To predict the future all you need is a rain gauge and a little imagination. Unfortunately the people who stand to gain the most by denying reality ... gain the most.

In addition, the map of western watersheds is amazing. I would love to see the other one the article mentions.

edit: couldn't find that, but did find Powell's 1878 report https://pubs.usgs.gov/unnumbered/70039240/report.pdf.

Huh. I learned about the Great Dust Bowl in American High School mostly through it's economic and sociological impact, books like "Grapes of Wrath".

The science behind it, and that it was predicted by John Wesley Powell isn't discussed. It's just a thing that happened. Maybe other schools, or more recent education, discuss it more in depth.

I watched the Ken Burns documentary about the dust bowl, it covers the science and farming practices that led to it - VERY interesting and well done, if a bit dry.

My main takeaway was that they "solved" the dust bowl by pumping water up from the aquifers, which are now like 70% depleted - scary.

Nor is the fact that the same extractive practices were then brought to California’s Central Valley where they are also resulting in environmental destruction.

> “When all the rivers are used, when all the creeks in the ravines, when all the brooks, when all the springs are used, when all the reservoirs along the streams are used, when all the canyon waters are taken up, when all the artesian waters are taken up, when all the wells are sunk or dug that can be dug in this arid region,” he warned, “there is still not sufficient water to irrigate all the land.”

This rings very true today, save for the ability to desalinate. While it’s hard to predict what environmental impact such mass irrigation would have, we do have the technical ability now.

California should certainly invest in at least enough of desalination to supply cities and act as a safe guards against fluctuations in rainfall for agriculture.

Absolutely, we need to look to Israel, also a country within a desert: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/israel-proves-the...

Israel desalinates more water than it uses and is a net exporter of water in the region, selling fresh water to other countries.

Very interesting article. However, it only talks about drinking water and the real problem is water for agriculture and the author doesn’t talk much about cost of desalinated water vs cost of acquirer water. My own professional experience suggests desal water is cost-effective within sophisticated fertigation, controlled-environment systems which produce high value crops, but probably not for the more expansive wheat, maize, rice systems we use to grow our staples and animal feeds. Maybe we’ll be able to achieve this in an era of renewables.

Wouldn't it be easier to take the farms to where the water is, rather than bring the water here?

The grandfathering of water use rights from 100 years ago and the political clout of rural areas guaranteed by the typical state/federal senate apportioning makes this extremely difficult to turn around from having the farms in the desert in California and Arizona. How do we fix that?

Farms need a lot more than water, though. They need square footage, soil quality, suitable climate, access to infrastructure for shipping, and a good amount of cheap labor. All of those (except, increasingly, cheap labor) can be found in California.

With cheap enough power, it might well be possible to desalinate water from the nearest ocean and pump it to wherever it's needed.

(Disclaimer: I haven't tried even back-of-the-envelope calculations about other costs of doing so, e.g., capital- and operating costs of pipelines, pumps, etc.)

Because I’m bored- Googling “cost to desalinate water” gives $2k per family of five, and googling “population of California” gives roughly a population of 40 million. 40mil/5 * 2k == 16 billion (if I’m counting zeroes right.)

So it’s in the ballpark of a percent of California’s total GDP (which is roughly 2 trillion, IIRC) for non-industrial uses. (But industry, including agriculture, is responsible for that GDP- how easily a “dry” Californian economy could support desalination can’t be inferred from these numbers!)

That's why "cheap enough" power.

Conceivably, using offshore wind turbines to power a desal plant could perhaps be cost-effective.

I mean, are you expecting power in the future to be a tenth as expensive as it is now? A hundredth? With “cheap enough” energy anything is possible, but I don’t see where we would get order of magnitude improvements there anytime soon.

I’m still hoping for nuclear fusion within my lifetime.

Very interesting article. One thought which still lingers in my mind is how to distinguish between visionaries (like Powell from TFA) and Malthusians in present? Both of them, after all, observe the current state of the world and make projections. Neither takes into account future technological progress.

This is an interesting question which you pose very clearly. Because we don’t know the future and what opportunities technology may bring, it is prudent to hedge the risk with an insurance policy. Right now we aren’t doing that and instead are doing the equivalent of driving fast without either a seat belt or insurance cover.

I’m not quite sure how we would hedge against 70% acquifer depletion, climate change or soil degradation, but a more honest conversation about the need for a hedge would be a start.

And looping back to your question, how to tell the difference between the Malthusian and the correct...and realizing you are essentially asking how to work out who is right and who is wrong about an unknowable future...maybe we look to how honest they are about the inherent uncertainty in any predictions made about the future, and secondly about the need to take risk mitigation steps to avoid worst outcome scenarios.

I'm not sure there's a real distinction. You make predictions based on evidence, and you're either right or wrong.

Equally flawed is taking on faith that technology will save us from ourselves.

its really amazing how Malthusian ideology is so pervasive in public thought, when the data shows that it is wrong just about everywhere you look. Even India's population growth rate is going down (has been going down since the late 1970s, source: google india population growth rate chart), and they are the poster child for population growth. Japan was the first country to post a population loss, but other countries will follow shortly

Africa is the concern on the population front.

I sort of feel we need Malthusian pessimists to warm us when we are heading for the cliff. The Green Revolution, and what it achieved in India and elsewhere, was achieved in substantial part through public investment in research. I guess we’re all rather glad we didn’t continue blithely believing the Gods would save us from the Malthusians! Right now, the Malthusians are warning us of the physical limits to further crop productivity increases. I’d take this as a signal that we need to start investing in solutions!

Africa has a lot of arable land that's uncultivated. So I'm not sure the Malthusians are right this time about crop productivity increases worldwide. Google tells me there are 600 million hectares in Africa, which is 60% of the world's total. That's a lot of potential food. Also, much of exiting agriculture in Africa is inefficient, and could be increased.

Much of Africa’s soils have only 20 years of harvests left.

This paper, by the British Warren Buffet, explains the problem and is well worth the read if you have the time. It’s well-written so not as daunting as it’s length otherwise makes it look.

https://www.gmo.com/docs/default-source/research-and-comment...

Resources are finite. A certain number of people will overwhelm the availability of resources. The fact that we are currently below that number does not make the theory wrong.

There's also the technological progress of fracking, a large proportion (20-50% per county in Texas for one example) of fresh water is used once for fracking.

Then they named Lake Powell after him!

For those not familiar with the American West, Lake Powell is the 'upper half of the Grand Canyon', blocking tributaries that only a handful of white men had ever ventured into before the whole lot was flooded.

> Then they named Lake Powell after him!

They love their irony.

Lake Powell, the $20 bill (Andrew Jackson was very against a central bank) &etc...

The hubris of mankind believing he can bend the climate to his will is still strong today.

s/the climate/capitalism/

Please don't do this because the guidelines ask you not to.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Your last several comments have broken the site guidelines (by complaining about downvoting, and by insinuating astroturfing without evidence). If you continue to do that, we're going to have to ban you, so please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and follow the rules from now on.

The site works for myself and most everyone else. Umatrix doesn't block the CDN because it's on their domain, but I think your browser might be blocking it.

The downvotes might be due to the technical issue being off-topic from the perspective of the content of the article - people are here to feel guilty about climate change, not to troubleshoot your browser.

"The site works for "" most everyone else" - Do you have anything to support that statement?

This is a link to a webpage on hacker news. Whether the page is viewable or not, is highly topical. If blocking tracking cookies happens to break the page, then thats even more interesting. If the page does not mention this and just gives a misleading message even moreso.

website is broken

https://image.ibb.co/m0Q6jK/image.png

I get that on the atlantic homepage and on slate.com when I use firefox with privacy badger. When I use chrome without any special add-ons it works. Assume there is some javascript nonsense going on there but haven't bothered reporting it or trying to figure it out.

Guessing your privacy settings are blocking the cdn. It's on their domain, so you might retry after allowing.