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therawstory.com wrote:Plagued by prolonged drought, California now has only enough water to get it through the next year, according to NASA.

In an op-ed published Thursday by the Los Angeles Times, Jay Famiglietti, a senior water scientist at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, painted a dire picture of the state's water crisis. California, he writes, has lost around 12 million acre-feet of stored water every year since 2011. In the Sacramento and San Joaquin river basins, the combined water sources of snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil water and groundwater amounted to a volume that was 34 million acre-feet below normal levels in 2014. And there is no relief in sight.

"As our 'wet' season draws to a close, it is clear that the paltry rain and snowfall have done almost nothing to alleviate epic drought conditions. January was the driest in California since record-keeping began in 1895. Groundwater and snowpack levels are at all-time lows" Famiglietti writes. "We're not just up a creek without a paddle in California, we're losing the creek too."

On Wednesday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced that one-third of the monitoring stations in California’s Cascades and Sierra Nevada mountains have recorded the lowest snowpack ever measured.

"Right now the state has only about one year of water supply left in its reservoirs, and our strategic backup supply, groundwater, is rapidly disappearing,” Famiglietti writes.

He criticized Californian officials for their lack of long-term planning for how to cope with this drought, and future droughts, beyond "staying in emergency mode and praying for rain."

Last month, new research by scientists at NASA, Cornell University and Columbia University pointed to a "remarkably drier future" for California and other Western states amid a rapidly-changing climate. "Megadroughts," the study's authors wrote, are likely to begin between 2050 and 2099, and could each last between 10 years and several decades.

With that future in mind, Famiglietti says, "immediate mandatory water rationing" should be implemented in the state, accompanied by the swift formation of regulatory agencies to rigorously monitor groundwater and ensure that it is being used in a sustainable way—as opposed to the "excessive and unsustainable" groundwater extraction for agriculture that, he says, is partly responsible for massive groundwater losses that are causing land in the highly irrigated Central Valley to sink by one foot or more every year.

Various local ordinances have curtailed excessive water use for activities like filling fountains and irrigating lawns. But planning for California's "harrowing future" of more and longer droughts "will require major changes in policy and infrastructure that could take decades to identify and act upon," Famiglietti writes. "Today, not tomorrow, is the time to begin."

frigidmagi wrote:I know they're expensive but I'm surprised no one is discussing desalination plants at this point.

Lys wrote:Because fossil fuel powered desalination plants are bad for the environment, nuclear powered ones are scary, and both types are hated by NIMBYs. Also one year isn't enough lead time to get a desalination plant going, let alone the multiple ones needed.

popular mechanics wrote:California is mired in a historic drought; we already know that all too well. And climate change – NOAA just declared this past winter the warmest one on record – is compounding the drought. It's so bad, we're wondering what, exactly, will we drink as the water literally disappears? Among the possible solutions are desalination of ocean water. But another potential option might turn some off: purification of waste water.

The idea of purifying and drinking waste water – which includes water from your toilet – is hardly new. Heck, television survivalist Bear Grylls has become rather famous (or infamous, depending on your point of view) for doing a crude version of it out in the wild. But it's a very real possible solution to a growing problem as Slate outlines in a story today comparing the purification process to desalination.

The main problem with desalination is the cost: Slate notes a desalination plant in Carlsbad will cost $1 billion and the return on investment isn't all that great. Which is why California is investing another $1 billion into water recycling plants. A year ago, CNN profiled a water recycling plant in Orange County that had just upped its production rate to 100 million gallons of recycled water a day. That may seem like a lot but it's only enough for a third of the county's population; adding it to the groundwater supply doubles that.

The use of recycled water is slowly gaining steam, especially over in Australia and Asia, but here in the United States as well. It's even catching right here, in both the city of San Francisco and the East Bay, in one capacity or another with efforts under way to expand. That expansion has been a bit slow, of course, because of the way it's perceived. As Columbia University's Earth Institute puts it: "The use of recycled water for drinking, however, is less common, largely because many people are repelled by the thought of water that's been in our toilets going to our taps."

Just look at that Slate headline. Yes, in a very roundabout way, you'll be drinking your own pee. But, as the story's author, Eric Holthaus, points out, we kind of already do that.

While it's not quite correct that every glass of water contains dinosaur pee, it is true that every source of fresh water on Earth (rainfall, lakes, rivers, and aquifers) is part of a planetary-scale water cycle that passes through every living thing at one point or another. In a very real way, each and every day we are already drinking one another's urine.

Of course, the idea that we're simply drinking recycled urine is also oversimplification. The treatment recycled water receives means you're hardly getting the Bear Grylls treatment. Again from the Earth Institute:

The term "toilet to tap," used to drum up opposition to drinking recycled water, is misleading because recycled water that ends up in drinking water undergoes extensive and thorough purification. In addition, it is usually added to groundwater or surface water for further cleansing before being sent to a drinking water supply where it is again treated. In fact, it has been shown to have fewer contaminants than existing treated water supplies.

Adding to the advantage of water recycling is that it costs a fraction of desalination. As Holthaus points out, the Orange County plant will "produce twice as much water for less than one-third of the average cost of San Diego's new desalination plant" while using only half the energy. So there's a lot to like about recycled water. And at the rate we're going, it's time for us to get over that "gross" factor and accept that the most cost-effective way to maintaining our water supply is one that doesn't necessarily sound pleasant but is no worse for us than any other solution. And far better than what Bear Grylls experiences in the desert.

General Havoc wrote:The article regarding us having a year of water left was recently debunked as a scare story designed to drive clicks, but the point is still relevant.

L.A. Times wrote:Lawmakers are proposing emergency legislation, state officials are clamping down on watering lawns and, as California enters a fourth year of drought, some are worried that the state could run out of water.

State water managers and other experts said Thursday that California is in no danger of running out of water in the next two years, even after an extremely dry January and paltry snowpack. Reservoirs will be replenished by additional snow and rainfall between now and the next rainy season, they said. The state can also draw from other sources, including groundwater supplies, while imposing tougher conservation measures.

"We have been in multiyear droughts and extended dry periods a number of times in the past, and we will be in the future," said Ted Thomas, a spokesman for the California Department of Water Resources. "In periods like this there will be shortages, of course, but the state as a whole is not going to run dry in a year or two years."

The headline of a recent Times op-ed article offered a blunt assessment of the situation: "California has about one year of water left. Will you ration now?"

Jay Famiglietti, senior water scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and a professor at UC Irvine, wrote about the state's dwindling water resources in a March 12 column, citing satellite data that have shown sharp declines since 2011 in the total amount of water in snow, rivers, reservoirs, soil and groundwater in California.

In an interview Thursday, Famiglietti said he never claimed that California has only a year of total water supply left.

He explained that the state's reservoirs have only about a one-year supply of water remaining. Reservoirs provide only a portion of the water used in California and are designed to store only a few years' supply. But the online headline generated great interest. Famiglietti said it gave some the false impression that California is at risk of exhausting its water supplies.

The satellite data he cited, which measure a wide variety of water resources, show "we are way worse off this year than last year," he said. "But we're not going to run out of water in 2016," because decades worth of groundwater remain.

Still, the state's abysmal snowpack and below-average reservoir levels could exacerbate the overpumping of already depleted groundwater reserves — a problem detailed in an in-depth Los Angeles Times article Wednesday.

There's little debate that the state's water situation is troubling, but there is some improvement from last year. Water levels in some of the state's largest reservoirs in Northern California are higher than last year at this time, largely because of big December storms. But some smaller Southern California reservoirs aren't doing so well and have lower reserves than a year ago.

The Department of Water Resources did not have a readily available estimate of the total water supply in California or the amount expected to be used over the next year.

Just because California is not exhausting its water supply "doesn't mean we're not in a crisis," said Leon Szeptycki, executive director of the Water in the West program at Stanford University, who called the state's snowpack, at 12% of average, "both bad for this year but also a troubling sign for the future."

State officials said stricter conservation measures, including watering restrictions for cities and big cuts in water deliveries to San Joaquin Valley farmers, will help reduce the drain on reservoirs.

Madelyn Glickfeld, director of the UCLA Water Resources Group at the Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, said the drought is so serious that stricter conservation measures are urgently needed. "But I'm confident California's government will not let this get to the point where water is not coming out of peoples' faucets."

Josh wrote:I once explained to somebody that Genghis Khan was literally pissing on us from the sky.

They thought that was gross.