Nearly 100 years ago, Dust Bowl refugees from the middle of the country sought new lives and livelihoods in the Golden State. Now California is fixing to become its own damn dust bowl. The last two months in the northern Sierra Nevada, normally the wettest time of the year, have shattered an all-time weather record as the driest January and February in recorded history.
The northern Sierra is crucial to statewide water supplies because it is where snowmelt accumulates to fill Shasta and Oroville reservoirs. These are the largest reservoirs in California and the primary storage points for state and federal water supply systems.
If February concludes without additional storms — and none are expected — the northern Sierra will have seen 2.2 inches of precipitation in January and February, the least since record-keeping began in the region in 1921.
That is well below the historical average of 17.1 inches.
Other spots throughout the state have also seen record dry conditions after November and December brought an epic atmospheric river to the West Coast, drenching the North Sierra in twice the average precipitation.
Another such Pineapple Express is unlikely in the months to come, though, and that reality has left residents dry and a bit itchy. Farmers are scaling back their plans to account for the lack of water. One water authority director laments that “there will be a lot of land fallowed” even though the state was “almost in flood-control conditions back in December.”
From feast to famine in just two months — quick work, California!
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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Western states fighting for each other’s water may be missing the big picture. As climate change continues, many regions of the U.S. will get hotter and drier, so much so that some of the nation’s most important reservoirs could dry up, according to a new study by researchers at Colorado State University, Princeton, and the U.S. Forest Service. From the study:
Although precipitation is projected to increase in much of the United States with future climate change, in most locations that additional precipitation will merely accommodate rising evapotranspiration demand in response to temperature increases. Where the effect of rising evapotranspiration exceeds the effect of increasing precipitation, and where precipitation actually declines, as is likely in parts of the Southwest, water yields are projected to decline. For the United States as a whole, the declines are substantial, exceeding 30% of current levels by 2080 for some scenarios examined.
The study includes a number of maps showing how water might dry up under different scenarios. Here are ones showing projected changes in water yields in 2020, 2040, 2060, and 2080 under a somewhat middle-of-the-road scenario:
More dramatic scenarios see reservoirs such as Lake Mead and Lake Powell drying up completely.
Think Progress points out that this is consistent with earlier research into coming water troubles. By 2050, one-third of U.S. counties may be at “high or extreme risk” of water shortages thanks to climate change.
“We were surprised to find that climate change is likely to have a much greater effect on future water demands than population growth,” Forest Service research economist Tom Brown told the Summit County Citizens Voice. “The combined effects of climate change on water supply and demand could lead to serious water shortages in some regions.”
You hear that, future dust-bowl states? Y’all might consider teaming up against climate change instead of fighting amongst yourselves for the last scraps here.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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In the great Goofus and Gallant cartoon of life, this is the Goofus version of protecting clean water. Oh, also if this Goofus and Gallant cartoon were actually an episode of The Sopranos.
From Environment News Service:
Two top officials of the East Orange Water Commission have been charged with conspiring to close contaminated wells before monthly water tests so as to falsely report low levels of a regulated contaminant in drinking water supplied to customers, then opening the wells, allowing the chemical back into the water supply. …
[Executive director Harry] Mansmann and [assistant executive director William] Mowell allegedly conspired to falsify mandatory testing of the EOWC’s water supply to hide elevated levels of the contaminant tetrachlorethene, or PERC, an industrial solvent used for dry cleaning, which is classified as a probable carcinogen.
Now with more PERC.
In addition to charges of conspiracy, the two were cited for official misconduct, unlawful release of a pollutant, and violations of state water quality laws. The two were responsible for the water quality of East and South Orange, home to some 80,000 people. According to ENS, one well had levels of PERC 25 times higher than the legal limit.
Our biggest fear is that this incident will lead to New Jersey getting a reputation for corruption, law-breaking, and pollution. God forbid.
Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.
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New Jersey officials arrested for conspiring to hide water pollution
You can’t make electricity without water. I mean, you can, but you have to use things like “solar panels” or “wind turbines,” and who’s going to do that? (Lots of people, I guess, but that doesn’t help my point.) A 2009 study suggested that half of the freshwater we use goes to energy production, boiled to create steam to turn turbines, or used to cool off reactors. When we run low on water — or when the water gets too warm — the ability to generate electricity declines or halts. (Except from wind turbines and solar panels; I’ll just keep pointing that out.)
According to the International Energy Agency, the amount of water we use for energy is about to go up. A lot. From National Geographic:
The amount of fresh water consumed for world energy production is on track to double within the next 25 years, the International Energy Agency (IEA) projects. …
If today’s policies remain in place, the IEA calculates that water consumed for energy production would increase from 66 billion cubic meters (bcm) today to 135 bcm annually by 2035.
That’s an amount equal to the residential water use of every person in the United States over three years, or 90 days’ discharge of the Mississippi River. It would be four times the volume of the largest U.S. reservoir, Hoover Dam’s Lake Mead.
That 90 days of Mississippi discharge presumably means when the river is at its normal level, not when it has been depleted by drought.
Which is the flip side of this heavy coin. Even as power sector water use doubles globally, the amount of water at hand is expected to drop, as climate change increases the length, frequency, and severity of droughts. A draft government report released earlier this month suggests that the Southwest will see more drought and the Southeast more strain on water supplies as the century continues. During Texas’ drought in 2011, several electricity production facilities came close to shutting down for lack of water.
Interestingly, shifts in power production away from coal and to other sources (excluding solar and wind!) won’t help the trend. The IEA suggests that the increased use of biofuels — renewable, organic material — will be a major source of “water stress,” increasing 242 percent over the next 20 years. Fracking for natural gas, on the other hand, isn’t likely to consume a large share of water. (We’ll see about water contamination.)
Enjoy it while you can, cow.
I could be apocalyptic and suggest that we’ll see some weird, Matrix-y war in 100 years as electricity-dependent robots seize control of dwindling water supplies that humans need to drink. That’s not going to happen. What could happen is that we’ll increasingly need to choose between uses for our water as we need more and have less.
If only there were a way to make electricity while using hardly any water at all.
Water Demand for Energy to Double by 2035, National Geographic
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Water use for electricity production set to double globally by 2035
A new, green future awaits the concrete drainage ditch that we know as the Los Angeles River. But it may have to wait for quite a while.
The Army Corps of Engineers, which originally poured all that concrete about 80 years ago (thanks for nothing, dudes), is teaming up with city engineers on a $10 million study of the potential for restoring the river’s ecosystem, creating wetlands for animals and hang-outs for people. From The Wall Street Journal:
The study examines an 11-mile stretch of the river on the city’s east side, where some resilient plants have survived in a narrow, muddy strip of so-called soft bottom at the center of the channel.
Efforts to manipulate the river’s concrete form without losing its flood-control function will be a “delicate balancing act,” said Josephine Axt, the Corps’ local planning chief who is leading the study, known as Alternative with Restoration Benefits and Opportunities for Revitalization, or Arbor.
It’s like “setting the table,” said Omar Brownson, executive director of the L.A. River Revitalization Corp., which coordinates economic-development projects along the river. “We’re creating a more attractive destination for investment.”
Yes, well, what’s a revitalized habitat without the business it attracts? I guess?
The Corps is expected to present the results of the study to the public in June. But that public might not take so kindly to the Corps and their master plans by then. Just last month, the Corps razed dozens of acres of the river’s wildlife habitat along the Sepulveda Basin, seriously pissed off the local water agency, violated the Clean Water Act, and potentially also violated endangered species protections.
State Sen. Kevin de León, one of several local officials who has demanded an explanation from the Corps, said the Sepulveda project “doesn’t bode well” for the future of efforts to revitalize the Los Angeles River’s natural landscape.
The Journal plays down the “Sepulveda incident” with this weird statement: “The federal interest, the public’s desires and a noticeable change in recent years in the way Los Angelenos view the river have cushioned the blow of the Sepulveda Basin shearing.”
If anything, the wetlands razing may just motivate the public to push the Army Corps harder to get this one right.
But even if the Corps cleans up its act, Los Angeles has a long way to go to clean up its river, which watchdog groups have found is periodically contaminated by mercury, arsenic, cyanide, lead, and fecal bacteria.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court ruled that L.A. area governments were not responsible for the polluted water that flows through storm drains and into the Los Angeles and nearby San Gabriel Rivers. But, fearing further litigation and fines (lead! fecal bacteria!), the county is looking at less painful ways to fund the clean-up. It is now considering an “ambitious” property tax to pay for pollution remediation, at about $54 per house, and up to $11,000 per big box store, per year. Not surprisingly, it is not terribly popular with the locals.
Without the cash to pay for the infrastructure to filter the water, these are going to be some dirty, dirty wetlands indeed.
Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for
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For those of you who sleep well at night knowing that the government is competently and robustly working to protect the health of our environment, you may want to stop reading now. Here’s a story that flew under the radar last week from WWLTV in New Orleans:
An oil company admitted Thursday that coffee filters were used to doctor water samples and cover up the fact that it was dumping oil and grease into the Gulf of Mexico on its platform 175 miles south of New Orleans. …
[W&T Offshore] contractors used coffee filters to clean the water samples before submitting them to regulators.
Also, the company admitted that when they spilled some oil in November 2009, they not only failed to report it to the Coast Guard, but sprayed the oil into the Gulf and then hired a company that worked for three days to clean the platform to make it look like there never was a spill.
The company was fined $700,000 and will pay “$300,000 in community service,” whatever that means.
The criminal mastermind’s tool for evading government oversight
Just to be clear, the reporting process goes like this.
And in order to get that OK, the company need only add step 1a: Pass them through a semiporous piece of paper. Got it.
How was W&T caught?
Inspectors from the Bureau of Safety and Environmental Enforcement still found oil staining on the platform deck and visible sheen in the water, all of which W&T failed to report as required.
Thank God for irredeemable idiocy.
Oil company admits using coffee filters to doctor water samples, WWL TV
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Oil company foils government inspectors with high-tech gadgets (coffee filters)
Lake Tahoe is pretty. The water is clear; the mountains surrounding it are beautiful. For half a century, the environmental group Keep Tahoe Blue has fought to preserve the region’s environmental sanctity, primarily by putting bumper stickers on Volvos, as far as I can tell.
Turns out that those Volvos are doing more harm than good. From the Santa Cruz Sentinel:
Climate change could profoundly affect the Tahoe area, scientists say, taking the snow out of the mountains and the blue out of the water. …
New climate models show that in a worst-case scenario average temperatures in the Tahoe area could rise as much as 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. That’s equivalent to moving Lake Tahoe from its current elevation of 6,200 feet above sea level to 3,700 feet, climate scientists report in a special January issue of the journal Climatic Change. That’s as high as the peak of Contra Costa County’s Mount Diablo, which gets only an inch of snow a year. …
It’s not just the mountains that would look different in a warmer climate, according to Climatic Change. The worst-case scenarios also predict a devastating ecological collapse of the lake and loss of its signature clarity and blue color.
Many lakes undergo a process every year, or every few years, that keeps the lake water well-mixed. As water temperature changes through the seasons, it creates circulation in the lake. The warm water on top of the lake in summer cools off in the fall and sinks, mixing with cold deep water. In a warmer climate, the surface water won’t cool off enough to mix with deeper water.
Without that mixture, oxygen doesn’t penetrate the lake, changing its chemistry. So long clarity. So long blue.
Sadly, there’s not a lot that can be done besides stemming climate change globally. The process is already underway; last season, Tahoe ski resorts didn’t see natural snow until January. Happily, this season started off better.
As we’ve noted before, the problem isn’t confined to Tahoe. Warming temperatures are threatening mountain climates across the country. But few have environmental legacies — and environmental success stories — as rich as Lake Tahoe’s.
A recommendation, then, for those who wish to help: Get a “Keep Tahoe Blue” bumper sticker and paste it over your car’s tailpipe.
A wintry scene from the mountains near Tahoe. Enjoy it while you can.
Climate change threatens Tahoe’s snow levels, lake clarity, Santa Cruz Sentinel
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Pot: not so green.
We’ve written before about the environmental damage done by marijuana growers — massive energy consumption, indiscriminate pesticide use, dead little forest critters, both cute and uncute. Now the L.A. Times reports that pot growers in California are also undermining salmon recovery efforts, poisoning bears, and even threatening our BFFs: dogs.
The marijuana boom that came with the sudden rise of medical cannabis in California has wreaked havoc on the fragile habitats of the North Coast and other parts of California. With little or no oversight, farmers have illegally mowed down timber, graded mountaintops flat for sprawling greenhouses, dispersed poisons and pesticides, drained streams and polluted watersheds.
Because marijuana is unregulated in California and illegal under federal law, most growers still operate in the shadows, and scientists have little hard data on their collective effect. But they are getting ever more ugly snapshots.
Here’s the bad news about salmon:
State scientists, grappling with an explosion of marijuana growing on the North Coast, recently studied aerial imagery of a small tributary of the Eel River, spawning grounds for endangered coho salmon and other threatened fish.
In the remote, 37-square-mile patch of forest, they counted 281 outdoor pot farms and 286 greenhouses, containing an estimated 20,000 plants — mostly fed by water diverted from creeks or a fork of the Eel. The scientists determined the farms were siphoning roughly 18 million gallons from the watershed every year, largely at the time when the salmon most need it.
“That is just one small watershed,” said Scott Bauer, the state scientist in charge of the coho recovery on the North Coast for the Department of Fish and Game. “You extrapolate that for all the other tributaries, just of the Eel, and you get a lot of marijuana sucking up a lot of water.… This threatens species we are spending millions of dollars to recover.”
And the bad news about bears:
Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist on the Hoopa Indian Reservation in eastern Humboldt …, is incredulous over the poisons that growers are bringing in.
“Carbofuran,” he said. “It seems like they’re using that to kill bears and things like that that raid their camps. So they mix it up with tuna or sardine, and the bears eat that and die.”
And the bad news about dogs:
Scientists suspect that nutrient runoff from excess potting soil and fertilizers, combined with lower-than-normal river flow due to diversions, has caused a rash of toxic blue-green algae blooms in the North Coast rivers over the last decade.
The cyanobacteria outbreaks threaten public health for swimmers and kill aquatic invertebrates that salmon and steelhead trout eat. Now, officials warn residents in late summer and fall to stay out of certain stretches of water and keep their dogs out. Eleven dogs have died from ingesting the floating algae since 2001.
Though California has yet to follow Colorado and Washington in legalizing pot, “[m]arijuana is, as a practical matter, already legal in much of California,” reports The New York Times, so common that it doesn’t even raise eyebrows. Gavin Newsom, California’s lieutenant governor and a likely future gubernatorial candidate, says the laws against marijuana “just don’t make sense anymore”; he’s now calling for legalization.
But with the federal government still resolutely anti-weed, even many growers in states where marijuana is legal are likely to stay in the shadows and keep using shadowy growing techniques — so get used to bad news.
Lisa Hymas is senior editor at Grist. You can follow her on
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