But the most alarming feature of the state’s water shortage remains hidden from view, scientists say. California is running low on groundwater, the vast pools of water stored in underground aquifers that took thousands of years to fill up but are now being drained to irrigate farm fields and run sink taps.
Groundwater usage has surged as the state’s drought has dragged on, jumping to an estimated 65 percent of the fresh water used in 2014, from under 40 percent in normal years. This year, that number could hit 75 percent.
With summer’s baking heat still to come, and with projections by NASA scientists that water reservoirs could run dry, groundwater could account for virtually all of California’s water by year’s end, said Jay Famiglietti, a NASA senior water scientist who uses satellites to study the problem.
“It’s more scary than people realize,” Famiglietti said.
Already, the state is showing signs of groundwater exhaustion. The water table is dropping two feet a year in parts of the thirsty, agricultural Central Valley. Even urban water utilities have noticed declines. Wells are running dry. Farmers are forced to dig deeper in the search for water.
And as the water is pumped up, the ground sinks down. In some places, the pace of subsidence could reach one inch a month for the rest of the year, said Thomas Harter, a groundwater hydrologist with the University of California at Davis. That could end up further damaging infrastructure, such as the state’s vital network of water canals.
James Jared Taylor who lives in Desert Hot Springs said he had been driving to his teaching job in Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, when he noticed the spray from a sprinkler was blowing into the street. It rankled Mr. Taylor, 57, who is cutting back his yard watering to once a week, and whose summer wardrobe of Birkenstocks and a bathing suit limits his laundry loads.
“It was just ridiculous,” he said. “People just have to realize this is a precious commodity.”
Whether the state can now cut its water use 25 percent from 2013 levels may depend on how vigorously it enforces the new rules and how sharply it fines violators, residents said. The governor called on local water agencies to change rates to make heavy consumption more expensive.
But Californians who are washing their dirty dishes in the sink and no longer hose off their dusty cars said they were not ready to abandon every comfort. Pat Allen, 62, an art therapist in Ojai, in the mountains northwest of Los Angeles, is now showering once a week (“I smell fine”) but said she would keep her swimming pool, which holds nonchlorinated water that has become a popular drinking spot for birds.
“Can we continue to live the way we’re living? Absolutely not,” Ms. Allen said. “I don’t think we’re supposed to run away to some other place where there’s water or punish ourselves by not enjoying life.”
“Can we continue to live the way we’re living? Absolutely not,”
“I don’t think we’re supposed to run away to some other place where there’s water or punish ourselves by not enjoying life.”
Yep, enjoy life, Ms. Allen. Continue to live the way you absolutely cannot continue to live until you are forced to run away to some other place where there’s water. And don’t be surprised if the folks there don’t welcome you with open arms and instead “punish” you just as Californians punished the Okies.
Deja vu all over again but in reverse?
My prediction is that they’ll start tapping into the water allocated for environmental use and habitat protection (large rivers, wetlands) when they get desperate. 50% of CA’s water goes to maintaining what was there before bulldozers and chainsaws were invented.
And they’ll start using that environmental water before they tell oil and gas to stop fracking.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that….. or does it?
After all, water tables have been going up and down for millennia. This is all part of the natural cycle.
As the land subsides, it gets lower. And lower means cooler. Isn’t cooler better when it’s so hot outside?
And isn’t dryer better than flash floods? I thought the problem was too much water from melting ice caps, even tho ice is higher than ever.
You don’t even know how much water is down there! Didn’t they just find huge oceans of fresh water below the mantle? You have absolutely no evidence that there could not be just such a huge underground reservoir below California.
And, if you don’t even know w how much water is down there, you have no idea if we have drained anything like a significant amount of water. There aren’t even any error bars.
-> There has been no statistically significant depletion of water before or after 1998.
Any other conclusion is hydrophobic alarmism. Typical liberal claptrap from an organization that gets paid for raking up controversy, instead of sticking to shooting men into space.
Water below the mantle… yep, that sounds like the answer :/
It’s true, man! You know how I know that? I saw it on WUWT.
No, the answer is bringing water back from the moon. Or corralling a comet and putting it in earth orbit. Nestle will be more than glad to bottle it and sell it to us (at a huge profit of course)
I heard that water isn’t in a centralized spot; but exists in a sponge like effect. You’ll have to frack it out of the midst of the earth.
Now wait a minute!
“…..sticking to shooting men into space”?
Don’t you know that we are going to privatize “shooting men into space” so that the campaign donors (er, I mean corporations and greedy rich) can charge the government twice as much and bleed off even more wealth to the 1%? Are you Un-American or something?
And don’t worry about “raking up controversy”—Famiglietti will soon be fitted with a “Scott Gag”. Remember what the Bushies did to Hansen et al?
Maybe I could write a macro to type this for me so I could just automate the process.
Industrial civilisation, confined to a closed system [a single planet for instance] is unconditionally unsustainable and irredeemable. Direct action is needed to tear it down ASAP. The longer the collapse is delayed, the worse things will be for who and whatever survives through and after it. The sooner it’s deconstructed, the more viable ecosystems there will be, the more resources will remain, the more species will survive and the sooner Earth may begin the process of recovery.
We will go over the cliff. There are only two options: climb down as slowly and carefully as possible or leap blindly over the edge and plunge headlong onto the jagged boulders waiting below.
Just my opinion
How much deconstruction is necessary?
Could a parallel, sustainable society be built alongside the collapsing business-as-usual society?
Would there be a tipping point into sustainable living as early adopters are joined by others who choose to opt out of the current scenario, or is the scale of the problem too large to choose this option?
I don’t believe technology will provide a solution (free energy, etc.) but will certainly be part of the solution. Apart from a wartime mobilization, galvanized by a national consciousness that recognizes the problems we face and is willing to face them head-on, I do believe we will not change until we feel more pain. Pain at the pump changes driving habits. Pain in the grocery aisle may bring local solutions into the picture. Maybe it is time to take all our eggs out of the central California basket and relocalize food production. It is possible….will we choose this option?
Don’t be surprised if part of the problem gets solved by sourcing food from China instead of California. Seems to be what is happening where I live!
That wouldn’t solve anything. Just add to a growing list of already insoluble problems.
Complete.
Humans have not evolved at the pace of their “progress“. At the current stage of evolution, Homo sapiens can’t exist sustainably in any culture that includes large population centers or employs technology much beyond that of the “stone age“.
The problem is much simpler than popular misconceptions make it seem.
Essential psychopaths make up no more than around 1% of any given population and they are male by a wide majority. When a tribe or “society” consists of a very small number of individuals it’s quite likely there will be no sociopaths present. If there are, they will stand out like the proverbial “sore thumb”, making them easy to eliminate.
Any parallel, sustainable culture, a partnership culture, would be set upon and destroyed by the prevailing dominator culture the moment it showed any signs of Life. Yes, the scale of the problem is too large for that option.
At this point technology is the problem, not the solution. Many species have been much more successful at “long term” survival than homo sapiens without ever resorting to any tools other than what is provided by their own physiology. They have never crossed the fundamental Rubicon into the territory where need and want are differentiated. They have survived, albeit basically unchanged, for many millions of years. Modern humans, with all the bells and whistles of “civilisation, have reached the brink of extinction in a paltry 200K. I find this most curious and, sometimes, amusing.
Localisation, or decentralisation if you prefer, would be inadequate. It seems that humans are best adapted to Life in small groups with a maximum of no more than 150 members. Frankly I think that 150 is pushing it.
Any “long term” human survival scenario is predicated upon a massive reduction of the population and a return to the forager/gatherer/hunter culture of the early to middle Paleolithic era.
Just my opinion
Roundup will do the trick…
Why deconstruct the civilization when we could just as easily deconstruct the people who make up that civilization?
And use their rotting corpses as fertilizer for raising Delicious Insects (TM) for food while we live in our spanking new Teeny Teensy (TM) houses which are toasty warm in winter because we heat them with organic hemp flakes.
Cause and effect. The chicken or the egg? Either one would likely, almost certainly, lead to the other. Either way, there will be a massive reduction in the human population.
Just my opinion
matched by a rise in zombie population, tho, don’t forget
actually, I agree with you. Billions will die Carbon criminals will murder them.
Murder, suicide, genocide, ecocide. Whatever.
As long as the survivors, if there are any, return to a Paleolithic forager/gatherer/hunter culture and stay with it long enough to let evolution do its job, there might even be a chance that a real human civilisation could one day exist.
“……stay with it long enough to let evolution do its job, there might even be a chance that a real human civilisation could one day exist”
Uh, Richard? You’re arguing both sides now, and even sounding a bit “bright-sided”. Evolution is what has gotten humans to the present sorry state of affairs, and what makes you think it will be any different “next time”? In fact, since the “evil gene” seems to be more adaptive (as you have argued), whatever “-cides” we employ to reduce the population will likely mean that MORE of the evil ones survive and pass the evil on. We would have to eliminate ALL the evil ones from the gene pool in order for evolution to PERHAPS lead us back to a different kind of civilization next time. It would take only a few “evil mutations” to upset that scheme.
Here we’ll need to agree to disagree. IMHO humans abandoned natural evolution in favor of ecocide way back in the late Paleolithic/early Neolithic. H. sapiens stopped adapting and started “customising” the environment, avoiding evolution by physically separating and shielding themselves from the natural world. That’s what’s got us to where we are.
No, we can’t “agree to disagree”. How evolution operates in the general sense is NOT something that is debatable and can be “disagreed” with. You need to rethink your definitions and stop trying to “anthropocentrize” (if that’s a word) the process of evolution. NO living thing can “abandon” evolution. Humans didn’t and haven’t done so, and “ecocide” is merely one of the outcomes of our particular evolutionary pathway.
“Ecocide” was not a problem at the beginning of the Neolithic. There were perhaps 5 million humans on the whole planet at the beginning of the Neolithic, and ~300 million at the time of Christ. That growth was made possible by agriculture and the rise of cities during the Holocene, but the biosphere was not in much danger then from the very localized “ecocide” that resulted.
The population reached ~1 billion in 1800 and that’s when the so-called Anthropocene (and the real ecocide) began. The time needed to add another billion after 1800 was 130 years, then 30 years, then 15 years, and we have now been adding another billion every 13 years since 1974. There are too many of us “customizing” the environment.
We have not “physically separated and shielded ourselves from the natural world” and “avoided evolution”. Yes, we have evolved a capability to use technology to shape our environment (“customizing” it if you will), and that may slow the evolutionary impacts of the environment on us. But anything that is alive and reproduces has a genetic heritage that mutates. Anything that is alive and interacts with ANY environment undergoes “selection” because of that genetic variability and any adaptive advantages or disadvantages it confers. That’s “natural evolution” (if there is such a term), and that brings us back to:
“……stay with it long enough to let evolution do its job, there might even be a chance that a real human civilisation could one day exist”. Evolution has brought us to the point of not “customizing” the environment but to having the capability to overexploit it and damage it, possibly beyond recovery, and when the SHTF, the slaughter will be immense—-THAT’S evolution—-whatever survives will begin the new “evolution”. In the case of humans, I will say AGAIN that your evil 6% are far more likely to survive and begin the whole nasty cycle again. That’s your “real human civilization”—more of the same but worse—-at least until the planet “goes Venus” or recovers enough to go back to having ice ages.
Sorry but I don’t care much for absolutes and I do, in fact, disagree, like it or not. We can all disagree with anyone, at anytime, about anything we like. I, for one, can do so without rancour. I hope you can do the same. I don’t feel it’s incumbent upon me to “convert” anyone to any particular way of thinking. I hope you can say the same.
As far as I’m concerned, textbook definitions don’t always conform to reality. I don’t think and am not saying that humans anthropomorphised evolution. They were misled into externalising it. The miniscule changes humans have undergone over the past 200,000 years or so are more attributable to “progress” than Darwinian evolution, two different things. Of course, the laws of Nature cannot be ignored for too long and, ultimately, unless they fully rejoin the natural world, humans will be forced to evolve…into an extinct species.
Ecocide was enabled somewhere during the transition between the Paleolithic culture and the Neolithic. Obviously the transformations took place at different times in different places, but they all followed the same, horribly wrong, chosen path. With evolution the path is not chosen by the traveler, it is chanced upon by the most fortunate in the game of selection roulette. The incredibly successful evolutionary strategy that had kept humans and their predecessors alive for over five million years was abandoned in favour of “civilisation“; permanent settlements, agriculture and industry. This was, IMHO, a massive fuckup that was largely orchestrated by a parasitic, psychopathic minority: the Kunlangeta, the Wétiko. The moment H. sapiens willfully cast off the nomadic Life of the forager/gatherer/hunter and began congregating in ever larger groups, to engage in ritualistic activities (religion), the die was cast. The door to pathocracy was flung open wide.
I don’t really give a rat’s ass about the history of population growth. It was set in motion and became virtually inevitable with the inception of “civilisation” as described above. Civilisation is like cancer, it’s intrinsically expansionist. It can’t help itself.
Humans most certainly have made every effort to divorce themselves from Nature and, unfortunately, have been quite successful at it. Our “progress“, the use of advanced technologies, is not, IMHO, evolution. It’s actually counter-evolutionary and counter-survival. If humans have evolved at all, it’s been in response, not to the natural environment of Earth, of which they are no longer a functional part, but to the artificial environments they have created. In so doing, they have acquired a plethora of wonderful new conditions: physical frailties, weakened immune systems, compromised digestive, respiratory, circulatory, pulmonary, auditory, visual, dental, muscular, skeletal and neurological systems, a splendid array of cancers, and a veritable cornucopia of psychoses and “mental disorders” beyond number. And, halleluiah says big pharma, new ailments are cropping up every day! As a result of this ostensible “evolution“, H. sapiens is today, as a species, weaker than it has ever been.
This effort to defy evolution, to isolate humanity from Nature by radically and recklessly modifying the environment, is what has brought us to the point of over-exploiting and destroying it. By focusing always outward, by externalising the process of evolution, humanity has missed the opportunity to achieve a new level of being. Had there been instead an equally ferocious inward focus employed, after the last 200K years we might have become an entirely different animal.
Personally I think the human animal has the inherent natural capacity to transcend the limitations of the environment without all the externalised and destructive technological “progress” humans have resorted to for that very purpose. Given the time to evolve within the natural domain of Life, I think H. sapiens could become an animal capable of controlling its own body, and perhaps some aspects of the environment, at the cellular or maybe even molecular level. There would then be no need to exploit the environment to provide “protection” from the environment. I think humans possess the potential to become totally symbiotic organisms, participants across the full spectrum of existence, throughout the entire universe.
But that opportunity has almost certainly been lost because, yes, when the fan gets buried in all the shit that’s going to hit it, the death toll will be staggering…and yes, if anyone survives, they probably will succumb to ponerogenesis again…or not. If they could only avoid that first step toward “civilisation“, the fatal error of gathering in large numbers for any reason, then anything could happen.
Is that “bright-side” enough for you?
In reply to Richard at 10:25 on 4/8
You say you “don’t care much for absolutes”? And yet you assert that you have an ABSOLUTE right to disagree with the laws of nature regarding evolution, genetics, and inheritance? And you do that “without rancour” yet conclude this rant with “Is that “bright-side” enough for you?” LOL.
And you “don’t feel it’s incumbent upon you to “convert” anyone to any particular way of thinking” and yet you go off on a FIVE-screen-length Gish Gallop in answer to my two-screen comment?. The only “conversion” I seek in anyone is that they pay attention to the science rather than to navel-gazing BS.
My “crap detectors” wiggled a bit when you first posted your ideas on Crock. I thought you were a bit smug and self-satisfied in your “Richard’s answer to everything” rants, but DID agree with your general thrust that man is “unworthy” and has developed a culture that is likely to lead to extinction.
However, I am beginning to think that you are a narcissist that has fallen so in love with the sound of your hodge-podge of philosophical-existential-quasireligious-mystical-pseudoscience bullshit that your grasp of reality is being warped. (Perhaps that commenter on your site that compared you to Nietzsche pushed you over the edge?).
There are five “mental” disorders that are generally accepted as inheritable—-depression, bipolar disorder, ADHD, schizophrenia, and autism. Sociopathy (psychopathy) also appears to be ingeritable to some extent. All of them are of course affected by the “nature-nurture” debate, and upbringing and cultural factors can be as important as genes and even more so. The field of evolutionary psychology tries to seek out ancient roots of these maladies.
There is no gene for “evil” per se. You climb on a high horse of rhetorical BS when you start stringing together all of the following: “Ecocide was enabled, chosen path, incredibly successful evolutionary strategy was abandoned in favour of “civilisation“,willfully cast off, to engage in ritualistic activities, the Kunlangeta, the Wétiko”.
You say that you “don’t really give a rat’s ass about the history of population growth”. Of course you don’t, because that would undermine your carefully constructed house of cards. The FACT is that humans have been supremely successful in the “evolutionary” sense, increasing their numbers exponentially and filling every possible niche. Look how the human population has “hockey-sticked” over just the last 200 years (in spite of all the “progress induced conditions” you list.
“….humanity has missed the opportunity to achieve a new level of being. Had there been instead an equally ferocious inward focus employed, after the last 200K years we might have become an entirely different animal”. You can’t really believe that—-an animal that is ENTIRELY different how?
You reach the heights of hyperbolic BS with “Personally I think the human animal has the inherent natural capacity to transcend the limitations of the environment without all the externalised and destructive technological “progress” humans have resorted to for that very purpose”, and particularly with this:
“Given the time to evolve within the natural domain of Life, I think H. sapiens could become an animal capable of controlling its own body, and perhaps some aspects of the environment, at the cellular or maybe even molecular level. There would then be no need to exploit the environment to provide “protection” from the environment. I think humans possess the potential to become totally symbiotic organisms, participants across the full spectrum of existence, throughout the entire universe”
WOW!. And…..DOUBLE WOW!! Would you care to expand on that last paragraph? I see a Nobel Prize in your future if you can.