Posted on 12/17/2014 2:23:42 PM PST by grundle
California needs 11 trillion gallons of water to recover from its three-year drought, the US space agency said Tuesday after studying water resources by using satellite data.
The first of its kind calculation of how much groundwater would end the drought was led by Jay Famiglietti of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California and based on observations from NASA's Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellites.
California has experienced rainstorms in recent days but, while welcome, scientists warn that they are not enough to end the drought.
"It takes years to get into a drought of this severity, and it will likely take many more big storms, and years, to crawl out of it," said Famiglietti.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Meanwhile, California has chosen to have water shortages instead of building enough desalination plants.
Why did California make this choice?
And why does an article about California's water shortage not say anything about desalination?
Why did California make this choice?
So they could build the high speed rail to nowhere?
Thorium powered desalination would solve a couple of issues. Massive pipes to pump the water back up to the farm land mid state and into the Colorado river basin would also end a lot of this.
I’m not a big fan of public works projects but this one I could support as long as the cost was borne by the users of the water.
Why did CA make this choice? Because we want to spend BILLIONS on a slow speed rail from one odd part of L.A. County to some place in the middle of the state, that no one wants and no one will use. Eventually, over decades, it will enable someone to leave their home in West LA and arrive in San Francisco in under five hours, with only four stops and using car, bus, and rail, probably only changing trains twice.
Hopefully there will be enough water for the railroad workers to drink while they build this.
Wow, I had not idea desalination was so cheap!
Pebble Bed reactors every 10 miles along the coast powering desalinization plants.
Desalination is right. The enviro’s are probably the brainiacs who are keeping it from becoming a reality.
Build a pipeline from Canada & the Northern States to California - and when it snows - shovel all that white stuff into the pipe - instead of piling it in the streets.
I have lived in So Cal for 44 years. For at least 30 of those years, there have been discussions of building a peripheral canal around the Sacramento Delta so as to transport water from Northern CA to Southern CA. The politicians in Sacramento did nothing but fight over the proposal.
Here in So Cal, there are numerous places in the mountains where dams could have been built to capture the winter rains. Little has been done.
The history of CA is one of continual rainy and dry years. The average annual rainfall amount means nothing as very few years are close to normal.
There is only one long term solution unless God decides to reconfigure rain patterns. That solution is desalination. However, the Sacramento politicians have done virtually nothing to make desalination a reality, although there is one plant due to come on line in Orange County despite the pols doing nothing.
Yes, desalination is expensive but water is essential. Over time, just like any other process, it will be made more efficient, and water conversion will become less expensive. Instead, Brown and his cronies are spending billions of dollars to build a high speed rail line, the cost of which per passenger mile will be astronomical. Unfortunately, California is a lost case. The state has be overrun with immigrants, most from Mexico and south. They vote Democrat, and now control the vote. At the state level, California is a one party state, and that will never change unless the racial makeup of the state changes.
As for this article, it is BS. All CA needs is a couple of years of above normal rainfall, and all of those reservoirs will be filled up. But the bureaucrats and politicians don’t ever want people to realize that. No, they want to use fear and intimidation to maintain an atmosphere of fear, one in which they can limit our water usage, thereby controlling one more aspect of our lives.
The green weenies would let it flow into the ocean to protect whatever lives in the pipeline.
Screw the citizens.
Californians need to recognize the fact that they live in a fairly arid place.
“Meanwhile, California has chosen to have water shortages instead of building enough desalination plants.
Why did California make this choice?”
Because we (they) are adverse to nuclear power (which would make desal really cheap) and burning fossil fuels (most likely natural gas) because it “pollutes.” Actually nuclear power is the only avenue that makes electric cars any sort of a real option as well. Otherwise they are just “golf carts.”
This would actually be a good use for a nuclear power plant. The plant could power the grid during the day, and the desalination plant at night - help smooth out the load and keep the plant running at the same speed all the time.
Drawbacks: Earthquake zone and close to ocean are a bad combination for a nuclear plant.
Actually some of the Indian tribes in the Dakotas have water rights (and available water) that far exceeds their needs. A pipeline to CO or NM in the future is not out of the question.
[Lake Erie] == [116 mi³]
[Lake Ontario] == [393 mi³]
[Lake Huron] == [850 mi³]
[Lake Michigan] == [1180 mi³]
[Lake Superior] == [2900 mi³]
Oh, my! Better slap a meter on everybody's a$$! Make sure they don't brush their teeth too long in the morning.
Will the fascist fear-monger commie control freaks ever STFU?!? We're on the razor's edge of actually slipping over into a flooding situation out here and the SOBs won't stop. Yes, we need water. Lots of it. But we're getting it and the disappointment is showing on the faces of those who dream of regulating every aspect of our lives.
IIRC there are two plants in Cal. Santa Barbara decommissioned theirs some years ago.
Carlsbad will open in 2016.
Instead of the Browndoggle bullet train we could have built a lot of desalt plants.
The gov’t could also stop flushing the water to the sea instead of stopping water to the biggest agriculture area in the country to supposedly protect a minnow that was introduced to the man made canals to keep mosquito population down.
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