(With expanded coverage of all the Western States)
For August 25, 2022
by Patrick Ruckert
www.californiadroughtupdate.org/20220825-California-Water-and-Infrastructure-Report.pdf
A Note to Readers
Join me on Saturday, August 25 at 12:00 Noon PDT for a discussion of the Western drought and solutions. Myself and my colleague Brian Lantz of Houston, will be the speakers at this event. The event will be a live meeting in Alameda CA and Houston TX. For those who cannot attend in person, the event will be broadcast on Zoom. The announcement will have the link to the Zoom broadcast. I hope you all can attend.
Immediately below this introduction is an advertisement of the event, which has all the details.
I do urge the reading of a book review I wrote in 2014 of “The West Without Water: What Past Floods, Droughts, and Other Climatic Clues Tell Us About Tomorrow” The authors are two paleoclimatologists from the University of California at Berkeley. Their thesis is that the past 2000 years of climate history in the southwestern states has been one of alternating megadroughts and megafloods. Some of those droughts lasting up to 100 years. The last megaflood on the West Coast was the winter of 1861,which put the entire Central Valley under ten to twenty feet of water for months.
The authors note that the past 150 years has been the mildest and generally wetless period of that 2,000 year climate history. They then look at the present drought of the Southwest and hypothesize that, perhaps, we are now returning to that more characteristic climate of the past.
While the authors give lip-service to the “man caused climate change” narrative, the evidence they present makes clear, that major climatic changes on our planet are a natural process. Which underlines the idea that droughts (and floods) are presented to us by nature, but that the damage caused is something we creative human beings can prepare for.
Not preparing for the present megadrought that we have today has been a fifty year record of criminal incompetence by the political class and the shifts of policy from a nation that knew wealth is based on the productive powers of mankind, and thus we used to build infrastructure based on what would be needed decades into the future, to a “post-industrial economy” driven by speculation by Wall Street and fueled by irrational environmentalism.
It was the period between 1933 and 1972 that the national government and California built the Central Valley Project, the Hoover Dam, the Colorado River Aqueduct, and much more that created the largest and most complex water management system in the world. One that made California the provider of more than 50% of the nation’s fruits and vegetables, which is still true today.
Here is the link to my review: https://larouchepub.com/eiw/public/2014/eirv41n19-20140509/48-52_4119.pdf
The rest of this week’s report:
I am cutting short the report this week, and will resume a more comprehensive report next week.
The U.S. Drought Monitor for California shows no changes from last week’s report. Utah, Arizona, Nevada, and New Mexico all showed improvements this week as Monsoon rains at least provided some moderation of the drought. Texas also had Monsoon rains, with Dallas getting nine inches in one day, and flooded streets.
On the Colorado River the crisis is intensifying as the states have not come to any agreement as of yet on how to cut two to four million acre feet from their normal allocations.
I include a link to an interview which presents a very dire future for the Colorado River basin and the west more generally, which is with a very well-respected climate scientist. Of course, like the politicians and most water managers, the picture he paints is from the view of “crisis management,” not crisis solutions.
