10 California drought myths debunked

[KamaAina]

http://blog.sfgate.com/stew/2015/05/29/10-california-drought-myths-debunked/

California is in the midst of a four-year drought, the worst in 106 years. The Sierra snowpack is dwindling; lakes and reservoirs are reaching historic lows. The lush green lawns of the suburbs are turning brown and parched. Vast swaths of the Central Valley farmland are sitting idle. Mandatory water cutbacks are now in place for both residential consumers and agricultural users....

The answers to these questions are spreading across the Internet like a wildfire blazing through the water-starved Santa Ana brush. Some of them are true, others exaggerated, and many downright wrong. No, you won’t be paying $20 for a little carton of California-grown strawberries this summer, even at that ubiquitous grocery store that loves to suck up whole paychecks with beautiful produce.

To help you determine fact from fiction, we checked in with Jay Lund, a University of California at Davis professor in civil and environmental engineering. Lund is on the forefront of drought research, predicting our state’s future and determining the best plans of action. He helped SFGate debunk a few of the most common California drought myths and the good news is that he says, “Don’t panic.”

“Water is going to get tighter,” Lund says. “We’re going to be reminded that we live in a dry state. But we can make some changes to better manage our water and we have a lot of ground water to help us out.”

[antiquie]

1. California drought myths 7 and 10

Glad to see these as myths:

Building more desalination plants will fix the problem.

Environmental regulation is causing the water shortages.

(from OP link)

[Cleita]

2. Industrial farming is sucking up the lions share of our water and the oil industry is with fracking.

I might venture to add Country Clubs with their golf courses of lush greens and other water guzzling lawns I have witnessed with my own eyes, especially out in the middle of the Mojave Desert. Instead the rank and file Californian is being expected to cut back on an average of 25% usage so that the water guzzlers can continue to guzzle. Well, I'm so anti-oil these days that I'm all for shutting down all drilling and refinery operations today, especially since the latest spill on our coast this month. But that is another topic.

[KamaAina]

3. One golf course in Marin has the right idea

they've stopped watering their fairways within 100 yards of the tee. Works for me. Think of it as a hazard, like a sand trap: if you hit your drive less than 100 yards, it's going to bounce along the rocky ground.

[Cleita]

4. I once lived in the Atacama desert and the engineers in the mining town I lived in

constructed a golf course that was topped with a kind of crushed gravel that they mixed with some kind of adhesive that kept the dust from blowing away. It made a workable golf course and no grass or vegetation was needed at all. So there are ways to do stuff if you have the will.

[NBachers]

6. I wonder if that could be used in the Salton Sea drylands that are filling lungs and throats

with noxious poison dust.

[Cleita]

7. You couldn't do it on a large scale. It would be like paving the whole desert. eom

[pinto]

5. Thanks for the post & link. A well-informed citizenry is an effective citizenry.