Via Brett Walton: Continuing a decades-long trend, California farmers will increase their almond acreage next year, according to a U.S. Department of Agriculture report. An estimated 48,000 acres of new almond orchards will be planted next year, an estimate based on a first-ever survey of nursery sales. The increase is roughly 40 percent higher than the …
Continue reading ‘Drought and those yummy California almonds’ »
Bloomberg’s Alan Bjerga last week gave us a nice tour through the details of how California’s agricultural businesses are responding to drought conditions. He notes especially a shift, was water gets more expensive, into higher valued crops. Stuff that can be grown in places where water is cheap and plentiful, like what, into high-dollar crops …
Continue reading ‘California’s drought – is this what climate adaptation looks like?’ »
Peter Gleick runs down some of the impacts of California’s remarkable drought: [W]ater still comes out of my tap, in unrestricted amounts and superb quality, at a reasonable price. And this is true of every resident in the state: drinking water supplies have not been affected, especially for the vast majority of the population that …
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Smart words from Phil Isenberg, California’s water sage: [O]ur historic population and economic growth—and the social and individual choices we have made—explain the water and environmental problems we face today. Unless we acknowledge that water supplies are limited, and act to temper our water use, we will limp toward the next drought, and act surprised when …
Continue reading ‘Isenberg: Drought amplifies, not causes, water problems’ »
California state senator Darrel Steinberg on the California water bond: In the water world, you can’t always get everything you want, but there’s a whole lot in this bond that California needs. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards on (I think) taking a lot of drugs and getting laid: You can’t always get what you want …
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If I was trying to manage water in California, these maps would give me the heebie-jeebies. It’s from a new paper (AGU-walled) by Zion Klos and colleagues extending our knowledge of the shift from snow to rain in the high country of the western United States as a result of warming temperatures. Here’s why this …
Continue reading ‘In the West, what used to be snow, falling as rain’ »
The state’s first protracted drought occurred in 1868 and lingered on until 1872 or 1873. The west side of the San Joaquin Valley suffered most. There the wheat crop was a total loss in 1870 and 1871, and by the fall of the latter year the parched valley had turned to dust…. [B]anks foreclosed on …
After spending the day reading about the federal government’s, shall we say, persuasive role in assisting Imperial Valley farmers that it was in their best interests to figure out a way to share a bit of their water across San Gorgonio Pass with the city folk to their west, I this evening ran across this: …
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As Southern California looks at its next water supply steps, one of the top items on its agenda is cleaning up groundwater contamination. It’s cheaper than building more storage. So says MWD’s Jeff Kightlinger: I think you’re going to see the next wave of investments over the next decades in Southern California focused around issues …
Continue reading ‘Pollution cleanup as a solution to water supply shortfalls’ »