On Mon, 25 May 2015 21:53:31 +0100, "Ophelia" >
wrote:

>
>
>"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

Indeed. Just wanted to endorse those that I endorsed!

J.