Added humor above – click for original image
Governor Schwarzenegger Proclaims Drought and Orders Immediate Action to Address Situation
San Francisco’s Spring, driest on record:
The rainfall for the months of March, April and May in San Francisco were the driest in the City’s 159 seasons of record. The total this spring is just 0.47”, bringing the 2007-2008 season to 17.44”. Below are the Top 10 Driest SF Springs and the total for that respective season. Credit: Jan Null, GGWeather
|
Rank |
Year |
Spring |
Season |
|
1 |
2008 |
0.47 |
17.44 |
|
2 |
1959 |
0.68 |
10.46 |
|
3 |
1934 |
0.70 |
12.91 |
|
4 |
1997 |
1.03 |
22.63 |
|
5 |
1873 |
1.22 |
15.66 |
|
6 |
1972 |
1.30 |
11.06 |
|
7 |
1966 |
1.35 |
16.33 |
|
8 |
1916 |
1.40 |
27.12 |
|
9 |
2004 |
1.46 |
20.54 |
|
10 |
1877 |
1.52 |
11.04 |
From the press release issued June 4th, 2008:
Following two straight years of below-average rainfall, very low snowmelt runoff and the largest court-ordered water transfer restrictions in state history, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger today proclaimed a statewide drought and issued an Executive Order, which takes immediate action to address a dire situation where numerous California communities are being forced to mandate water conservation or rationing. The lack of water has created other problems, such as extreme fire danger due to dry conditions, economic harm to urban and rural communities, loss of crops and the potential to degrade water quality in some regions.
“For the areas in Northern California that supply most of our water, this March, April and May have been the driest ever in our recorded history,” Governor Schwarzenegger said. “As a result, some local governments are rationing water, developments can’t proceed and agricultural fields are sitting idle. We must recognize the severity of the crisis we face, so I am signing an Executive Order proclaiming a statewide drought and directing my Department of Water Resources and other entities to take immediate action to address the situation.”
Today’s Executive Order directs the Department of Water Resources (DWR) to:
- Facilitate water transfers to respond to emergency shortages across the state.
- Work with local water districts and agencies to improve local coordination.
- Help local water districts and agencies improve water efficiency and conservation.
- Coordinate with other state and federal agencies and departments to assist water suppliers, identify risks to water supply and help farmers suffering losses.
- Expedite existing grant programs to help local water districts and agencies conserve.
This Executive Order also encourages local water districts and agencies to promote water conservation. They are encouraged to work cooperatively on the regional and state level to take aggressive, immediate action to reduce water consumption locally and regionally for the remainder of 2008 and prepare for potential worsening water conditions in 2009. As part of the Executive Order, DWR will work with locals to conduct an aggressive water conservation and outreach campaign.
Last month, DWR’s final snow survey of 2008 showed snowpack water content at only 67 percent of normal and the runoff forecast at only 55 percent of normal. As conditions continue to worsen across California, it underscores the state’s need for infrastructure improvements to capture excess water in wet years to use in dry years like this one.
“This drought is an urgent reminder of the immediate need to upgrade California’s water infrastructure. There is no more time to waste because nothing is more vital to protect our economy, our environment and our quality-of-life. We must work together to ensure that California will have safe, reliable and clean water not only today but 20, 30 and 40 years from now.
Read more from the press release and watch the video
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Yah riiiight. A 17 inch season and monster snowpack in parts of the Sierras. The Water Resources Department said the state’s snowpack water content in 2008 was only 67 percent of normal. This is the same WRD that in February said the Sierra snowpack was already 111% of normal. The politics of water are the new social engineering lever now that AGW is discredited.
Surprised he didn’t say anything about AGW.
Right now in South Everett (just north of Seattle) it’s been raining all morning and cold (2pm and 60 degrees). Normally people would be out enjoying the pool since Memorial day, but we’ve barely been above 60 since then.
I demand some Global Warming!
“Cuz it never rains in Southern California”, I guess we can add Northern California to the list of places with infrequent rainfall. Most people that I know, that live in California, are proud of the fact that they have so many rain-free days there.
The agriculture industry uses a large portion of the fresh water that is available, and if they start getting restricted, it will put more pressure on food prices.
I do believe a negative PDO historically leads to drier conditions in the southwest (including California). Except now there are millions of more people living on land that has gone through wetter (better) years with the PDO in the warm phase.
Of course GW will be blamed, when all they have to do is look at their window at the real cause. Cool times tend to bring more pain than warm times and the negative PDO could bring years of lower than average rainfall.
Of all of Arnold faults, getting ahead of this is a good thing.
Hey Ahnuld, one word: desalinate!
It just occured to me that if all coastal States use desalination to provide their water needs, we may be able to reduce the rise in sea levels due to global warming… I’m sorrry I mean climate change …. or is it now greener to say arctic ice melt? This is getting confusing.
Robert Cote says “The politics of water are the new social engineering lever now that AGW is discredited.”
Building large scale water projects is good for society. CO2 restrictions are bad for society. Simple as that.
I’m all for government getting involved in huge water resource schemes especially if it replaces CO2 hysteria.
Here in upstate NY Aqueduct #3 of the NYC water system is being built. It is the largest construction project in the country. It was started in 1970 and will be completed in 2020.
In Seattle, average June monthly rainfall is 1.44 inches as measured at SeaTac
I found my math error from a cut & paste from a website which had the surface as 510 Mm-2. Off by 1000. That’d be 510M Km-2.
In Everett we’re already at 1.72 inches just in the last 72 hours. SeaTac is at 0.89. Looks like it’s gonna be a cold, wet summer.
http://landslides.usgs.gov/monitoring/seattle/rtd/rainfall.php
The shortsightedness of government officials in charge of water resources for the last 50 years may be unprecedented in history, and not just in California.
70-90% of normal precipitation for a single season and we are in a drought? Are you kidding me? We have no infrastructure capable of supplying the needs of the state within normal weather variation.
We need 3 to 5 times the amount of reservoir capacity currently in place at a minimum, so yes this is not the current administration’s fault, but dozens of administrations.
We need to be able to deal with sustained droughts—the real thing, say 7 years or more of less than 50% of normal rainfall. It is ridiculous to live on a razor’s edge of need, praying for 100% of normal every single year and decrying disaster when that doesn’t happen.
Of course this does not mean that agricultural water subsidies don’t need a second look as well. I could never make sense of growing rice in the California desert.
So why does the US drought monitor show the San Francisco area only as “abnormally dry” – at the far end of the scale from Extreme or Exceptional drought? That’s the worst they’ve seen in 159 years? What blessed lives they lead in California.
Reid:
Only problem is that environmentalists will fight ANY water project here in California. It doesn’t matter if we need it, doesn’t matter if it is environmentally sound. It will sustain growth, and that is the crux. Anything to smack down growth.
Unless you’ve lived here and seen firsthand how irrational these groups are, you can’t really get a feel for it. For example. We had a local highway expansion project that had been planned for early 90’s. It was to fix a dangerous intersection between two state highways 149 and 70. People died there regularly, thus the reason for the improvement.
The local environmentalist group got an obscure, essentially useless weed that was homozygotic, self pollinating, and at the end of it’s genetic thread listed an endangered species about then. Coincidentally, some of it showed up right in the middle of the area where the new highway expansion was planned.
Dozens of millions of dollars went down the toilet in inflation, delays, environmental studies, mitigation, and more. Lawsuits by local environmental groups occurred. They were settled. The project just finally got started last year and is due for completion this year. Another lawsuit was filed by the local environmental group just as the project started because they say all the mitigation plans were “inadequate” even though USFWS had signed off on it.
In the meantime, about 8 people died at that road while all that fighting over the weed called Butte County Meadowfoam happened. One of them was an innocent 5 year old boy riding in a car with his mom. She survived, only to have a lifetime of anguish. It angers me everytime I think about it.
I think these enviro-groups should be held accountable for these deaths, because if the highway had been completed on schedule, the accidents would not have happened.
But, they apparently care more about the welfare of a weed than a little boy who died. There was not one expression of remorse from these folks over that.
A POX on California.
Back when I was young and stupid (as opposed to old and foolish now) I lived in Northern California. I was a Merchant Seaman, so have a reason to remember this controversy.
Back in 2002, a fellow had the idea of buying surplus tankers and carrying fresh water from Northern California to Southern California. He was going to do it with his own money.
The plan was to anchor off of the Gualala River and pump fresh water from the mouth of the river just before it went into the Pacific.
There was lots of outrage over stealing their water.
Of course, after the water ran into the Pacific, it was useless.
Anyway, here is an opposition site:
http://www.gualalariver.org/export/fantasy.html
And here are some replies to the questions asked of the entrepreneur:
http://www.gualalariver.org/export/questions.html
The first question is really telling about the mind set of the opponents.
The target date for completion was 2004. It would have been in operation by now.
Maybe it was a pipe dream-they are a regular part of Northern California culture. But maybe he had a good idea. Whether or not it would work is irrelevant. It was immoral to make a profit out of what was otherwise wasted.
Regards,
Steamboat Jack
Yeah, I live in the mid-Willamette Valley. I finally remembered to order some hops rhizomes before they sold out.
The darn things are rotting in the ground because of the cold wet weather.
“Whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting” – Mark Twain
Water has _always_ been a contentious issue in California and the rest of the Southwest. This is nothing new and I fail to see a link between Arnold’s declaration and the AGW crowd.
Pay more taxes, government will pretend to control the weather. This is the pretend part.
I wonder how he is going to make all that Sierra snow go away?
Desalinization ideas along the coast in Monterey and Santa Cruz county have been repeatedly shot down because they would “encourage growth”. In that region there is a range of coastal hills (the Santa Cruz mountains) that cause storms coming in from the Pacific to drop a lot of their moisture before heading inland. Nearly all of that water simply runs right back out to sea as there isn’t enough room to really build storage between the mountains and the ocean. So a lot of the winter rains drop and run right back out into the ocean.
One of my (many) harebrained ideas would be to build a tunnel (or series of tunnels) from the coast to the Santa Clara valley and allow a lot of that wet air to have a path inland. That would transport a lot more water inland and should result in greater Sierra snowpack. The tunnels could double as power stations with a turbine that works in either direction placed in them. When the winds howl out toward the ocean in the fall or in off the ocean in the winter, the stations would be generating power that is placed into the grid. other infrastructure such as gas pipelines, power and communications cables could use them too.
Just on a positive note. I too have noticed a shift in terminology in the AGW battle implying that even the left most media is starting to change their minds. Just today the CBC (Canada’s answer to “Pravda”, but Pravda was not quite biased enough,) on some news casts talking about AGW, it has gone from a “consensus of 2500 IPCC scientists” to (and I kid you not) “some people say CO2 contributes to Global Warming”. I almost crashed my car!
The “2500 IPCC scientists” changed to “some people say” on the CBC! Wow!
REPLY: We are winnng this battle, slowly but surely.
If nothing else, Arnold is media savvy. The picture in the background is great window-dressing. The only thing missing are the circling vultures.
REPLY: I wondered when somebody would notice. I added that, for some humor. Here is the original:
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2008/06/governator_drought.jpg
Historically, California is a semi arid state. Droughts, in the past, have lasted as long as several centuries, but the population of California has grown beyond it’s capacity to sustain such a large population. The logical solution is to build more dams but the environmentalists want to tear down the existing dams… go figure.
Perhaps the driest spring, but that’s not what matters.
How do the two rainfall seasons of 2006 – 2007 and 2007 – 2008 compare to those of 1975 – 1976 and 1976 – 1977?
Mature trees now deep underwater tell us that the Sierras were much drier for long periods (perhaps a hundred or more years in the Medieval Warm Period) than recent times.
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=956
BTW, in order for these lakes to dry up, precipitation has to decrease by a large amount, in excess of 50%.
Anthony, you sly devil. I underestimated your irreverent humor. I’ll have to stay on my toes in the future. Keep up the good work
These are some interesting stats for San Francisco, but the courts are restricting the Sacramento River flow south and I do not thing that SFO drought figures represent California droughts. D.M. Meko, did a reconstruction of Sacramento River System Runoff From Tree Rings from 901 to 1977 for the California Department of Water Resources, published in July 2001.
I have added the river flow to the supposed drought years. Note from 1777 to 1977 the average flow in Acre Feet as 18.02, the Max 37.3, the Min 5.56. In several of the supposed drought years the Sacramento River exceed the average flow.
Rank Year Season Sac Rv Flow (Million Acre/Ft)
1 2008 17.44 N/A
2 1959 10.46 8.72
3 1934 12.91 7.36
4 1997 22.63 N/A
5 1873 15.66 18.34
6 1972 11.06 13.43
7 1966 16.33 12.95
8 1916 27.12 24.14
9 2004 20.54 N/A
10 1877 11.04 10.12
I will dig up some plots I did for a TV show on the Sac River Flow, which I think will be better indicators of California drought.
I tend to agree with you richard,this is just the beginning…
I remember seeing on the Climate Audit site a rather long time ago a reference to a paper that used carbon dating of now-swamped tree stumps in Lake Tahoe and possibly other Sierra lakes to document extremely long periods of drought in California in the past that have dropped the lake levels considerably and by considerably, I mean by tens of feet. If you have ever seen Lake Tahoe, that represents a huge amount of water.
Glad you brought that up, Richard. California cannot sustain its population when a real drought comes along. So, are the “environmentalists” going to suffer the huge economic damage when the infrastructure is no longer capable of sustaining life along with the rest of the inhabitants?