scientists on this ? and make sure to follow through with a plan.

    I wouldn't bet against the bolded. Nestle drew a shitload of criticism because their then-CEO actually had the ? to suggest that water should be privatized, and that corporations should control it, much like they do oil and natural gas.

  • VIBE
    VIBE Members Posts: 54,384 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cloud seeding.
  • Kat
    Kat Members Posts: 50,667 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Cain wrote: »
    @kat you need to read this before you move

    I don't plan on staying forever anyway.
  • Splackavelli
    Splackavelli Members Posts: 18,806 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Stiff wrote: »
    Crazy ?
    Crazy mexicans
    Racist police
    High ass cost of living
    An earthquake that could destroy the entire state that could happen at any moment
    and now : No water

    Why is California a thing?

    Women.
    Weed.
    Weather.

    You can find that damn near any where its not worth dying of thirst or getting swallowed up by the earth. Damn even nature be kicking ya'll ? out in cali. Mudslides ,brushfires earthquakes and now drought.
  • willywanker
    willywanker Members Posts: 787 ✭✭✭✭
    edited March 2015
    The solution is simple, invent a machine that we can ? in that turns the ? back to water, then drink up.
  • wmj710
    wmj710 Members Posts: 3,798 ✭✭✭✭✭
    nasa need to worry about space
  • Trillfate
    Trillfate Members Posts: 24,008 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Stiff wrote: »
    Crazy ?
    Crazy mexicans
    Racist police
    High ass cost of living
    An earthquake that could destroy the entire state that could happen at any moment

    and now : No water

    Why is California a thing?
    movie about this starring the Rock

    https://youtu.be/23VflsU3kZE
  • kingblaze84
    kingblaze84 Members Posts: 14,288 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Damn California stay having bad luck smh
  • kingblaze84
    kingblaze84 Members Posts: 14,288 ✭✭✭✭✭
    Pico wrote: »
    False news. The drought isn't real. I been running mad water all day we good.

    And you're part of the problem damnit lol
  • Darth Sidious
    Darth Sidious Members Posts: 2,507 ✭✭✭✭✭
    The company I work for is in the utility spectrum and we had a seminar about water where a book was discussed called 'The Big Thirst'


    I haven't read it but the author stated we are currently living in the 'golden age' of water in the developed world. Meaning that in general, it is

    1) Cheap
    2) Abundant
    3) Safe

    However, in the not too distant future..at least on of those three things will not be true.


    'The Big Thirst'

    The water coming out of your kitchen tap is four billion years old and might well have been sipped by a Tyrannosaurus rex. Rather than only three states of water—liquid, ice, and vapor—there is a fourth, “molecular water,” fused into rock 400 miles deep in the Earth, and that’s where most of the planet’s water is found. Unlike most precious resources, water cannot be used up; it can always be made clean enough again to drink—indeed, water can be made so clean that it’s toxic. Water is the most vital substance in our lives but also more amazing and mysterious than we appreciate. As Charles Fishman brings vibrantly to life in this surprising and mind-changing narrative, water runs our world in a host of awe-inspiring ways, yet we take it completely for granted. But the era of easy water is over.

    Bringing readers on a lively and fascinating journey— from the wet moons of Saturn to the water-obsessed hotels of Las Vegas, where dolphins swim in the desert, and from a rice farm in the parched Australian outback to a high-tech IBM plant that makes an exotic breed of pure water found nowhere in nature—Fishman vividly shows that we’ve already left behind a century-long golden age when water was thoughtlessly abundant, free, and safe and entered a new era of high-stakes water. In 2008, Atlanta came within ninety days of running entirely out of clean water. California is in a desperate battle to hold off a water catastrophe. And in the last five years Australia nearly ran out of water—and had to scramble to reinvent the country’s entire water system. But as dramatic as the challenges are, the deeper truth Fishman reveals is that there is no good reason for us to be overtaken by a global water crisis. We have more than enough water. We just don’t think about it, or use it, smartly.

    The Big Thirst brilliantly explores our strange and complex relationship to water. We delight in watching waves roll in from the ocean; we take great comfort from sliding into a hot bath; and we will pay a thousand times the price of tap water to drink our preferred brand of the bottled version. We love water—but at the moment, we don’t appreciate it or respect it. Just as we’ve begun to reimagine our relationship to food, a change that is driving the growth of the organic and local food movements, we must also rethink how we approach and use water. The good news is that we can. As Fishman shows, a host of advances are under way, from the simplicity of harvesting rainwater to the brilliant innovations devised by companies such as IBM, GE, and Royal Caribbean that are making impressive breakthroughs in water productivity. Knowing what to do is not the problem. Ultimately, the hardest part is changing our water consciousness.

    As Charles Fishman writes, “Many civilizations have been crippled or destroyed by an inability to understand water or manage it. We have a huge advantage over the generations of people who have come before us, because we can understand water and we can use it smartly.” The Big Thirst will forever change the way we think about water, about our essential relationship to it, and about the creativity we can bring to ensuring that we’ll always have plenty of it.