California: running out of water as seen from space

California water districts appear (for "good" selfish reasons) loth to accept what a pair of satellites is showing: the state is running low on groundwater.

How bad is it? Over the 2003-2010 period, California drew down nearly enough groundwater to fill Lake Mead, and I'll assume that's full-capacity, pre-bathtub-ring Lake Mead.

Looking at the map, some areas in the southwestern part of the Central Valley, around Tulare, look like they don't have a lot of life left.

That said, I wish the Times had produced a similar map for the Ogallala Aquifer. I doubt West Texans would totally wake up, even then, to the severity of water issues, but maybe some would.

Where data has been presented, though, and not just in California, it's been resisted:

In other areas of the world, like northern India, the novelty of the gravitational measurements — and perhaps the story they tell — has led to pushback, scientists say. ...

John Wahr, a geophysicist at the University of Colorado and his colleague Sean Swenson faced opposition for a study on aquifer depletion in northern India. As Dr. Swenson explained, “When in a place like India you say, ‘We’re doing something that is unsustainable and needs to change,’ well, people resist change. Change is expensive.”

In places on high-tension, water-focused borders, like India-Pakistan, Israel-Palestine-Jordan-Syria and such, this is understandable in a way, but still lamentable.

An interesting sidebar is that the satellites were launched from Russia and some of their data would have been considered classified before the end of the Cold War. A peace dividend!

Tea Party schadenfreude, dried out and warmed up

Arizona is of course a hotbed of illegal (and general) immigrant stereotyping, along with being near the top in birtherism, and home to one of our biggest political hypocrites, John McCain. Well Schmuck Talk Express and others better find a way to get one-third more water to their area. Ditto for Orange County denialists, as California is already the most "overdrawn" state by absolute water numbers as well as percentages.

The thumbnail is here.

All the details on how climate change will affect the Southwest are here (PDF).

Nothing short of cutting ag use by nearly 50 percent AND hiking prices by that much to push non-ag conservation will really help.

Going by value, the ag answer is simple - eliminate hay growing, at least the irrigated variety. Change rice to winter wheat followed by rapid-grow summer corn. Cut back on beans, which do OK as a dryland crop anyway.

The bottom-line question about water is not whether adaptation is difficult or expensive, compared to doing nothing. Rather, it should be compared to buying several trillion dollars worth of water over the next century; adaptation is a bargain that the region cannot afford to ignore. The implication for climate policy is similar: although doing something about greenhouse gas emissions is expensive, doing nothing would cost even more. Among the benefits of global emission reduction is a savings of hundreds of billions of dollars in the future cost of water, or the avoidance of water scarcity, in the five states of the Southwest.

Part of my solution?

Let's not try to "repair" Nevada's casino-based economy. If Federal job training includes moving people out of that state, with the nation's highest per-capita residential use, do it!

Second, find a way to undercut economic development corporations that don't adequately price water as part of their recruiting pitch.

That said, the authors wrote their study while ignoring the Colorado River Compact, and admit they did that as a simplifying measure. In reality, the "project" is even more difficult than they paint.

Majority favors pot decriminaliziation

The AP tried to fudge poll information on this issue, as California heads into an initiative vote on this in November, and Raw Story busts its chops.

There's some other interesting poll findings at that link, which undercut the bipartisan War on Drugs. (Yes, PR aside, Team Obama is still fighting that war, even against pot.)

Now, if you're a marijuana cartel, since this is headed for the November ballot via initiative, do you fund a campaign against it, and if so, how?

Sierra goes anti-enviro AGAIN!

Apparently Carl Pope doesn’t understand the word “environmentalism.” The Sierra Club was one of five major environmental organizations to not only sign off on, but help negotiate the environmental metrics of, the sale, for commercial development, of parts of California’s Tejon Ranch.

And, I don’t care if non-comment “handshake” agreements, albeit without contracts, have been common in the past. The original practice, even without a contract, is a crock. It’s unprofessional, in my opinion, for a wildlife biologist, unless he or she wants to be on the take, to sign off on such a deal in advance.

Ditto for the environmental organizations lining this up.

The hypocrisy is squared by the gag order also extending to how much money each of the scientists was paid.

It would be the equivalent of me, as a newspaper editor, agreeing in advance of the first words of an interview to let someone go off the record.

Joining Sierra in the Green Hall of Shame?

First, shock me that Sierra signed off on this. Carl Pope probably thought he could use some Sierra-branded Clorox to bleach away bad PR.

I’ve blogged my displeasure, including my refusal to renew my Sierra membership, here, here and here.

Shock me also that Natural Resources Defense Council was one of the five groups. After getting snookered here in Texas by William O’Reilly and Kohlberg Kravis Roberts on the TXU buyout, and giving KKR priceless greenwash, it makes me wonder about any corporate dealings NRDC has too.

The third biggie? Audubon California.

As for Audubon, the last time I got an offer to join it, I e-mailed back, to the appropriate department, asking if its free tschotschke du jour was made in China or not. (WWF burned me on that one a few years back.)

No answer from Audubon means no membership from me.

More people who are knowledgeable are going to stop participating in major environmental organizations and get more active in smaller, more pristine ones.