Another lake drained
Local residents astonished that desert basin is desert basin.
The few who live along the shores of Mono Lake are accustomed to the peculiarities of this high desert basin.
Famously strange limestone spires known as tufa towers rise from the water. The lake contains so much salt that it’s barren of fish. In the arid sands beyond, sagebrush thrives, and that’s about it.
But the alkali flats that are emerging from the lake’s surface, ghost white, aren’t just another nod to the uniqueness of this ancient place. They’re a sign of trouble. Amid a third year of drought, the sprawling lake on the remote east side of the Sierra Nevada is sharply receding, and the small towns and wildlife so closely tied to the water are feeling the pinch.
Drought? Drought??? Who could possibly have seen that coming?
The drought bearing down on Mono Lake and the rest of California picks up on a two-decade run of extreme warming and drying. It’s a product of the changing climate that has begun to profoundly reshape the landscape of the West and how people live within it. From less alpine snow and emptying reservoirs to parched forests and increased wildfire, the change is posing new, and often difficult, challenges.
Now why would reservoirs be emptying just because the planet is heating and people keep building new houses in deserts? I just can’t figure it out, can anyone?
For eight decades, the city of Los Angeles has piped water from four creeks that feed the lake to its facilities 350 miles to the south, sometimes diverting almost all of the inflow. It’s a familiar California tale of old water rights yielding inordinate benefit.
“Excuse us, we need this water for our city 350 miles from here, thanks, bye.”
The concerns at the lake, though, were supposed to have been resolved. In 1994, after a lengthy environmental campaign that spurred “Save Mono Lake” bumper stickers on vehicles up and down California, state water regulators put caps on L.A.’s exports. Slowly, lake levels rose. But they did not rise as much as they were supposed to.
Scold them. Tell them they’re not living up to their part of the bargain. Remind them it’s a signed agreement.
Drought, on top of a climate that’s changed faster than expected, has slowed progress. On April 1, the typical start of the lake’s runoff season, the water level measured 6,379.9 feet above sea level, about 12 feet short of the state target. Before Los Angeles began drawing water from the creeks here, the lake was nearly 40 feet higher.
Who knew that if you use something up then it’s gone?
As previously mentioned Eastern Norway is experiencing unprecedented drought conditions as well. To hydro power companies like the one I’m working for this puts us in an awkward situation since people are angry at us both because of the low levels in the reservoirs and because of the low water flow in the rivers. Never mind that the only way to keep the reservoirs from sinking would be to reduce the water flow in the rivers even more than we already have, and the only way to increase the water flow in the rivers would be to drain the reservoirs to even lower levels. And of course everybody’s angry about the record-high energy prices resulting from the drought (and made a lot worse by the situation in Ukraine). You can’t win…
Bjarte:
After reading your comment I looked at
https://electricitymaps.com/
& see that the southern end of Norway is a bit less green than usual.
Looking at the details I see that it is importing electricity from Germany, which of course is burning coal because they have shut down most of their nuclear plants
#2 Jim Baerg
When Germany shut down all their nuclear plants, I broke my “most synonyms for ‘blithering idiots’ in an uninterrupted monologue” personal record. That decision has had multiple terrible repercussions.
And now they are re-opening some of the coal power plants that had already been closed down…
Of course it hardly matters at this point just like it hardly matters if someone decides to fire another bullet into whatever’s left of your corpse after filling it with all the ammo in the state of Texas…
Taken in retrospect, the CDU and its much-acclaimed former leader, Angela Merkel, seem to have been on the take from Russia and its state-owned petroleum concern Gazprom. Merkel’s predecessor, Helmut Kohl, went on to take a position on Gazprom’s board of directors after he retired from politics. At the very least, the CDU’s policies are indistinguishable from those of a party captured by foreign interests: not only did Merkel use Fukushima as an excuse to shutter Germany’s entire nuclear battery, she actively blocked attempts to extend pipelines to other potential suppliers and she banned fracking domestically while giving strong incentives for German citizens to use natural gas as their homes’ and offices’ heating source, all the while heaping scorn upon anyone and everyone who raised any concern whatsoever about the implications of relying on an aggressive sclerotic kleptocracy as the primary source of half of her country’s industrial economy.
Add to this the fuckery the Germans used to pump up their renewable figures — measuring solar input on the three days in August Germany has no cloud cover, only counting emissions on electricity (while keeping coal plants burning but not connected to the grid during the tests, therefore excluding their emissions from the grid calculations), and the general lunacy that has seen forests of windmills too small to actually make a return on the energy it took to manufacture and transport them or using solar panels north of the Alps.
Not that the SPD and the Greens are any better. If they’re not assisi on the take (which is a questionable assumption), they have certainly been captured by the anti-nuclear propaganda the FSB circulated among left-wing cells more than twenty years ago. Germany has a history of its left-wing activists getting captured by Soviet and post-Soviet psyops, but this particular one has redounded beyond Putin’s wildest dreams here.
The histories of Arizona and Southern California, and Nevodda are full of battles over water rights. It’s one way that white settlers destroyed Pima and Tohona O’odham communities- rerouting water, diverting it away from their canals. Northern California talked of breaking from Southern California because of the amount of water being transferred southwards to make farms in Fresno rich… and this was in the 80s before the 20 year drought hit.
People move there for the t-shirt weather in January, but they want the green, green grass of home among the cacti.