Global cooling

[mac]

OMG--you got the joke. A first.

[mac]

[techno900]

mac said: [quote]Techno--was Poinster's posting clear enough for you? The freezing point is moving upslope. Which means that less snow will be stored on the mountains and released with melting. Which was my point all along.

And I acknowledged that in a previous post:

[mac]

Both. Virtually all reservoirs in California were built by a government agency (shock and awe!) and were economically justified based on management for multi-purposes. They derive economic benefits from flood control, water supply, power generation, and recreation. They cannot be operated for only a single purpose, and having the runoff earlier in the rainy season, because of rainfall earlier in the season, means that much of the water will be released to retain a sufficient pool for flood control. With 1400 reservoirs and many different entitities managing them, that will only change slowly and with much more conflict as different users fight with each other.

The larger the storage pool behind a reservoir, in acres, the more evaporative loss. Relatively little from snow--water vapor storage in the air at freezing or just above freezing temperatures is small. Groundwater storage has far less loss, and is being done in a number of fully adjudicated basins in California, particularly the Southern California ones. But groundwater has been so abused in Central California, and the deadlines for beginning to manage it are so far in the future, that there will be little progress in the short term and likely some additional legislative tweaking.

Imagine that, every time a windsurfer goes to play and gets a water, he has the government to thank. Think they do?

[nw30]

So, in short according to mac, building more dams will just result in more water evaporation, so that would be useless, but every time you get a drink of water, thank the government for that.
You forgot to mention the delta smelt, how cruel!

The classic Berkeley mind set.......... good grief.

[mac]

Classic nit wit. Doesn't understand my post, doesn't understand the subject matter, but that doesn't stop him.

For those who actually have an interest in learning, and as I said before, the best reservoir sites are taken. New reservoir sites, with the possible exception of raising Shasta, are dramatically more expensive and generate little new water. More water has been promised through water rights and contracts than can actually be delivered. Much of that water is sold to agricultural buyers, on an interuptible basis--that means they don't get any when there is a drought--for less than it costs to pump it to their location. That means, they are paying nothing for the cost of capital facilities--the dams and the aqueducts--that move it around. If they had to pay those costs, they wouldn't buy the water.

Some of that water is used to grow cotton, alfalfa, and seed alfalfa. Crops that we pay farmers in other parts of the Country where they get enough rain to grow those crops, not to grow.

Yes, we need to add storage in the system to replace the diminishing snowpack. It will be immensely expensive--and it won't add a drop of water. Storing it in the ground will reduce evaporation losses.

Let's look at one of those projects--probably the most economical--raising Shasta Dam. Estimated cost is $1.1 billion. Annual operating costs would be $54 million. It would add 634,000 acre feet of storage, but no new water. Shasta is in the north of the state, where loss of snow pack is less significant, so it is not clear that much new annual yield would actually be delivered. The Bureau of Reclamation, in their feasibility study, estimated that raising the dam would increase water supply by 133,000 acre feet. Do the math--that is about $500/acre foot. The contract cost for Bureau of Rec water for Westlands Water District--the big district centered around Fresno--is under $50/acre foot.

That 133,000 is literally a drop in the bucket. The Central Valley Project--the oldest Bureau project with the most cost effective dam sites--has a capacity of 7 million acre feet. The State Water Project delivers about 2.3 million acre feet a year--far less than the 4 million acre feet per year that was expected. Costs for water storage in reservoirs, which will for the most part just replace some of the lost snow pack storage--are even higher than Shasta.

The classic mind set of the uninformed that has no idea why water comes out his tap, and doesn't want to support government anyway. What a fool.

[nw30]

I just love making you work.
I disagree with you 95% of the time, this time as well, but I just love making you work.
Still no mention of the delta smelt, whadup?

[isobars]

It's in today's WSJ. Long story short, seems they flushed over a trillion gallons of water down the Delta to preserve 8 (EIGHT) fish. That's a misleading oversimplification of the story and the data, but the bottom line is that CA has a water management problem, not a drought problem, and that bad science is at the root.

http://tinyurl.com/olpw5bo

[mac]

Instant experts with no knowledge and no information. Among you righties, it seems that only Techno has an honest curiousity. But you make it easy for big business to brainwash you.

And the nitwit disagrees with me. He has no idea why, he just does it reflexively. I love laughing at him. there is no hope for him.

[LHDR]

I learned something from Mac about CA water here.

On global warming, from the Holy See.
"As part of the effort for the encyclical, top Vatican officials will hold a summit meeting Tuesday to build momentum for a campaign by Francis to urge world leaders to enact a sweeping United Nations climate change accord in Paris in December. The accord would for the first time commit every nation to enact tough new laws to cut the emissions that cause global warming."

Wouldn't this be a wonderful issue for the religious right and doubters here to embrace?
Alas, we are all too fallible:

“The Holy Father is being misled by ‘experts’ at the United Nations who have proven unworthy of his trust,” Joseph Bast, the president of the Heartland Institute [Koch funded, naturally], said in an interview. “Though Pope Francis’ heart is surely in the right place, he would do his flock and the world a disservice by putting his moral authority behind the United Nations’ unscientific agenda on the climate.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/28/world/europe/pope-francis-steps-up-campaign-on-climate-change-to-conservatives-alarm.html?_r=0