From Yemen to India, and parts of Central America to the African Sahel, about a quarter of the world’s people face extreme water shortages that are fueling conflict, social unrest and migration, water experts said on Wednesday.
With the world’s population rising and climate change bringing more erratic rainfall, including severe droughts, competition for scarcer water is growing, they said, with serious consequences.
San Diego water managers are working with local researchers to understand how atmospheric rivers bring water to the region.
The moisture-laden storm systems bring rain to Southern California, but too much rain can be damaging.
Scripps Institution of Oceanography researchers are working to better understand atmospheric rivers, or ARs, so they can predict when and where the weather systems will hit.
State officials threw a lifeline to four fossil fueled power plants along the Southern California coast, deciding the facilities are still needed to provide reliable electricity even as they contribute to the climate crisis.
Tuesday’s vote by the State Water Resources Control Board to let the gas plants keep operating past the end of this year followed brief rolling blackouts over two evenings last month, as a heat wave caused air conditioning demand to soar, and California found itself short on electricity supplies.
In spring and summer, when the skies are warm and the shadows thin, California’s snowy Sierra Nevada and southern Cascades unleash billions of gallons of fresh water each day, a melted bounty that nourishes the state’s mightiest rivers before converging slowly on the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta.
Recent years have brought a taste of extreme weather and the destructive power in nature that’s always just around the corner here in California. At the same time, numerous crises have highlighted our many vulnerabilities: drought, new groundwater restrictions, endless stumbling blocks in the way of system repairs and upgrades, regulatory restrictions to protect declining fish, and elusive voluntary agreements in lieu of “unimpaired flow” standards for the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta from the state water board that would be ineffective and would cripple regional economies.
The sad reality is that the blackouts rolling across California this past week were both predictable and avoidable. The silver lining is that future blackouts across California are avoidable – if we invest in large-scale energy storage projects to provide on-demand power.
Energy analysts have warned for years that California’s embrace of renewable energy sources – while laudable – create significant risks that can and should be addressed to sustain our economy and quality of life while maintaining progress toward the state’s climate goals. What no one could have known was that we’d be roiled by a pandemic and a recession when the energy grid’s weaknesses were exposed for everyone to see.
A coalition of 21 states [including California] sued the Trump administration Friday for rolling back what they say is a “rule that is, at its heart, the gutting” of America’s bedrock environmental law.
The sad reality is that the blackouts rolling across California this week were both predictable and avoidable. The silver lining is that future blackouts across California are avoidable – if we invest in large-scale energy storage projects to provide on-demand power.
A group of residents in a southern Nevada town that sits along the Colorado River are organizing a campaign to oppose a proposed pipeline that would divert billions of gallons of river water to southwest Utah, reflecting intensifying struggles over water in the U.S. West.
Water is central to nearly everything we value in California. Healthy communities, economies, farms, ecosystems and cultural traditions depend on steady supplies of safe water. Those values are increasingly at risk as California confronts more extreme droughts and floods, rising temperatures, overdrafted groundwater basins, aging infrastructure and other challenges magnified by climate change.
