The Scorching of California How Green extremists made a bad drought worse
2015 Feb 9, 6:37pm 2,702 views 12 comments
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If a drought is a long period of little to no rain,then the Greens must have discovered how to stop rain.
indigenous
2015 Feb 9, 7:30pm
If a drought is a long period of little to no rain,then the Greens must have discovered how to stop rain
Say what?
curious2
2015 Feb 9, 11:19pm
city-journal.org is published by a "conservative" (i.e. regressive) partisan think tank, to manipulate oxymoronic "movement conservatives". It is not intended to provide objective information for what "movement conservatives" deride as "the reality-based community." The purpose is to drive movement, not to inform; as a result, it is the pseudo-conservative version of linking to the pseudo-liberal Krugman.
indigenous
2015 Feb 9, 11:29pm
Yea yea, what was not accurate in the article? VDH has been in farming in Calif for a long time, he is saying how desperate the situation is and how pathetic Moon Beam's solution is.
The drought/water shortage is likely the new "normal" in CA and most of the west. The modern west was developed during a "wetter than normal" climate epoch.
I know a person who works for the water board. He said on the central coast we might have 3-5 more reservoirs, except that the environmental groups have shut down every project over the years. Ironically, the fish that they were hoping to save perished, when several of the creeks completely dried up.
Now we are forced to look at Desal, and guess what - the fish can get pulled into the intake.
So if we made 0.5% of the land into reservior, would this have any measurable effects on the upstream fisheries - cant measure it?
Y
2015 Feb 10, 7:12am
Cal going thru it's metronomic weather cycles with the various bandwagoneers apeing on their platforms..nothing new here...move on..
indigenous
2015 Feb 10, 7:45am
I know a person who works for the water board. He said on the central coast we might have 3-5 more reservoirs, except that the environmental groups have shut down every project over the years. Ironically, the fish that they were hoping to save perished, when several of the creeks completely dried up.
Now we are forced to look at Desal, and guess what - the fish can get pulled into the intake.
So if we made 0.5% of the land into reservior, would this have any measurable effects on the upstream fisheries - cant measure it?
"Just as California’s freeways were designed to grow to meet increased traffic, the state’s vast water projects were engineered to expand with the population. Many assumed that the state would finish planned additions to the California State Water Project and its ancillaries. But in the 1960s and early 1970s, no one anticipated that the then-nascent environmental movement would one day go to court to stop most new dam construction, including the 14,000-acre Sites Reservoir on the Sacramento River near Maxwell; the Los Banos Grandes facility, along a section of the California Aqueduct in Merced County; and the Temperance Flat Reservoir, above Millerton Lake north of Fresno. Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years. California’s water-storage capacity would be nearly double what it is today had these plans come to fruition. It was just as difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities."
indigenous
2015 Feb 10, 7:45am
Cal going thru it's metronomic weather cycles with the various bandwagoneers apeing on their platforms..nothing new here...move on..
Cept we are thirsty.
Y
2015 Feb 10, 8:08am
libbys brought on global warming by blocking reservoir construction eliminating billions of sqft of water surface for water to evaporate...
Had the gigantic Klamath River diversion project not likewise been canceled in the 1970s, the resulting Aw Paw reservoir would have been the state’s largest man-made reservoir. At two-thirds the size of Lake Mead, it might have stored 15 million acre-feet of water, enough to supply San Francisco for 30 years.
zzyzzx
2015 Feb 13, 8:55am
Kill the water sucking people! Kill them all!
If they did kill off all their illegal aliens in CA, they would probably have plenty of water left over for legal citizens, or at least a whole lot more.
Not content with preventing construction of new water infrastructure, environmentalists reverse-engineered existing projects to divert precious water away from agriculture, privileging the needs of fish over the needs of people. Then they alleged that global warming, not their own foolish policies, had caused the current crisis. It was just as difficult to imagine that environmentalists would try to divert contracted irrigation and municipal water from already-established reservoirs. Yet they did just that, and subsequently moved to freeze California’s water-storage resources at 1970s capacities.
For 50 years, the state transferred surface water from northern California to the Central Valley through the California State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project. Given these vast and ambitious initiatives, Californians didn’t worry much about the occasional one- or two-year drought or the steady growth in population. The postwar, can-do mentality resulted in a brilliantly engineered water system, far ahead of its time, that brought canal water daily from the 30 percent of the state where rain and snow were plentiful—mostly north of Sacramento as well as from the Sierra Nevada Mountains—to the lower, western, and warmer 70 percent of the state, where people preferred to work, farm, and live.
As 2013 wore on, climatologists, trying to project how long the drought might persist, warned state officials that their records only ran as far back as the late 1860s. California is a relatively new human habitat, and scientists can say little with certainty about the eons of natural history preceding the arrival of Spanish, Mexican, and American explorers. Tree-ring evidence suggests that past droughts had lasted 50 or even 100 years. Historically, drought may be the norm rather than the exception in California. This might explain why such a naturally rich state could support only a small population of indigenous people. Is coastal and central California, in its natural state, a mostly unsustainable desert for large, settled agrarian populations? Maybe modern Californians don’t fully appreciate the genius of their forefathers, who were prescient enough to see that, if huge quantities of water weren’t transferred from the wet northlands, the Sierras, and the Colorado River, then the cities of San Francisco and Los Angeles would be little more than arid coastal villages, analogous to lightly populated and perennially water-short Cayucos or Cambria, along Highway 1.
In reaction to these ongoing disasters and fearing a fourth year of drought, the legislature and Governor Jerry Brown placed a $7.5 billion water bond on the November 2014 ballot. It passed, but only a third of the money will go to construction of reservoirs canceled in the 1970s and 1980s. Most of the bond’s provisions will fund huge new state bureaucracies to regulate access to groundwater and mandate recycling. The bond will essentially void more than a century of complex water law as the state moves to curb farmers’ ability to pump water from beneath their own lands. Bay Area legislators who helped draft the bill failed to grasp that farmers bear the huge costs of drilling and pumping, not because they are greedy or insensitive to the environment but because the state’s population has doubled and its water infrastructure has not kept pace. A better way to regulate overdrafts of the water table would have been to increase vastly the amount of reservoir surface water for agriculture so that farmers would have no need to turn on their pumps. But legislators and policymakers let utopianism get in the way.
http://www.city-journal.org/2015/25_1_california-drought.html
#environment