"JRStern" > wrote in message
...
> On Sun, 24 May 2015 11:32:35 +0100, "Ophelia" >
> wrote:
>
>>I have noticed several people here mention California. We have had a lot
>>of
>>stuff on tv about the lack of water there. We were shown the huge
>>reservoirs with very little water in them. They were showing how people
>>with lush grass and full swimming pools were being demonised.
>>
>>Is anyone here affected? It sounds very frightening!
>
> Water has been in short supply in California since forever, and we've
> tended to tune out the warnings, but this time it seems to finally be
> getting very real.
>
> But even now it's complex. Even in this drought there is enough water
> to go around if the 5% of the crops that are the big water wasters
> were shifted to something else. Urban water usage is only about 15%
> of the total, depending on how you count, and landscape is about half
> of that.
>
> There are some farms in the delta with historic, premptive rights to
> water and they are slow to give it up voluntarily - just this week
> agreed to cut back by 25%, but it won't even be monitored, and it's
> also not clear that water that gets to them will be used by anyone
> else anyway, it's already too far downstream.
>
> Everyone has known for a century that the day would come when
> California would have to do SOMETHING about water, and that day has
> arrived. Desalination is pretty much the solution for the coastal
> cities, but we might need 100 plants the size of the Carlsbad plant
> being completed this year, and the anti-growth idiots like our
> Governor Moonbeam are fighting it all the way. It might triple the
> cost of urban water. BTW, do you know what it costs today, in Los
> Angeles, for a gallon of water out of the faucet?
>
> For agriculture the long-term solution is harder, they are used to
> getting water at 1/10 the price of urban water or less, much less.
> And they're not on the coast, so just pumping water there would raise
> the price as well. I suspect a century from now you will see 10,000
> square miles of California farmland covered by greenhouses.
>
> I actually got in a bit of a panic about this just about a month ago,
> when we got to the end of the rainy season and it punked out on us
> again, and I read that the last 100 years of weather in California
> have been unreasonably WET, the average for the 1,000 years before
> that is about what we've been getting recently, or worse! Ooops.
>
> It could get really bad since our politicians are such idiots. But it
> is mostly fixable, if people would just get off their asses.

Thank you. I appreciatd your comments but all these points have been
discussed already. You seem to have come late to the party

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