All excesses take care of themselves.
I’ve seen it happen in Colorado. When I moved here 20+ years ago, all the new builds had lawns. Now most of the new construction that I see are xeriscaped. There are more reservoirs being built or current ones expanded. The history of the West has always included water issues, probably always will.
I read that it takes 7x the water to grow strawberries and a lot come from California. Maybe we just need to drink more wine and eat less strawberries.
Those are both methods to increase supply.
What about reducing demand?
If people have to pay increased costs due to putting in systems to increase supply that will likely reduce demand.
That’s not how its worked in other large drought-stricken states, in part because it’s a completely incoherent solution for a state which includes, for example, Eureka and Twentynine Palms. See, e.g., Texas: https://www.tceq.texas.gov/drinkingwater/trot/location.html
Luckily premium wine grapes use less water than any other ag crop and significantly less than most in trend now. If anything you will see a shift from ag crops that use more water to wine grapes. Even if we only get 50% (22 in.) of average (44 in.) rainfall up here ponds still fill and the fields reach holding capicity like the last few years.
My biggest drought fears are forest fires and smoke taint! ![[swearing.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/8/8a0d3f3461d40641d294442fc2be78039bf94d19.gif "[swearing.gif]"){kind=small}
If history is any guide, we are just in a down part of the cycle. The likelihood is that in the next 1-3 years, we’ll get record rain/snow again, and wine country will have more water than it knows what to do with. None of that means we shouldn’t be conserving, and making more efficient use of water; but short term panic is unwarranted until this goes on for a lot longer than it has. I’ve lived through so many periods of drought and floods in both northern and southern California throughout my life, I don’t pay attention to the year-by-year totals, except to know how much I can or can’t water my lawn.
Well, no. Your statement is true in the same sense as the non-wine-drinker looks at a bottle of Apothic Red and a bottle of Baudry and says “they’re both red wines, they’re technically, but not usefully different”.
Here are the big picture principles:
(1) There is no basis for saying that agriculture in many of the main quality wine-growing regions of CA is threatened, in the long term, by drought or climate change. There’s no basis for deeming the current drought a “new normal”, either as a result of anthropogenic climate change, natural variation or both.
(2) That being said, I wouldn’t want to be a industrial grape grower in the central valley who relies upon snowmelt from the Sierra Nevada for irrigation. There’s certainly an interesting question about the sustainability of irrigation-driven, industrial agriculture in CA.
(3) Climate on the CA coast is driven by a mixture of semi-predictable oscillations in Pacific sea-surface temperature patters, and also just random chance. To the extent that global warming is expected to have any long term effect on CA climate, it’s expected to increase precipitation, not decrease it. See, e.g., http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/pub/seager/CA_drought_JCLI.pdf
California has a thoroughly statewide water system, David, with enormous volumes moved from region to region – mostly from the eastern mountains to the Central Valley and urbanized coastal areas (bright green lines), but also from north to south (red line). So addressing the drought is necessarily a statewide issue.
LA gets much of its water from Mono Lake, hundreds of miles away and due east of San Francisco; San Diego draws water from the Colorado River on the other side of the state; and San Francisco’s water comes from Yosemite, 180 miles to the east.
Meanwhile, water from the Sacramento Delta east of San Francisco is sent down an aquaduct in the Central Valley to the LA and Santa Barbara areas.
True, although supply and demand have been imbalanced for quite some time, mainly because the cost to users has been too low. The lack of rainfall has only exacerbated that.
Part of what I’m getting at is that “drought” is a meteorological phenomenon, defined by rainfall below, by some percentage, historical averages. One could have a drought and have enough water if demand is low enough. One could also not have enough water even without a drought, again because demand is too high. The assumption in California for too long has been that demand is a given.
Like Eisenhower’s highway initiative, we need to do something similar with a network of waterway distributions. We have known flooding areas within the U.S., so it makes sense to build infrastructure around those areas to prevent flooding and collect the water into new reservoirs. Then build a network of pipes that can take excess water to areas that are susceptible to drought. Will this cost a lot of money? The alternative is even more costly.
I think the mistake when discussing water in California is to associate the warmer areas of California, notably the Central Valley with being water deficient while associating the cooler coastal areas of California as being more sustainable. The reality is that it couldn’t be further from the truth, which is why California has extensive water delivery systems taking water from the northern floodplains and eastern Sierra Nevada watershed. However that’s more of an urban and broader agricultural discussion.
As it pertains to the wine growing regions, there’s likely enough water for the major winegrowing regions to farm at lower density (dry-farming) in the future. Part of the issue is the density of planting in areas like the Napa Valley, where vines are planted at an unsustainable density without supplemental irrigation. Unlike Bordeaux, where denser planting is an asset to draw up excess moisture through rains during the growing season, it’s more of a hindrance for California vineyards due to the very limited precipitation during the growing season. Vines can be well-adapted to these dry conditions if allowed to do so and are farmed accordingly. Unfortunately, this is more of a long-term transition for existing vineyards and they would need to be weened off irrigation with many vines needing to be pulled out.
So I can’t imagine a situation where there’s an end of the California wine industry. There many success stories for non-irrigated vineyards and sites throughout California that have been historically farmed with little to no irrigation. These sites often handle drought conditions particularly well without the stress that irrigated vines sustain during heat spikes and other severe climactic events.
Um, that’s not entirely true. In fact, much of this discussion erroneously focuses merely on rainfall totals. In CA, much of the water supply comes from the snow pack, and NOT from rainfall. This is why the current snow scarcity is such an enormous problem:
http://www.water.ca.gov/waterconditions/waterconditions.cfm
To the extent that climate change is causing more precipitation in CA to fall in the form of rain instead of snow, then that change in turn has drastic implications for CA’s water supply.
Bruce
Showers all night in Sebastopol, Sonoma County, and drizzling now as I type.
A tiny amount of moisture in the very deficient bucket, but odd to see rain here on June 1st.
Alternatively, don’t feed the expansion of parched areas by devoting significant resources to providing them with water.
Yes, but don’t confuse the issues facing the Central Valley or the LA Basin from those facing places that get heavy winter rains and are at least partially self-sufficient. IIRC, Napa only gets a small portion of its water from the state-wide system; most of it is quasi-local.
It’s really just this simple - Oakville gets 32" of rain a year. Healdsburg gets 40". That’s enough to support intensive agricultural land use and a high population density, if you manage/store that water correctly.
Failing to distinguish between a threat to Bronco’s 35000 acres of vines planted in places with 10" of annual precipitation, and the quality wine production in places like Napa and Sonoma, is what gets folks into trouble.
David - I was responding to your statement that a statewide policy was “incoherent,” which I don’t think it is in California given that the water resources are moved all over the state. I’m not sure, but I think Texas relies more on groundwater, which makes water policy much more of a local issue.
Your rainfall figures are very interesting. I was amazed to see that Calistoga gets more than 40" – roughly what Seattle does. It’s so hot there in the summer at the northern end of the Napa Valley that I never imagined it go that much rain. Napa, at the other end of the valley, near the Bay, gets about half that. I hadn’t realized the variation.
As you say, even at ~20 inches, that should sustain grapes.
Still, the shortfall over the past two rainy seasons in St. Helena (I was pulling those figures while you were looking at Oakville) has been quite dramatic, with long stretches where there was no or almost no precipitation during the rainy season, which is unusual:
Month - Actual (inches) - (Average) - % of average
Rainy season months bolded
Oct. 13: 0 (1.85) 0% of average
Nov. 13: 0.6 (4.5) 13% of average
Dec. 13: 0 (7.1) 0% of average
Jan. 14: 0.4 (6.9) 6% of average
Feb. 14: 12.1 (7.4) 164% of average
Mar. 14: 3.6 (5.1) 71% of average
Apr. 14: 1.4 (2.0) 70% of average
May 15: 0 (1.3) 0% of average*
June 15: 0 (0.2) 0% of average
July 15: 0 (0.04) 0% of average
Aug. 14: 0.01 (0.04) 25% of average
Sept. 14: 0.2 (0.3) 67% of average
Oct. 14: 1 (1.8) 56% of average
Nov. 14: 2.5 (4.5) 56% of average
Dec. 14: 17.1 (7.1) 241% of average
Jan. 15: 0.3 (6.9) 4% of average
Feb. 15: 6.1 (7.4) 82% of average
Mar. 15: 0.3 (5.1) 6% of average
Apr. 15: 0 (2.0) 0% of average
May 15: 0 (1.3) 0% of average*
TOTAL: 45.6 (72.8) 63% of average
Footnote: A third of the two-year total consisted of the excess over average of the two very rainy asterisked months. I don’t know if flood-level rains in two months even begin to make up for the lack of rainfall in normally went months. (As I recall, flash storms don’t soak into the soil as much as lighter but steadier rain.)
Most scarce resources are allocated by price. And it’s the fact that water is usually either free, allocated by arcane historical rights, or priced by a patchwork of governmental entities, that results in it being overused and inefficiently used.
To give other examples, think of freeway traffic. That is another valuable and scarce resource that is mostly not priced, and thus it is overused, and you have traffic gridlock at rush hour. Or think of good surfing breaks; they often end up allocated by peer pressure or intimidation.
The issue is less how to reduce demand, than how to allocate the water there is efficiently. Market pricing is the best solution. It allocates the resources to those uses that desire it most strongly, and it incorporates the true value of water as an input into the decision about if and how much of it to use. I’m sure it will never happen, though.
Back to the original question, the kind of wine we drink for the most part is not much threatened by less rainfall, because grape vines in places like Santa Barbara, Napa, Sonoma and Mendocino usually require little or no irrigation. High water usage crops in places like the Central Valley and the Imperial Valley are the things which are really threatened if drought continues (which it very well may not – I’ve lived through droughts like this in the past and they come and go – we have a tendency to think everything that happens for a few years is some trend that will go on forever).
If anything, continuing drought might cause California’s premium (i.e. not referring to cheap Central Valley wine) wine industry to expand, as farmers look for profitable crops to plant as they pull out avocado trees, almond trees, strawberries, and other high water-usage crops. I’ve read that some avocado farmers in San Diego County are replacing their orchards with wine grapes because they can’t access the water they need for avocados.
But then again, I just have a 6th grader’s knowledge of California and climate issues, so take all that with a grain of salt, preferably the kind that is a byproduct of a desalinization plant.
![[snort.gif]](/uploads/db3686/original/2X/b/bdc3944606213c4dca6c1169cf0a166c8bc4f8c9.gif "snort.gif"){kind=small}
In terms of water resources, it’s probably helpful to think of California as three different places: (1) a place where there is ample surface water to support current land use and population (pretty much everywhere on the coast and in the coastal mountains north of the Golden Gate; isolated areas in the Central Coast; (2) places that don’t have adequate surface water to support current land use and population (most of the most densely populated and farmed regions of CA) and (3) places that serve as a de facto giant reservoir in the sky for the places in #2 (the Sierra). The long term issue California faces is that there may be less usable water in region 3 to spend on region 2, while region 2’s demands, if anything, grow as population increases. Region 1 is mostly uninvolved in that quagmire.
Incidentally, the steep N-S precipitation gradient around the Bay Area is really interesting, because it reflects sort of a transition from a temperate-type Mediterranean climate to more of a subtropical, arid type Mediterranean climate. First order, with global warming, you’d think the Hadley Cell would expand north and move that gradient north, imperiling a lot of prime vineyard land in Napa/Sonoma/Santa Cruz Mountains. But I guess when they actually model it, counterintuitively, the winter jet off of CA doesn’t move north and the wet parts of CA stay wet in a warmer global climate. Which is a rather cool result, if you’re a climate geek.
The most water deficient areas are coastal cites from San Francisco to San Diego. Look at Santa Cruz, the Monterey Peninsula, Cambria, Morro Bay, San Luis Obispo, all the way down to Santa Barbara. There’s a reason why some of the most beautiful places in California are as small as they are - there’s no water. There are primarily two areas that have ample water in the state: Northern California (from coast to interior valleys) and the eastern Central Valley. A large portion of these water rich areas exist within the North Coast and Sierra Nevada water sheds. For a time the the Central Valley itself had plentiful water with high water tables and seasonal rivers both fed by the hundreds of miles of Sierra Nevada snow melt. (where they would make their way to the delta).
You can’t associate climate (and evapotranspiration) with water supply. The San Francisco peninsula could receive dozens of inches of rainfall and much of it would end up in the ocean. (and it doesn’t, historically, with some 20" of average rainfall per year on the peninsula).
David Z: Its really funny that your trying to convince everyone that you’re the Einstein of weather when you’re talking about such an inexact science.