California Drought Update
February 16, 2015
by Patrick Ruckert
Headlines around the world over the last week warn of the apocalypse. Well, maybe not quite that, but the headlines about the new NASA, Cornell and Columbia universities’ report might evoke that image. The study, released last week, claims that between 2050 and 2100 the West will experience megadroughts that can last decades. The report claims that this could be the worst era of droughts in the last 1,000 years. It is claimed that this will be caused by anthropomorphic climate change.
For more than a year now, this reporter has discussed how over the past 1,000 plus years, the climate of the Southwestern part of the U.S. has been characterized by megadroughts, lasting up to a century, and, on the other hand, megafloods, greater than any experienced since the West has been settled over the past two hundred years. B. Lynn Ingram and her colleague published a book more than a year ago, “The West Without Water,” that documented this history.
See my review of “The West Without Water,” here:
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n19-20140509/48-52_4119.pdf
As I have often written, the climate and the weather are super complex phenomenon that the computer models always fail to accurately forecast, because they ignore critical determinates of the Earth’s climate, like the Sun and the affects of the processes of the entire Solar System.
So, this new report, while forecasting a future of megadroughts, contributes no real new knowledge, nor does it, like most of such similar reports, offer any alternative policies other than the regularly regurgitated “we must conserve more,” narrative, which does nothing to provide any new sources of water for the state. Only nuclear-powered desalination would do that.
Merely conserving the surface water and the existing and depletion prone groundwater obviously won’t work, especially since, as reported last week, the state’s population is expected to grow 14 percent, reaching an estimated 44 million people by 2030, according to the California state Department of Finance.
Meanwhile, with sunny skies dominating the state, and the winter temperatures at record highs, the snowpack in the Sierras remains at about 20-25 percent of normal for this time of the year. Most of the state remains in “severe drought” or worse, and the reservoirs remain at about 50 percent of normal despite the heavy rains of early February.
These conditions have already provoked the state and local water agencies to announce that they will be rationing water again this year. The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California last week announced that it would cut deliveries to the agencies it supplies by 5 to 10 percent. The state and federal agencies that operate the California Water Project and the Central Valley Project will shortly announce what these projects will deliver this year. It is expected that, like last year, the deliveries will be near zero.
