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Water.

bleubird

bleubird

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California.What are you going to do?
http://www.cadrought.com/
LA was built on stolen water.
I am used to high food prices.
What about the rest of USA?
Hey,I will seen you water if you pay the shipping.
 
bleubird said:
California.What are you going to do?
http://www.cadrought.com/
LA was built on stolen water.
I am used to high food prices.
What about the rest of USA?
Hey,I will seen you water if you pay the shipping.
Click to expand...

In the long run we are probably going to have to go the desalinization route, or else quit trying to grow food in near desert conditions.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
bleubird said:
California.What are you going to do?
http://www.cadrought.com/
LA was built on stolen water.
I am used to high food prices.
What about the rest of USA?
Hey,I will send you water if you pay the shipping.
Click to expand...

In the long run we are probably going to have to go the desalinization route, or else quit trying to grow food in near desert conditions.
Click to expand...
Lost Vegas is a dead end city if they can not get cheap water.
 
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Desalinated drinking water fit for human consumption costs about $1 per thousand litres, from a modern plant. LA is on the coast, and is in a rich nation, so there is no technical nor economic reason for LA to run out of water. Political reasons are another thing entirely - political barriers can create a crisis out of nothing, and stupid people who are so used to paying below cost for a resource that they won't even consider paying the full cost even when it is well within their means get to cry in their beer, but get no sympathy from me.

Las Vegas is a long way from the coast, and is about 600 metres above sea-level; so the cost of water there might be as high as $5 or $6 per kilolitre. That is still incredibly cheap compared to other fluids - such as gasoline or milk; so unless there is a big panic about LV running out of those fluids, any panic about running out of water is purely a matter of poor planning. The technology exists, and the US has the wealth, so there is no excuse.

Ultimately this whole panic comes down to people refusing to plan for the fact that the climate has changed and continues to do so. It's not a 'climate change' issue, so much as it is an 'ignoring the climate' issue.

Poor countries have an excuse for running out of water in their cities. Rich countries really don't.
 
fromderinside said:
How about just warming the air in proper places over water (ocean, lakes, rivers) to encourage more evaporation at the surface. Lots of ways to do that, even ways from space, The rest is just a matter of guiding such flows toward proper geology.
Click to expand...

It's cheaper to use reverse osmosis and pump the water up to fill the existing under-filled reservoirs.

It's even one of the few applications for renewables such as wind and solar where the intermittency of the power source is a non-issue; make drinking water and pump it up to Lake Mead when the wind blows, with power from wind turbines. Periods of drought are long and problematic, but periods of calm are less prolonged, so there is no problem relying on the water already in the lake on calm days and refilling it when the wind starts to blow again.
 
bilby said:
Desalinated drinking water fit for human consumption costs about $1 per thousand litres, from a modern plant. LA is on the coast, and is in a rich nation, so there is no technical nor economic reason for LA to run out of water. Political reasons are another thing entirely - political barriers can create a crisis out of nothing, and stupid people who are so used to paying below cost for a resource that they won't even consider paying the full cost even when it is well within their means get to cry in their beer, but get no sympathy from me.

Las Vegas is a long way from the coast, and is about 600 metres above sea-level; so the cost of water there might be as high as $5 or $6 per kilolitre. That is still incredibly cheap compared to other fluids - such as gasoline or milk; so unless there is a big panic about LV running out of those fluids, any panic about running out of water is purely a matter of poor planning. The technology exists, and the US has the wealth, so there is no excuse.
Click to expand...

There's no reason it should cost any more here--we don't actually need to desalinate our water. Rather, we would build a desalinization plant in California to replace water we were taking out of the Colorado. So long as we don't need more water than what coastal California uses from the Colorado there's no need to actually ship the water here.

Ultimately this whole panic comes down to people refusing to plan for the fact that the climate has changed and continues to do so. It's not a 'climate change' issue, so much as it is an 'ignoring the climate' issue.
Click to expand...

While we are in a drought the real problem is the allocations are based on an unusually wet period.
 
bilby said:
It's even one of the few applications for renewables such as wind and solar where the intermittency of the power source is a non-issue; make drinking water and pump it up to Lake Mead when the wind blows, with power from wind turbines. Periods of drought are long and problematic, but periods of calm are less prolonged, so there is no problem relying on the water already in the lake on calm days and refilling it when the wind starts to blow again.
Click to expand...

Yup, it would make renewables much more grid-attractive. You could also have the plant itself operate only when there was enough power on the grid.
 
When I look at this topic I get chills over the distance we have to fall.

The only saving grace is that we are currently wasting a lot of water because of cash crops and that is where a lot of slack in the system is.

I think that California is going to be facing this type of drought as the new normal because of global warming. The rains will go elsewhere.

The thing about global warming is that it will lead to drought and deluge. When the rains come the land will too dry to take up the torrential rains.

Also it will make the rains go to higher latitudes.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
There's no reason it should cost any more here--we don't actually need to desalinate our water. Rather, we would build a desalinization plant in California to replace water we were taking out of the Colorado. So long as we don't need more water than what coastal California uses from the Colorado there's no need to actually ship the water here.

Ultimately this whole panic comes down to people refusing to plan for the fact that the climate has changed and continues to do so. It's not a 'climate change' issue, so much as it is an 'ignoring the climate' issue.
Click to expand...

While we are in a drought the real problem is the allocations are based on an unusually wet period.
Click to expand...
You are fucked.
move on.
You live in a totally artificial environment that is not sustainable.get over it,
 
bleubird said:
Loren Pechtel said:
There's no reason it should cost any more here--we don't actually need to desalinate our water. Rather, we would build a desalinization plant in California to replace water we were taking out of the Colorado. So long as we don't need more water than what coastal California uses from the Colorado there's no need to actually ship the water here.



While we are in a drought the real problem is the allocations are based on an unusually wet period.
Click to expand...
You are fucked.
move on.
You live in a totally artificial environment that is not sustainable.get over it,
Click to expand...

Everyone in the first world lives in a totally artificial environment. All of those environments can be made sustainable if the political will is there to do it.

Artificiality rocks. Living in nature sucks donkey balls, which is why people have been striving to avoid it for over six thousand years.
 
My feeling is that these predictions of mega droughts coming later will actually come a lot sooner.

Take whatever a group like the IPCC projects to be the worst case and go beyond it by a healthy margin. Seems to have held true up until now.

This is going to sound cruel, but let's say that in the next 10 year in California that 5 would have decent rain and 5 would have drought. It would be better for the next 5 to be drought to shake the foundations of the U.S. by front loading the pain.
 
Loren Pechtel said:
bleubird said:
California.What are you going to do?
http://www.cadrought.com/
LA was built on stolen water.
I am used to high food prices.
What about the rest of USA?
Hey,I will seen you water if you pay the shipping.
Click to expand...

In the long run we are probably going to have to go the desalinization route, or else quit trying to grow food in near desert conditions.
Click to expand...
Ever drive through the Central Valley? You pass bleeding rice paddies. We can keep right on growing food in near desert conditions, even as the climate changes; we just need to stop being stupid about how we do it.
 
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I wonder when Washington state will start to be affected by this larger weather system that has Cali in drought. The first effect will be from lack of snowpack. That will be interesting for our hydro power down the line.
 
I like living in an area where the water isn't a problem. The Great Lakes region offers a bunch, and all that is required to watch algae blooms. Oddly, the last few years, we've been having 100 yr storm events annually, maybe 4 of 5 in the last 10 years.

The SW has been dealing with a long drought and it doesn't appear to be going away. The only solution is to repeal Obamacare.
 
bilby said:
Artificiality rocks. Living in nature sucks donkey balls, which is why people have been striving to avoid it for over six thousand years.
Click to expand...

So where are we going to get the energy to sustain artificiality bilby, jim, bob. Air moves irregularly and often minimally, sun shines best with no clouds, rivers run down hill until there's no runoff from nearby mountains, fossil fuels cause cancer, lung problems, heart disease, and they run out. I'm thinking nature after several billion years got it right. So fuck artificiality bring on nature, warming, floods, earth quakes, asteroid hits, and all. Lets enjoy what we are the most advanced form of nature here on earth and get on with evolving.
 
fromderinside said:
bilby said:
Artificiality rocks. Living in nature sucks donkey balls, which is why people have been striving to avoid it for over six thousand years.
Click to expand...

So where are we going to get the energy to sustain artificiality bilby, jim, bob. Air moves irregularly and often minimally, sun shines best with no clouds, rivers run down hill until there's no runoff from nearby mountains, fossil fuels cause cancer, lung problems, heart disease, and they run out. I'm thinking nature after several billion years got it right. So fuck artificiality bring on nature, warming, floods, earth quakes, asteroid hits, and all. Lets enjoy what we are the most advanced form of nature here on earth and get on with evolving.
Click to expand...

The sun produces vastly more energy than we could ever use.

Call me back in 4,000,000,000 years, and I will start to worry then.

Sure, we might need a few decades to get the collection of solar energy organised, but there is plenty of Uranium to fill the gap.
 
huh,

You do realize that in about 500 million years the sun will get hot enough to make almost all multicellular life extinct? It would take intelligent life of the time to make the Earth go further out in orbit to ameliorate it.

At any rate, I need to start going back to websites like resilience.org that talk about getting ready for the shit to hit the fan. It is as about as positive and mainstream as those types of sites get.
 
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