That's not really true; improved stormwater capture, potable reuse, and fixing leaking infrastructure are far more economical & environmentally friendly options being planned or undertaken. MWD put out a proposal last year for a billion dollar potable reuse plant and the SWRCB put out a draft report for regulation of direct potable reuse out last month.

Desalination plants are really an option of last resort given their cost, environmental impact, and capacity. The Carlsbad desalination plant cost $1 billion, runs their RO membranes at 800 PSI, produces 50 MGD, and is ~ $2,000 per acre-foot of water. Whereas OC's GWRS(indirect potable reuse) cost ~$623 million after an initial expansion last year, runs their RO membranes at 150 PSI, produces 100 MGD, and is ~ $476(~$850 before subsidies) per acre-foot.

Those alfalfa farms where the entire crop is shipped off to China are a huge chunk of the state's water usage. The Central Valley could also move from almonds and other water-intensive crops. If it was just vegetables and tree fruit it wouldn't be so bad.

Subsidies are a big problem. Washington actually has pretty good climate for growing almonds and there's plenty of resources for thirsty almonds... yet most almonds are grown in California because growers can assume water is essentially free.

Good luck running on a platform to end subsidies though. Media will immediately spin that into "shipping jobs overseas, hurting our poor local farmers". The conservative Central Valley will love that.

California is a strangely successful state considering that if it was a country it would probably have gone the way of Czechoslovakia ages ago.

http://www.ppic.org/main/publication_show.asp?i=1108

Residential users ("super rich") pay 40 times what agricultural users do and they get their water from the same sources. http://www.takepart.com/feature/2014/10/23/california-drough...

The truth is that it would be completely cost effective to get urban water from desalination plants, but very expensive to replace farming water that way, which is now being taken from groundwater. But lets not let the facts get in the way of blaming people in mansions.

Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions. And beyond that we need to start thinking about levelling out energy consumption entirely, even independent of CO2 emissions.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uc1vrO6iL0U

Classic Newsroom clip but fact-checked as accurate, minus the hyperbole at the end about permanent darkness. We're already seeing majorly shifting weather patterns, movement of the jet stream, droughts, unprecedented wildfires, etc. We're already starting to see the first major cities lost due to rising sea levels - Miami is already sinking beneath the seas and it's only a matter of time before it exceeds the limits of engineering to fix it. It's built on porous limestone and borders directly on hundreds of square miles of swamp, so it's something of a worst-case scenario. You can't pump out water when it just comes right back in through the limestone, and even if you could we would be talking about hundreds of times as much wall as the Netherlands uses.

Every single building in Miami will need to be elevated Chicago/Seattle style or abandoned within the next decade or two. Otherwise people are going to start leaving rather quickly once the sewers start backflowing on a regular basis. All of modern society is built on the shoulders of sanitation infrastructure and it's going to get nasty once it stops working.

http://www.motherjones.com/blue-marble/2014/11/climate-desk-...

https://newrepublic.com/article/123216/miami-sinking-beneath...

I wish I had something positive to say like "maybe this will finally get us to proactively solve our problems instead of assuming they can always be fixed at some future date" but I don't actually believe that will happen. We are unwilling to systematically factor in future risks into present costs. Heck, even we as a community don't do it properly - how many times are we going to get hacked before we learn to lock things down from day 1?

Sorry to be pessimistic but that's the reality at this point. Objections to this are political slant and wishful thinking. The US military's job is to be apolitical and make realistic assessments about future threats to our nation, and they're planning for increased levels of conflict due to climate change in the 21st century. It's happening and it's going to suck pretty bad.

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-climatechange-idUSKCN1...

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/2016/10/u-s-intel-alert-cl...

When the oil wells in Kuwait were set on fire as the Iraqis left, the prediction was that it would burn for years and be a global environmental catastrophe. When crack teams from around the world converged on Kuwait, invented new techniques on the spot and put the fires out in a mere six months, that did not get anywhere near the hype that the initial dire predictions got.

In the 1990's, they were predicting a global financial meltdown due to y2k and people were prepping for it -- putting away food stocks, etc. That got quietly solved and no one wakes up every day going "THANK GOD THEY SOLVED THAT AND WE AREN"T LIVING IN THE POST Y2K APOCALYPSE!!!!"

I think we can solve this. I also think if we do solve it, people will act like the fears we are expressing now about it were overblown. People are terrible about being unable to count the disasters that did not happen. When things go well, we seem to think that is "normal" even though it really is not.

I am aware we may not solve it and the world may, in fact, go to hell the way everyone is predicting. But may not and cannot are different things. But, you know, we are all dust in the wind anyway. In another million years, none of this really matters.

My experience is that if you have something positive to say, people pretty much ignore you. I am still trying to figure out how to get traction for being able to talk about things that actually work in various problem spaces. People mostly do not want to hear it. They are far more interested in being all emo about the state of the world while carrying on with their lifestyle as usual for the most part.

I'm generally an optimist. I think there will be fairly widespread support for environmental engineering in our state to protect and repair our natural areas. (There already is a lot of that.)

But it looks like a really big, scary problem from the boots-on-the-ground perspective.

I know that you are aware that I am homeless in California and have been for about 4.5 years. Every place I camp with my two sons, we urinate on the local bushes and trees to intentionally try to grow better cover for our campsite.

Where we currently are, we are camped behind what we thought was a dead tree. Large parts of it are covered in lichen. With being peed on for months, it grew a whole new section and developed berries. Birds began nesting in it. Nearby, what was previously essentially a dead zone is alive with insects and smaller animals.

The large bird that routinely perches above us has stopped screeching constantly -- a territorial behavior intended to drive off competitors for its food -- and we recently witnessed multiple birds of the same species gather nearby in a copse of trees. We think these are all golden eagles and we think they may have paired off to mate, though we aren't sure. It was somewhere between 8 and 11 birds that we could count and it may have been more.

I am homeless and live without a car (and gave up my car a few years before I walked away from my corporate job) and everywhere I pee, the flora and fauna flourish.

My "boots" are probably on the ground a lot more than yours, and to me it looks like it isn't that hard at all to make a positive difference in this situation. Though I have no idea how to start a "please walk more and please pee on a tree" campaign. Nonetheless, everywhere I go, people begin walking more and the local environment visibly improves -- a thing I have written about some: http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

I also have a deadly medical condition that is incurable and I am getting well when doctors claim that cannot be done. So I spent over a year at death's door and have spent a lot of years coming back from that. Thus, what we are doing to our environment looks solvable to me. I have done harder things.

But I am a homeless woman that everyone dismisses as insane because, obviously, only men in white lab coats can figure out how to help deathly ill people (for scads of money, of course) not former homemakers who are dirt poor because of a) being a woman that no one will listen to and b) having an expensive debilitating medical condition.

So, to my eyes, the big challenge is figuring out how to get an audience and how to present the information in a manner that will be palatable. If I can get off the street in the near future, I imagine I will work on that -- because we all need a hobby, I guess.

I'm more worried about the subalpine forest, the kind of stuff you see in the western Sierra from about 3,000 to 8,000 foot elevation. That's where we're seeing the worst of the tree die-off and wildfire disasters, and it's an ecology that takes much longer to return to what we think of as "healthy". The watersheds in these areas is also a major, very important part of the state's water supply, so impacts on these ecosystems have the potential to affect communities all over the state.

Best wishes to you. Good to hear from you again.

Yes, one of which is that some pines only reproduce in the aftermath of fire.

http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/BOREASFire/

http://creationrevolution.com/plants-that-need-fire-to-survi...

I'm not saying the engineers did a bad job, at all. It sounds like they worked miracles, but the issue with climate change is that the global money distributers and politicians want engineers to stop people from solving this problem. they just don't seem to care. There is no consent given for the right people to fix it.

Solving the problem in this case using common sense and reasoning, just means you're stepping on self-interested, highly deluded people's toes.

The real problem that needs solving first is the baking and political systems. People problems.

Common folk seem to want the issue resolved but have taken the failed stance of being a single entity who can't make a difference, without realising they're everything, the way they vote, travel, eat and consume all are part of the solution. We're all feeding the machine.

The consumption levels in the world are just out of control, I wonder how we have gotten this far. Even today in Rome I was looking at the millions of cigarette butts on he ground, a storm was forecast and I just felt sorry for Mother Earth, she needs rain to provide for us but when it happens, she is rewarded with toxic rubbish ending up in the oceans. She has provided us with everything and that's what we give back.

By the way I think you're right, if the problem was one of pure engineering, science and reasoning, we wouldn't have a problem. In that sense there is a positive side.

What is wrong with us?

The rich people failing to do something effective about this are fools. They are like the hyenas in "The Lion King" destroying the landscape -- the very source of their wealth. Without abundance, wealth dies.

I blog about varying topics -- homelessness, managing health issues without drugs, etc -- topics to empower ordinary people to solve their problems with minimal resources. There isn't much money it and a lot of people are openly dismissive of me. But not doing it scares me more. No one seems to be effectively addressing these problems.

I would be thrilled if you would check out some of my writing and Tweet it or otherwise share it.

They are not massively cross disciplinary.

Oil wells were a specific problem solved by finding a solution possible with current tech.

Same for y2k. The fear got us on the other side, and the damage was far less than expected.

But.

We have been harping on climate change forever, there are vested interests who have found it useful to cloud civic thought with FUD, there is a political movement which has evolved (implying that even the base debate was fraught), to openly mock science and research.

Working on climate change is further hampered by it being vague and imprecise, dependent on our improvements in science and tech.

It also severely curtails the options of growing economies who see it as the west robbing them blind, living like kinds and then denying them the same quality of life.

Global warming requires people around the world to feel and believe they are in the same boat, which is worth saving, with other people they share a lot in common with.

Since that is a pipe dream no one is working on, broad political solutions are out, leaving weird targets and alliances to move forward. Targets which most people don't want to meet because it means engines cost more, products become expensive, and margins thin.

This is not a problem solved the same way.

http://micheleincalifornia.blogspot.com/2016/08/for-just-few...

So, in my mind, your objections are irrelevant. There are plenty of Americans -- the so-called 99% that rich assholes would like to treat like sheeple and give Basic Income -- whose lives are in the toilet. I in no way need to convince them they are saving the world. I just need to get solutions into their hands that make their lives work better. The solutions that work are lightweight and low cost. If you can arrange your life so that you do not need a car, your quality of life can go up dramatically even if you are some "loser" failing at having a spiffy well-paid career. And then you are doing less harm to the environment even though saving the environment was not on your agenda.

I am a big believer in enlightened self interest. Our current system does not work for most people. We have a shrinking/shrunken middle class and most people's lives are just not working, even if they are doing everything the system tells them is the right thing to do.

The gig economy is growing and Millenials are insisting more on walkable neighborhoods and many of them live without a car. To the best of my ability, I try to encourage people who are failing to get a job to stop looking for a job and embrace the gig economy.

This is not a movement I need to start. It is already happening because no car and flexible work just works better for some people. But I can toss in my two cents worth and hopefully make the transition process a little easier for some folks, basically.

The problem here is that the parallel to the burning oil wells are already on fire, have been on fire for years, and the collective response hasn't been one determined to address this, it's been a fight between people who are saying there's a problem and people who are saying the idea of burning oil wells is a conspiracy (and even if it's not, we didn't light the oil wells on fire).

Things can get _way, way_ worse than this, and we still need to do everything we can asap.

This is completely true - it's just sad that even now, we can't seem to make the right decisions. Both democrats and republicans have had the opportunity to head this off and have done little to nothing to stop it.

Every time one of these threads come up, I still see Carter's speech in 1977 about the energy crisis: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/primary-...

That was 35+ years ago, what have we done since then? Not much. Reduce emissions by a fraction here and there while other countries ramp up their industrial revolutions and outweigh any gains we make in this country.

>> Levelling off is no longer good enough, it's too late for that, we need a massive decrease in global carbon emissions.

Not sure how this would even be accomplished. Even if you took off all the gas powered cars on the road and replaced them with electric vehicles it wouldn't be enough - and then you have to contend with the pollution on the Li-Ion battery production and recycling issues.

I'm not being sarcastic, but would like to know what you'd propose that would work. In smaller countries mass transit works well, but since our country is so large geographically and our mass transit differs from state to state, I'm not sure even if you outlawed cars all together and just ran with public transportation that would help either.

Essentially an end to fossil-fuel combustion as far as is technologically feasible. A large-scale rollout of nuclear power, replacing literally everything, with enough capacity to cover the peaks. Large-scale electric vehicle rollout where feasible, large-scale synthetic-liquid fuel (derived from nuclear energy and atmospheric sources) rolled out where direct electric is infeasible (colder climates and aircraft).

http://scitation.aip.org/content/aip/journal/jrse/4/3/10.106...

There is no technical impediment to a large-scale nuclear rollout. We literally have unlimited power at our fingertips and we cannot find the will to use it. The only thing we need is the political will to solve the waste disposal problem - which is another of those problems that humanity refuses to solve until their house is burning down. Between reprocessing and our geologically-sound repositories we can easily solve the problem until we have cheap and reliable launch capability in 50-100 years (eg launch loop) and launch it into the sun. Arguably we have that now - the Atlas-V has done 106 consecutive successful launches now.

This is actually why I say that we need to solve energy consumption on a long-term basis as well. Nuclear is so good that we will literally poison our planet with waste heat unless we preemptively solve that problem. Depending on your figures the impact of waste heat is between 1% and 50% as significant as the greenhouse impact of fossil fuels. The number varies based on how much of the atmosphere you are considering venting the heat towards - a vast majority of our energy is dissipated within say 100 meters of the surface and a vast majority occurs in cities that make up say 1% of the total surface area.

We can certainly bring everyone up to a first-world standard of living but we can't continue indefinite population growth and indefinite per-capita increases in energy consumption. A 25-100x increase in total energy consumption can easily happen within a few decades if we continue to allow population to boom while also increasing per-capita consumption, both at exponential rates. Exponential growth happens fast.

https://www.skepticalscience.com/waste-heat-global-warming.h...

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/01/waste-heat-as-a-contribu...

That's not really how aqueducts work, They don't suck water from mountains, they collect and divert it. Rivers and lakes downstream mountains lose access water. The mountains don't lose any water that they wouldn't have anyway. You can blame gravity, not aqueducts or Los Angeles.

The tree die off is an effect of the long California drought.

Is this a cyclical kind of thing, or does it seem to be unprecedented? I'm asking because I know nothing about this topic.

edit: for a less flippant reply, a lot of folks don't realize that vast swathes of what we now consider dense forest were all logged to the ground from about 1800 to about 1930. That's what makes places like Sequoia National Park and Big Basin State Park and parts of Humboldt and Mendocino counties so unique -- they're the remnants of old growth forest, and it's a very different kind of forest.

So perhaps it's not right to talk about this in terms of the "health of the forest". Much of the current forest could die and be replaced by entirely new forest over the next hundred years.

A better question is, what kind of environment do we want to be able to enjoy during our lifetime? That environment is currently struggling.

I don't much care for hiking in burn scars and dealing with muddy places in the Winter, so I'm pretty interested in what's happening to the forests right now.

So I'm from Colorado and spend a decent amount of time in the mountains. I've read an argument that our over protection of the forest is potentially to blame for some of the problems right now. We do everything we can to protect it from forest fires, and now its being chocked out by dead trees and overgrowth. If this argument is wrong however I would like to understand it better.

This is not all that's going on, though, in the Sierras and elsewhere. Other contributing factors:

1) Drought. Severe drought. Trees need water. There's less of it.

2) The heat. Higher average temperatures (climate change!) affect how living trees use/need moisture and how dead trees turn to tinder.

3) Where these don't kill, they stress, and things like the current bark beetle infestation epidemic happen: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-milne/pine-tree-deaths-p...

Fortunately, in the United States, we have several robust federal agencies dedicated to... wait. We massively cut funding to all of them years ago (http://wilderness.org/blog/sequestration-continues-threaten-... ). Largely under pressure of wild fantasies from the growing unhinged wing of the Republican party (which, let's hope, has reached its apotheosis in Trump) whose economics and governing philosophy are on par with their ability to recognize and admit science into a discussion of how we handle our environment.

So, yeah. Overprotection has been a problem. But prescribed burns have found their way into Forest Service philosophy (http://www.fs.fed.us/fire/management/rx.html ). And it's not going to solve the problem.

If only we were as able to let observant study and good stewardship guide us in other areas.

Due to alfalfa, almond/pistachios, pastures, rice, corn, other field crops, vineyards, other truck crops, cotton, grain, and tomato, primarily, according to: http://www.takepart.com/article/2015/05/11/cows-not-almonds-...

I was surprised about alfalfa and pasture.

And "The cattle sector of the Brazilian Amazon, incentivized by the international beef and leather trades, has been responsible for about 80% of all deforestation in the region, or about 14% of the world's total annual deforestation, making it the world's largest single driver of deforestation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_of_the_Amazon_ra...

Convince your friends not to eat as much meat, especially beef. It's bad for the environment.

Here's a drawing from 1855 of Yosemite Valley from Inspiration Point by Thomas A. Ayres: https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/hampton/images/...

And here's one from Inspation Point in 2013 : https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fc/Yosemite...

The forest has become very dense which makes fires larger, more intense, and incredibly difficult to control. It also makes the forest more susceptible to pine beetle outbreaks (they spread faster when the trees are close), and that makes fires even more likely.

Manzanita is one of the bigger reasons (for me). I hate that damn plant with a fiery passion, and it's one of the first things in the sierra to come back and take over an area after it burns.

Well-managed forest areas tend to have much much less manzanita.

only worthwhile thing they produce are the burls, but those are worthless for turning since they have a high likelihood of containing rocks.

[0] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range...

[1] http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/long_range...

Source was an interview with the woman running the Old Farmer's Almanac, aired on NPR a couple of weeks ago.

I'll take some time later today to see what the overall consensus looks like from more sources.

Talking with the park rangers, i found out that the state of the park is _after_ a half million dollar project to thin the underbrush and dead wood in order to protect the park in the event of a fire.

I was of the understanding that fires are a healthy thing for a forest, though I must admit that it's been decades since I've lived in California, and that the local climates and ecologies are quite different.

> "Historically, fires operated in a way that tended to be less severe in valley bottoms and lower slopes," Taylor added. "Now, because of fire suppression, they tend to burn at a higher severity and you lose that habitat." The practice of not allowing any fires means that more leaf litter and branches—the components of forest fuel—can accumulate on the floor, while small trees that would have burned in the past can grow large enough to carry fires into the crowns of the taller trees that had escaped the impact of less severe fires in the past, putting the landscape in jeopardy. [0]

[0] http://news.psu.edu/story/270206/2013/03/26/research/suppres... [1] http://snamp.cnr.berkeley.edu/static/documents/2012/06/13/St...

The people at that department are doing some incredible research like mapping forest floors from drones/airplanes with radar.

There are some scientists talking about some newly discovered effects on soil by fireforests. There are two types of ashes after a fireforest: White and Black. White cinders are completely burned. Can be permeated by rain and contain minerals and nutrients easily taken by plants. Black ashes are incompletedly burned and have instead an hydrophobic efect. They make the soil reject the new water. Soil turns into a brick and water can now only move trough crevices, (unavailable to the other "90%" of the soil for months or years).

So, fireforests can be good, but there are some undesired collateral effects also. A better way would be that some people stop deliberately creating fireforests for profit, and I'm not talking about environmental managers here.

The lack of enough rain weakened the trees enough to let the beetles do their destructive work.

Also, buy air filters now, because they get expensive during fire season.