California Drought Update By Patrick Ruckert December 22, 2014
It rained some more
The welcomed rain and snow that has arrived in California over the past few weeks has alleviated unfortunately not the drought, but the perceptions of most of the population that the worries about the drought are now a thing of the past.
The state water authorities, the scientists who study the weather and the water supply, and even some of the media and politicians have tried to get across the idea that this drought is far from over. While all of these institutional representatives are right as far as they go, still none of them dares to address the fundamental problem that even if this drought ends, the state and the Southwest generally do not have an available water supply even in normal precipitation years to even support the existing population, and especially the existing agricultural capability.
With that said, let’s look at some of the developments of this past week.
The U.S. Drought Monitor for December 16, shows that for the first time since July, less than half of the state is in the most serious category of drought, exceptional drought. The exceptional drought category fell to 32 percent of the state from 55 percent. Yet, 78 percent of the state remains in the second most serious category, extreme drought, and 94 percent of the state is still found to be in severe drought. It is important to recall that until 2014, not even one percent of the state had ever been in exceptional drought.
As was reported last week, the reservoirs have shown some improvement, moving a few percent upward toward their capacity. But, remember, they are still at less than half of the normal level. Shasta has moved to 33 percent of capacity and Lake Oroville is likewise at 33 percent.
Even with the atmospheric storm that hit especially the northern part of the state including the mountains, the snowpack is still just at 48 percent of normal for this time of the year. The snow elevation level still remains above 5,000 feet, and for a build-up of the snowpack that level has to be below 3,000 feet. The continuing warm weather is responsible for that condition. To repeat, about 75% of the the state’s water supply comes from snow melt run-off in the Spring and Summer.
As for groundwater, it will take many years of above average precipitation to recharge those important source of water.
What is the forecast? A report from one of the climate institutions forecasts that the next three months should produce more rain than normal. That is the optimistic one. Others essentially throw up their hands and refuse to make a forecast.
11 trillion gallons are missing
A report presented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union last week in San Francisco. The study by scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, led by Jay Famiglietti, presented the data gathered by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) satellites to make an estimate of how much water is missing from the San Joaquin and Sacramento river basins due to the drought. Their conclusion is that 11 trillion gallons is missing, which is more water than the state’s 38 million people use each year. They estimated that about two-thirds of the loss was due to depletion of the groundwater under the Central Valley. Famiglietti stressed that it will take years to get out of this drought.
See the discussion below in which Ben Deniston presents some perspective on exactly how much water 11 trillion gallons is by using the flow of the Colorado River for comparison.
Another study found that the snowpack in the Sierras this year was only half of previous estimates, which were bad enough. Again the data is from NASA and their Airborne Snow Observatory, which provides much more accurate measures than ground-based stations.
Fracking
That fracking is a policy of economic suicide was reported on some months ago in an article I linked to. Here it is again:
Fracking: The Economics of Extinction http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n12-20140321/78-80_4112.pdf
In addition, a new article from Executive Intelligence Review of December 19, 2014, rips apart the idea promoted by Wall Street that the U.S. can become the energy producing capital of the world. Rather, what the entire “boom” in fracking represents is nothing but a huge Ponzi scam:
“Fracking—A Stupid Move By the ‘Global Players’”
http://www.larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/2014_50-52/2014-50/pdf/34-39_4150.pdf
The local perspective
An article from the Porterville Recorder of December 20, 2014, is excerpted below to give you a taste of how localities view the drought and the rain:
Despite some of the strongest storms in three years, California’s snowpack is just 50 percent of average statewide and a meager 13 percent of the important April 1 average.
The state Department of Water Resources reports that the snowpack is fairly even across the state, with all regions reporting 4 inches of water content.
“We’re still not out of the woods,” said Ron Jacobsma, manager of Friant Water Authority, which manages the Friant-Kern Canal that supplies water to more than 15 irrigation districts on the Valley’s east side.
“We are ahead of last year,” he said, but so far the amount of rain in the Valley has only been equaled in the mountains. Typically, the mountains receive about three times more than the Valley gets.
“We are at just a 1-to-1 ratio,” he said of the lack of heavy precipitation in the mountains. And, he added, what does fall is still being soaked up instead of flowing into reservoirs.
Some water has been pumped out of the San Joaquin Delta to the San Luis reservoir, which is good news. However, Jacobsma said pumping has been scaled back because of concerns the threatened delta smelt may be around the pumps.
“We’re losing about 10,000 acre-feet a day because of the diminished pumping,” he said, adding water officials are looking at the restrictions and he is hopeful more water can be moved. He said right now there is “tons of water flowing into the Delta.”
Officials say 98 percent of California is in a severe drought with many parts of the state receiving only about half of the historic average rainfall.
With three weeks of heavy rains, reservoirs continue to slowly rise across Northern California. On Thursday, the U.S. Drought Monitor, a weekly map issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and other agencies, showed that 32 percent of California is still in “exceptional drought,” down from 55 percent last week, the Mercury News reported.
Officials say that even with all the rain, Shasta Lake in the Northern California town of Redding is just 33 percent full, up from 23 percent full three weeks ago. Success Lake is just 14 percent full.
The reference in the article to the scaling back of pumping of water from the Delta to the San Luis Reservoir was explained by Ara Azhderian, as reported by Valley Public Radio on December 15. Azhderian is with the San Luis & Delta-Mendota Water Authority in Los Banos, and said that all the water flowing into the Delta from the rain attracts the Delta Smelt too close to the pumps, threatening to suck them in, thus killing them.
So, millions of gallons that could be sent to the San Luis reservoir is instead allowed to flow out to San Francisco Bay.
One year ago more than 700,000 acre-feet were likewise allowed to flow into the bay in order to protect the Delta Smelt, which is enough water to “meet the needs of 1.4 million households for a year or to irrigate 200,000 acres of farmland, we are reminded by Families Protecting The Valley, in their post this week.
More discussion meant to provoke response
To continue the discussion I initiated in last week’s report, I include below the dialogue between Mathew Ogden and Ben Deniston from the LaRouche Pac Weekly Webcast of December 19, 2014. The entire webcast can be seen at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJxQxvYHOL4
The “Hamilton Principle Ogden mentions refers to the principles and policies of U.S. Founding Father and the first U.S. Secretary of Treasure Alexander Hamilton, who defined the role of the U.S. government as to be directing the credit of the economy toward increasing the physical productive capability of the nation, through industry and infrastructure.
The BRICS nations are Brazil, Russia, Indian, China and South Africa, who in July established a new global economic system based on the development of the physical economy, not financial speculation. In other words an American System and Hamiltonian policy.
The petition for the U.S. to join the BRICS can be accessed here: https://larouchepac.com/20141121/petition-us-must-join-brics
Deniston directly addresses the California Drought in his remarks, emphasizing the point that only by the creative power of the human mind has mankind not only solved so-called “resource limitations,” but it is through the mind that mankind evolves to higher and higher levels of existence. As for the supply of water, an entirely new, scientific approach is required.
But, I will let Deniston speak for himself:
OGDEN: Good. Thank you. Now, for our final question, I would just like to pursue what Mr. LaRouche has identified as the “Hamilton principle,” a little bit more in depth. And just to return to our initial subject here tonight, which was the publication of this very impressive list of signators on the petition calling on the United States to join the BRICS, I think it’s necessary to emphasize that this new paradigm, which the BRICS represents, is not just an extension of the current system of government, or the current axioms of thought which dominate politics and economics today, or even the scientific and culture world, for that matter.
You’re talking about an entirely new understanding of what mankind is as a species and what the fundamental principles underlying economics must be, as well as the basic political organization of society in general.
This type of political revolution which is urgently necessary for mankind’s survival on the short term, requires and must be premised upon a fundamental scientific and philosophical revolution in the basic outlook of mankind, both his view of himself, and in terms of his relationship to the universe more generally.
And what the Hamilton principle implies is that money is worthless, absent the real productive value which is defined by the human mind. Measurement of economic value is not something which is measured by money, but by the successive revolutions in man’s influence over the Solar System. Now, obviously, this implied in what the “U.S. Must Join BRICS” petition calls for, and we must base this new paradigm on a principle of human economy which clearly distinguishes between man and beast, and defines a positive principle of what the human species is, and the role that we must play.
So, to address this a little more in depth, I’d like to ask Benjamin Deniston to come to the podium.
BENJAMIN DENISTON: Thanks, Matthew. So, I would like to just take a couple minutes and underscore Mr. LaRouche’s views on this issue. As you said, Matthew, Lyn has emphasized that this is not just — you know, it’s a dramatic world situation, but this is not just an opportunity to fix the current world system as it is, but to actually create an entire new stage for mankind. And a new stage that has to be premised on what Mr. LaRouche has called “a scientific understanding of the distinction of mankind from the animals”; together with what his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche has called for as “a new paradigm for mankind.” And I would say we might even call this the science behind what Chinese President Xi Jinping has called the “win-win cooperation policy.”
So the crucial issue is this scientific understanding of the unique nature of the human species. Or, to put it otherwise, the difference between man and animal, has Mr. LaRouche has continued to emphasize the point. Now, animals progress in a certain way, animal life progresses, by evolution, the systems of animals as a whole will increase its anti-entropy. This what the great Russian scientific Vernadsky recognized in what he called as his biogeochemical principle. But this type of advance is in a sense, an involuntary advance. It’s an involuntary turnover of one species to the next, with one species being replaced by a higher order species. So while the whole process of animal life in the history of this planet has moved forward, has been anti-entropic in a certain sense, any one species in that process has been fixed, biologically fixed by the conditions it participates in.
But mankind is different: Mankind progresses but not biologically. Mankind progresses only by the unique powers of creative human thought. Now this can actually be illustrated relatively easily, if you just compare what you might call the ecological characteristics of any animal species with the ecological characteristics of mankind: Start with something like carrying capacity, or maximum potential population. The carrying capacity of any single animal species will be fixed, it’ll be an externally defined fixed function. The carrying capacity for the human species, the potential of the human species to have a larger and larger population is a variable function, not a fixed function, and it’s not externally defined, but it’s self-defined by mankind’s own creative capabilities.
So the difference between man and animal, is not a quantity, it’s not a value, it’s a different principle. Any animal species can be defined by a particular value. Mankind cannot be defined by a value; mankind is defined by the unique ability to change the value, willfully, of the entire species as a whole. So now, what does this mean in practice? Why would we say this is the “science behind a ‘win-win’ BRICS cooperation policy”? Well, this means for mankind that wealth is not something that man just finds in places. Value is not something that we just go out and find. Value is something that mankind creates by this type of process.
So I want to take one example to illustrate this, which is the current water crisis. I want to highlight this, because some NASA scientists just released a new study, which focused on California, which shows that California now needs something like 11 trillion gallons of water or nearly 42 cubic km of water, just to recover from the current drought. Now, to put those very large numbers into some type of perspective: California’s allocation of the Colorado River, one of the largest sources of water for California, especially southern California, is somewhere around 4-5 cubic km per year. So, as a thought-experiment — we couldn’t actually do this, because the water is needed for other places, but, as a thought-experiment, if we were to double California’s allocation of the Colorado River, as an example, if would still take over eight years, just to match the current deficit that now exists; and that wouldn’t even account for the continued building of a greater deficit over that eight-year period.
This will give you a scale of the crisis now hitting California.
But it’s not just California, it’s the whole Southwestern United States is in a major drought; and it’s not just the United States. China needs water. Australia needs water. The nations of North Africa, of the Middle East, and of Central Asia all need water. Water is a huge issue for the coming period.
But, remember that we’re talking about water, we’re talking about something that covers the majority of the entire Earth’s surface. There is no actual lack of water, on this planet per se; there’s a lack of the application of the type of resource-creating, creative human improvement of the system: That’s what’s lacking.
The existing freshwater supplies we’re looking at, they don’t exist in finite stores, finite amounts, but you’re talking about cycles, you’re talking about natural cycles of water moving from the ocean to the land, back into the ocean again. You’re talking about cycles of a process of evaporation, precipitation and run-off back into the ocean, all of which is ultimately powered by the Sun, so that defines the process in which we’re working here. So we can’t talk about just amounts of water, but we’re talking about rates of cycles, or the rates of activity of cycles.
Now, to return to the issue here. For animals, the rate of any local or regional cycle, if it’s too low, the animals can’t do anything; if there’s not enough water, then more advanced animal life will just not be able to exist in the region; and the region is left to be taken over by lower forms of life.
But obviously as we know, for mankind this is different: Mankind can control and change existing cycles. Mankind can take an existing water cycle on the scale of a continent, and mankind can actually increase the productivity of that entire water cycle; can increase the wealth and the value created by that entire water cycle, by river management, by river diversion systems. What Franklin Roosevelt did with the Tennessee Valley Authority; what China is now doing with their South Water North program, and what the U.S. should have done with NAWAPA, decades ago. That’s one aspect.
But we can go further: Mankind can create new cycles. We can use desalination systems to create our own freshwater, freeing ourselves on relying on solar activity alone, to create freshwater supplies. We can begin to develop weather modification technologies to potentially manage and modulate atmospheric moisture flows. So if you look at the potential available to mankind today, you could say it might take a little bit of time, and it would certainly take a lot of work, but there’s no intrinsic reason why mankind couldn’t address all of the water needs, for even a much larger population that we have on the planet today.
We can create the needed resources, specifically by increasing the energy-flux density of mankind’s activity per capita and per square kilometer, per area. Especially what’ll be critical for this is the development of fission and fusion technologies and economics systems.
So stating that, posing that, I think it’s worth stepping back and reflecting on the implications of what we’re talking about. Obviously no animal could do this. What we’re looking at, mankind beginning to take on a certain role on the planet as a whole: We’re looking at mankind taking on a global influence, and management of the biosphere as a whole, of the global water system as a whole, which has until now, solely been the domain of action of the Sun itself. So in a sense, you’re looking at mankind taking on the role of force on the planet, that the Sun has otherwise played, and we’ll probably surpass and overtake the role of the Sun, at some point, in terms of our ability to manage and improve the terrestrial water system. But to do that will probably require our own mastery of the principle of the Sun, here on Earth, through the application of fusion power.
Now obviously, water, that’s one example, but that’s an expression of what mankind is, as a species, the ability to create through human creative action, the types of resources needed, and apply this to everything — to food, to materials, to industry, to power, so on. As {Executive Intelligence Review} has presented in their new, full global program “The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge,” mankind now has at its fingertips, really, the potential to address the needs of the entire world population, through infrastructure, technology, science-driver programs, the recognizing that when mankind applies itself in these ways, we literally create the resources, create the wealth, create the value which will not only support a larger population than we have now, but can support a larger
population at a higher living standard than we currently have.
Mankind does not find wealth, he creates it; mankind is different than any animal species on this planet. And ultimately this is, really, what you could call the scientific basis underlying the scientific validity of President Xi Jinping’s policy of this “win-win cooperation.” We’re not talking about charity or sacrificing, although there’s nothing wrong with those concepts, but we don’t need to have charity or sacrifice to split a finite amount of wealth on this planet: With this type of “win-win cooperation” pursuing this unique creative ability of mankind, we can as a whole bring mankind to a higher level. We can create the type of revolutionary advance that moves the entire human species to a new stage.
And this is what’s natural. This is what makes the human species truly human, and I think Mr. LaRouche would want to underscore and emphasize that it goes further than even what we’re talking about so far, here. It goes to the Moon; it goes to what China is doing on the Moon, where you have, on the Moon — and this is what China is now looking at with some of their leading scientists — you have on the Moon, this strange dust, this very fine, very abrasive material, frankly somewhat nasty stuff — it wasn’t very inviting to the Apollo astronauts who landed on the Moon decades ago; but you have this fine, abrasive dust covering the entire surface of the Moon. But in this surface layer, in this otherwise worthless and if anything, annoying, dust, you have built up over billions of years a very significant accumulation of this wonderful little isotope, this one type of helium, helium-3.
So we’re looking at the ability of the prospect, of mankind going to the Moon, taking this otherwise, frustrating dust, and potentially using this and turning it into the most powerful energy source, the highest energy-flux density source of power to available to mankind today, with advanced forms of helium-3 fusion. And we’ll be forced, as Mr. LaRouche has emphasized since his becoming familiar with China’s lunar program and the prospects of this type of mission, we’ll be forced to look at
mankind completely differently in the process of accomplishing this mission. We’ll have to recognize that no longer is mankind a species on this Earth alone; that our existence on Earth will literally be redefined from the standpoint of our more powerful and higher-order existence in the Solar System as a whole. Just as Kepler was the one that really first taught us this principle.
We may remain for the most part physically on Earth, most people, most of the time. But even people living on Earth, their existence will increasingly be redefined by this larger process. Even our existence on Earth, will be redefined by mankind’s changed relationship not just to the planet, but the whole Solar System. And I think, ultimately, from the standpoint of where mankind is at today, that is our source of wealth, that is our source of value. And that is the potential right now, before us, with this concept of the U.S. joining a “win-win policy” premised on the development of the creative powers of the human species, as a unique species, different than animals, which is defined by this ability to constantly revolutionize our relationship to the universe.
