All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

[Meandering]

Long-Term Drought Impacts
Land subsidence is a gradual settling or sudden sinking of the Earth's surface owing to subsurface movement of earth materials. Excessive groundwater pumping and aquifer depletion can cause land to sink, which can cause permanent loss of groundwater storage in the aquifer system and infrastructure damage. Overpumping in California's San Joaquin Valley aquifer system has caused renewed land-surface elevation drop that could result in serious operational and structural issues for the Delta-Mendota Canal (DMC).

In coastal communities, the reversal of natural groundwater flows to the ocean as a result of groundwater pumping can cause seawater to enter the aquifer system. Seawater intrusion compromises groundwater quality and can be a costly problem to manage. The City of Santa Barbara is working with the California Water Science Center to update information on its groundwater supplies and to identify optimal water-resource management strategies to balance groundwater use with other sources of water.

Water allocations for river, wetland, wildlife, and fish restoration projects can be reduced or stopped altogether during severe drought. The California Water Science Center is part of the team tasked to restore river flows for salmon survival along the San Joaquin River. This year the Bureau of Reclamation will reduce flows a month earlier than planned because of critical water shortages.

Dry, hot and windy weather, combined with dry vegetation and a spark - either through human intent, accident or lightning - can start a wildfire. Drier-than-normal conditions can increase the intensity and severity of wildfires. In the aftermath of wildfires such as the 2013 Rim Fire, ash, woody debris and sediment can flow downstream from burn areas and contaminate water supplies. Flash flooding and mudslides in burn areas can also be damaging and deadly.

USGS science - conducted both in "real-time" and over the long-term - helps inform decision makers in communities across the country who have to deal complex issues and competing interests in times of drought. The California Water Science Center monitors the immediate impacts of drought on water availability and water quality through streamflow, surface water, and groundwater monitoring and data collection. Long-term data collection is needed to asses the effects of climate variability on water sources, to monitor the effects of regional aquifer development, and to obtain data sufficient for analysis of surface water and groundwater-level trends.
http://ca.water.usgs.gov/data/drought/drought-impact.html

"Because of increased pumping, groundwater levels are reaching record lows — up to 100 feet (30 meters) lower than previous records," Mark Cowin, director of California's Department of Water Resources, said in a statement. "As extensive groundwater pumping continues, the land is sinking more rapidly, and this puts nearby infrastructure at greater risk of costly damage." [It's Raining Spiders! The Weirdest Effects of California's Drought]

What's more, this furious groundwater pumping could have long-term consequences. If the land shrinks too much, and for too long, it can permanently lose its ability to store groundwater, the researchers said.
Certain hotspots are shrinking at an astonishing rate — regions of the Tulare Basin, which includes Fresno, sank 13 inches (33 cm) in just eight months, they found. The Sacramento Valley is sinking about 0.5 inches (1.3 cm) per month. And the California Aqueduct — an intricate network of pipes, canals and tunnels that funnels water from high in the Sierra Nevada mountains in northern and central California to Southern California — has sunk 12.5 inches (32 cm), and most of that was just in the past four months, according to the new study.

The unquenchable thirst for groundwater in certain regions is largely a result of agriculture: Most of the state's agricultural production resides in the fast-sinking regions around some of the state's most endangered river systems — the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers. As the heat and lack of rainfall have depleted surface-water supplies, farmers have turned to groundwater to keep their crops afloat.

Subsidence isn't just an aesthetic problem; bridges and highways can sink and crack in dangerous ways, and flood-control structures can be compromised. In the San Joaquin Valley, the sinking Earth has destroyed the outer shell around thousands of privately drilled wells.

"Groundwater acts as a savings account to provide supplies during drought, but the NASA report shows the consequences of excessive withdrawals as we head into the fifth year of historic drought," Corwin said. "We will work together with counties, local water districts, and affected communities to identify ways to slow the rate of subsidence and protect vital infrastructure such as canals, pumping stations, bridges and wells."
http://www.livescience.com/51943-california-sinking-faster-than-thought.html

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[Randolph Kinney]

El Nino could make 2015 'the hottest year on record'... and 2016 will be even hotter

The slowdown in global warming is likely to end within two years as the Earth’s climate system undergoes a radical shift that could push temperatures to record highs this year and next, according to the Met Office.

The findings will demolish claims by climate sceptics that the slowdown in the rate of global warming over the past 17 years proves that scientists’ concerns are exaggerated.

And it will put further pressure on world leaders to agree strong action to curb carbon emissions at a key UN climate change summit in Paris in December – regarded as crucial if global warming is to be limited to 2C, beyond which the consequences become increasingly devastating.

The research predicts the world has entered what could be one of the strongest El Niño events in the past century – a change to the climate system that increases the world’s temperature by warming the Pacific Ocean and which can be hugely damaging, causing droughts and extreme weather all over the world.

It forecasts that this El Niño event could be at least as strong as in 1997-98, which caused deadly mudslides in South America, a crippling drought in South-east Asia and extreme weather in many other parts of the world.

It could also push the average global temperature – which hit a record high in 2014 and is expected to increase again this year – to a third consecutive record in 2016. At the same time, the rate at which the temperature rises could enter a period of higher increases, at a similar level to that seen before the slowdown began.

“Global mean temperatures in 2014, 2015 and 2016 are likely to be at or near record levels... It is now likely that decadal warming rates will reach late 20th century levels in the next couple of years,” said Professor Adam Scaife, of the Met Office Hadley Centre. Apart from potentially pushing the world into record temperatures, El Niño has already weakened the Indian monsoon season and has increased the risk of droughts in South Africa, Indonesia and Australia. It could also be a force for good, potentially bringing rain to California which has suffered drought.

El Niño events typically last nine months to two years, although they can potentially go on for four years.

The research, peer-reviewed by the University of Reading’s Professor Rowan Sutton, has also identified a second major change to the climate system – which is likely to warm the planet further, again by increasing the temperature of the Pacific Ocean.

After a 15-year “cool” phase, during which the Pacific Ocean has dragged down the world’s average surface temperature, the signs are it has entered a “warm” phase, according to Professor Scaife.

He said that these natural shifts in weather patterns have happened for millennia but that their effect on the temperature is becoming even more profound given the rising volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“A lot of these things can occur without the influence of human beings. However, they are now occurring on top of the influence coming from man’s activity, so when they occur, when the El Niño comes and raises the global temperature, that is the icing on the cake, that is the extra bit that creates a record,” he said.

Professor Sutton added: “If greenhouse-gas driven warming continues unabated the long-term effects on global and regional climate will dwarf those from short-term fluctuations like El Niño.

“Unless there’s a big volcanic eruption it looks likely that globally 2014, 2015 and 2016 will be among the warmest years ever recorded. This isn’t a fluke. El Niño is an important factor, but this comes on top of the longer-term warming caused by human activities,” Professor Sutton added.

An El Niño event occurs when the prevailing winds that circulate over the tropical Pacific start to weaken, which warms the surface waters of the tropical east Pacific substantially above its usual level. It typically raises the chances of dry conditions in parts of Asia, Australia, southern, northern and sub-Saharan Africa and Central America, but brings a tendency for wetter conditions in equatorial east Africa and the south of the US.

So far this year, El Niño is thought to be behind a series of unusual weather events. Apart from putting the world on course for a record average temperature in 2015, these include a relatively dry Indian summer Monsoon, where rainfall is currently 10 per cent less than normal.

Rainfall was also lower than normal in South-east Asia and Central America in May and June.

http://www.independent.co.uk/enviro...redict-2016-will-be-even-warmer-10499220.html

As one can see by the temperature graph, the big El Nino happened in 1988-89 with a big temperature spike up. The following years when La Nina follows with a big temperature spike down. All natural occurrences.

 

[Meandering]

He said that these natural shifts in weather patterns have happened for millennia but that their effect on the temperature is becoming even more profound given the rising volume of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

“A lot of these things can occur without the influence of human beings. However.....

I don't want to be named in a RICO case, so it's still your fault.

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[Meandering]

Do volcanos need to violently erupt? or could they slowly erupt?

SKAFTAFELL, Iceland — Just north of here, on the far side of the impenetrable Vatnajokull ice sheet, lava is spewing from a crack in the earth on the flanks of Bardarbunga, one of Iceland’s largest volcanoes.

By volcanologists’ standards, it is a peaceful eruption, the lava merely spreading across the landscape as gases bubble out of it. For now, those gases — especially sulfur dioxide, which can cause respiratory and other problems — are the main concern, prompting health advisories in the capital, Reykjavik, 150 miles to the west, and elsewhere around the country.

But sometime soon, the top of Bardarbunga, which lies under as much as half a mile of ice, may erupt explosively. That could send plumes of gritty ash into the sky that could shut down air travel across Europe because of the damage the ash can do to jet engines. And it could unleash a torrent of glacial meltwater that could wipe out the only road connecting southern Iceland to the capital.

All of that could happen. Then again, it may not.

Mount St. Helens was the most destructive eruption in American history — it also wiped out nearly 200 miles of roads — but others could be worse. Mount Rainier, for example, is just 50 miles from Seattle, and an eruption there would probably produce devastating floods of volcanic ash, water and rock. (The huge Yellowstone volcanic system in Wyoming has received a lot of attention for its potential to cause a climate-altering disaster, but scientists say the probability of such an event is exceedingly small for a given year.)

In Iceland, scientists knew in mid-August that something was happening at Bardarbunga, which had last erupted in 1910. Seismometers began recording a swarm of small earthquakes, eventually numbering in the thousands, on the north side of the volcano. This was a clear sign that magma was beginning to intrude into a fissure perhaps five or six miles below the surface.

Although this was happening in a part of the volcano covered by the glacier, scientists could tell that the magma was moving horizontally and mostly to the northeast along the fissure, because the centers of the earthquakes were moving, too. Until Aug. 29, the magma was underground, but on that date reached the surface on Bardarbunga’s northern flank. The magma — which is called lava when it is above ground — spewed out in red-hot fountains.

Of greater concern is what is happening at Bardarbunga’s caldera, the wide, deep valley at the top of the mountain that is filled with hardened magma from past eruptive activity. Earthquake data and G.P.S. measurements show that this hardened magma, which acts like a plug, is sinking, probably as the hot magma below it escapes through the fissure to the north. The subsidence is astonishingly rapid, about a foot a day, and the question is how much more of this the plug can take before it breaks up.

“As of now, the system seems to be relatively stable,” Dr. Einarsson said. “But it’s almost certain that this can’t last very long, and that’s what people are worried about. Because this plug is bound to disintegrate as it moves so much.”

If the plug cracks apart, the hot magma below would have a new, easier path to the surface — straight up — where it would combine with ice to cause a steam-magma explosion. Such an eruption could create a large plume of ash that could disrupt air travel, as the eruption at another Icelandic volcano did in 2010. Its effects on the surrounding region could be catastrophic as well, with glacial meltwater collecting in the caldera until it overflows, causing a vast flood.

That has happened countless times in Iceland’s geological history, and it is what created the eerie skeidararsandur, the vast delta west of Skaftafell that resembles the surface of the moon, as floodwaters brought huge quantities of black volcanic sand down from the mountains.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/06/s...it-is-crucial-as-iceland-well-knows.html?_r=0

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[Randolph Kinney]

What is land subsidence?
Land subsidence is a gradual settling or sudden sinking of the Earth's surface owing to subsurface movement of earth materials. The principal causes are aquifer-system compaction, drainage of organic soils, underground mining, hydrocompaction, natural compaction, sinkholes, and thawing permafrost (National Research Council, 1991). Three distinct processes account for most of the water-related subsidence--compaction of aquifer systems, drainage and subsequent oxidation of organic soils, and dissolution and collapse of susceptible rocks.

How is land subsidence measured?
Measurements of elevations, aquifer-system compaction, and water levels are presented, interpreted, and integrated to improve understanding of the processes responsible for land-surface elevation changes. Elevations, and elevation changes, have been measured using Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar (InSAR), Continuous GPS (CGPS) measurements, campaign Global Positioning System (GPS) surveying, and spirit-leveling surveying.

http://ca.water.usgs.gov/projects/central-valley/land-subsidence-monitoring-network.html

Central Valley (California)

The flatness of the valley floor contrasts with the rugged hills or gentle mountains that are typical of most of California's terrain. The valley is thought to have originated below sea level as an offshore area depressed by subduction of the Farallon Plate into a trench further offshore. The San Joaquin Fault is a notable seismic feature of the Central Valley.

The valley was later enclosed by the uplift of the Coast Ranges, with its original outlet into Monterey Bay. Faulting moved the Coast Ranges, and a new outlet developed near what is now San Francisco Bay. Over the millennia, the valley was filled by the sediments of these same ranges, as well as the rising Sierra Nevada to the east; that filling eventually created an extraordinary flatness just barely above sea level; before California's massive flood control and aqueduct system was built, the annual snow melt turned much of the valley into an inland sea.

The one notable exception to the flat valley floor is Sutter Buttes, the remnants of an extinct volcano just to the northwest of Yuba City which is 44 miles (71 km) north of Sacramento.

Another significant geologic feature of the Central Valley lies hidden beneath the delta. The Stockton Arch is an upwarping of the crust beneath the valley sediments which extends southwest to northeast across the valley.

Physiographically, the Central Valley lies within the California Trough physiographic section, which is part of the larger Pacific Border province, which in turn is part of the Pacific Mountain System.[5][6]

Most lowlands of the Central Valley are prone to flooding, especially in the old Tulare Lake, Buena Vista Lake, and Kern Lake beds. The Kings, Kaweah, Tule and Kern rivers originally flowed into these seasonal lakes, which would expand each spring to flood large parts of the southern San Joaquin Valley. Due to the construction of farms, towns and infrastructure in these lakebeds while preventing them from flooding with levee systems, the risk of floods damaging properties increased greatly.

The Great Flood of 1862 was the worst flood that the Central Valley has experienced in recorded history, flooding most of the valley and putting some places as much as 20 feet under water.

Major public works projects beginning in the 1930s sought to reduce the amount of snowmelt flooding by the building of large dams. In 2003, it was determined that Sacramento had both the least protection against and nearly the highest risk of flooding. Congress then granted a $220 million loan for upgrades in Sacramento County.[24] Other counties in the valley that face flooding often are Yuba, Stanislaus, and San Joaquin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_Valley_(California)

Most of the water in the state has been diverted by canals to ship the water to southern California and flood control projects for decades. It has only be recently that farmers have resorted to pumping groundwater to make up for the loss of water diverted to the ocean.

 

[Meandering]

Canadian News:

Muzzling of federal scientists widespread, survey suggests

Hundreds of federal scientists said in a survey that they had been asked to exclude or alter technical information in government documents for non-scientific reasons, and thousands said they had been prevented from responding to the media or the public.

The Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), which commissioned the survey from Environics Research "to gauge the scale and impact of 'muzzling' and political interference among federal scientists," released the results Monday at a news conference.PIPSC represents 60,000 public servants across the country, including 20,000 scientists, in federal departments and agencies, including scientists involved in food and consumer product safety and environmental monitoring.

In all, the union sent invitations to participate in the survey to 15,398 federal scientists in June. A total of 4,069 responded.

Twenty four per cent of respondents said they “sometimes” or “often” were asked to exclude or alter technical information in federal government documents for non-scientific reasons. Most often, the request came from their direct supervisors, followed by business or industry, other government departments, politically appointed staff and public interest advocates.

The survey asked scientists whether they agreed with a number of statements about their ability to speak freely. It found:

• 37 per cent agreed that they had been prevented by public relations or management from responding to a question from the public or the media about their area of expertise in the past five years.

• 14 per cent agreed that they could speak freely and without constraints to the media about work they published in peer-reviewed journals.

• 10 per cent said they were allowed to speak freely and without constraints about the work they do at their department or agency.

In addition:

• 50 per cent of respondents said they were aware of “cases where the health and safety of Canadians" (or environmental sustainability) have been compromised because of political interference with their scientific work.
• 71 agreed that "our ability to develop policy law and programs that are based on scientific evidence and facts has been compromised by political interference," although a greater number (81 per cent) thought underfunding compromised those abilities.
  
  
• 48 per cent said they were aware of cases where their department or agency “has suppressed or declined to release information, and where this led to incomplete, inaccurate or misleading impressions.”
  
  
• 74 per cent of respondents thought the sharing of government science findings with the Canadian public has become too restricted.

In recent years, there have been numerous complaints from scientists and the media about federal scientists being restricted from publicly talking about their research. Some complaints are being investigated by Canada's Information Commissioner Suzanne Legault.

Peter Bleyer, head of policy and communication for PIPSC, said this is the first time anyone has collected “quantifiable evidence” about political interference in the communication of federal science to the public.

“It’s a potential threat to all Canadians,” he said. “We need to fix it.”
He added that the government has been tightening its control over the communications of all public servants — not just scientists — for 15 or 20 years, although he thinks it has accelerated since the arrival of Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

The government could be doing that for many reasons, he added, but “if the control of public servant speech is purely about short-term political advantage, that’s a bad thing.”

Asked for a government response to the survey, Minister of State for Science and Technology Greg Rickford simply said, "Our government has made record investments in science."


http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/m...ientists-widespread-survey-suggests-1.2128859

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[Randolph Kinney]

Subsidence in California's Central Valley

This animation shows, in exaggerated terms, how the surface of the southern Central Valley of California deformed from the period 2007 to 2011. Interferometric data from the Japanese ALOS PALSAR imaging radar was used to measure the deformation, shown in color overlaid on an ASTER image. The large subsidence "bowl" that developed over this time period was caused by withdrawal of groundwater, causing subsurface layers to compact. Interferometric synthetic aperture radar, or InSAR, can be used to monitor subsidence in order to prevent groundwater overdraft and irreversible compaction of aquifers. ALOS PALSAR data is copyright JAXA/METI and was provided by the GEO Supersites and the U.S. Government Research Consortium datapool at the Alaska Satellite Facility.

For more information regarding this animation, please contact Tom G. Farr, Zhen Liu, or Vincent Realmuto, at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

Government Mismanagement Causes Water Crisis

California Central Valley has a water crisis, not because the state doesn't have enough water, but because government agencies have allowed massive amounts of water to flow out to the ocean instead of storing it for future need.

 

[Meandering]

If the aquifer under the San J valley compacts, someone will need to build a reservoir there to catch water in the hopes it sinks below the surface and plumps up the former aquifer. Your aqueduct could have a redirecting sprig to send some water to the reservoir when needed, and shut off when not needed. But if something isn't done to build back that aquifer, the ability to continue to grow food there over the rest of this, or other droughts, might be severely compromised for a long, long time.

 

[Randolph Kinney]

If the aquifer under the San J valley compacts, someone will need to build a reservoir there to catch water in the hopes it sinks below the surface and plumps up the former aquifer. Your aqueduct could have a redirecting sprig to send some water to the reservoir when needed, and shut off when not needed. But if something isn't done to build back that aquifer, the ability to continue to grow food there over the rest of this, or other droughts, might be severely compromised for a long, long time.

Western U.S. at 65 Ma (below). Between 75 Ma and 65 Ma, there were enormous geotectonic changes in western North America. The continental sea withdrew completely, and the Laramide orogeny began. With the formation of the Laramide uplifts (discussed in a later lecture), many of today's most beloved and recognized western U.S. mountain ranges were added to the landscape. Volcanism in the Colorado Rockies also began during this period (see figure farther above in this lecture), representing a huge eastward shift in the location of volcanism prior to 75 Ma. A shallowing of the angle of subduction of the Farallon oceanic plate under western North America is presumably responsible for shifting subduction-related volcanism far eastward into the Rocky Mountain region. Some evidence suggests that the collision of a large and buoyant oceanic plateau on the Farallon plate with the subduction zone resulted in Laramide-age mountain building and volcanism.

Western U.S. at 50 Ma (below). Laramide orogenesis continued during this period. Large lakes formed in the basins located between the major mountain ranges. As sediments eroding off the neighboring ranges poured into these lakes, the basins subsided further, leading to very deep sedimentary fill. Subduction of the Farallon plate continued during this period.

Western U.S. at 35 Ma (below). During this period, widespread volcanic activity occurred (see the "volcanic history" figure earlier in this lecture), predominantly due to the continued influence of Farallon plate subduction along the west coast. As the subducting Farallon plate grew ever narrower, the Pacific-Farallon seafloor spreading center neared the West Coast and brought Pacific plate seafloor ever closer to contact with the western edge of North America.

Western U.S. at 20 Ma (below). First contact of the Pacific and North American plates occurred around 15 Ma because the Farallon plate had, by this time, largely subducted into the mantle in the vicinity of California. This change fundamentally altered the forces that were acting along the plate boundary on the western edge of North America, with east-directed convergence that prevailed during Farallon plate subduction changing to northwest-directed Pacific plate movement parallel to the West Coast. The transcurrent San Andreas fault of western California was born at about 15-12 Ma - northwestward movement of the Pacific plate was accommodated in part by slip along the San Andreas fault. Relaxation of the convergent stress regime associated with Farallon plate subduction lead to widespread extension in much of western North America, giving rise to Basin-and-Range uplift. Drainage systems of the Western Interior were still not well integrated. Note the absence of a through going stream on the Colorado Plateau. Subduction continued in northern California, Oregon, and Washington, where the Juan de Fuca plate (a remnant of the Farallon plate) continued subducting eastward beneath the coast. Interestingly, there is little or no evidence from this time for the existence of the deep canyons carved by the Colorado River. Notice that the Great Valley of central California (just west of the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range) was an inland sea at this time.

Western U.S. at 5-10 Ma (below). Basin-and-Range extension continued during this period, as did volcanic activity in some areas. Significant downward erosion of rivers into the Colorado Plateau began as the plateau experienced net uplift of 4000-6000 feet.
The transition to an extension-dominated tectonic regime with an ever-decreasing amount of volcanic activity was well underway, reflecting the change from subduction-dominated to strike-slip dominated plate boundary motion along the West Coast.

Today's western U.S.(below). Based on the images and descriptions given above, I hope that you now see the present topography of the western U.S. as the product of a long and complex geotectonic past, rather than an unchanging, fixed landscape. Assembling the details of the geologic history of the western United States from an eroded, multiply deformed, and largely buried rock record is a difficult task, one that will undoubtedly continue for many decades..

Edmund Gerald "Pat" Brown, Sr. (April 21, 1905 – February 16, 1996) was an American politician and lawyer who served as the 32nd Governor of California from 1959 to 1967.

California State Water Project

The economic expansion following World War II brought millions of newcomers to the state which, along with the state's cyclical droughts, severely strained California's water resources, especially in dry Southern California. This began the California State Water Project, whose objective was to address the fact that one half of the state's people lived in a region containing one percent of the state's natural supply of water.[7] Much of the state's extant water was controlled by regional bodies, and the federal government. These federally controlled areas were under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Reclamation, which was considering the implementation of a "160-acre principle", a policy contained within the Newlands Reclamation Act of 1902, limiting delivery of federally subsidized water to parcels equal to the size of a homestead, which was 160 acres. This brought strong opposition from the agricultural industry, as such would require significant splintering of existent land holdings. To alleviate this threat to the agricultural economy, Brown and other state leaders began the State Water Project, whose master plan included a vast system of reservoirs, aqueducts, and pipelines powered by pump stations and electrical generating plants to transport the water around the state. This included the capture of Sacramento River runoff, redirecting the sea-bound water through the San Joaquin Valley, not only irrigating the arid desert regions, but also providing Southern California, especially Los Angeles County, with the water required to sustain growths in population and industry.[7] The entire project was projected to take sixty years, costing $13 billion, nearly $104 billion in 2015 dollars.[10]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pat_Brown

The land subsidence started in earnest when Edmund Brown became Governor. The Central Valley flooded every year until Brown's water project was completed. When the natural flow and runoff of water is channeled, held in reservoirs, and used for growing crops and cities, flooding stopped.

When the federal government got involved with protecting endangered species, a portion of the water was directed out to sea.

Without water to recharged the groundwater, you get an acceleration of subsidence. All this thanks to government.

But now the current drought is caused by global warming although the natural condition of most of California (at least the southern part) is drought. It is called a dessert for a reason: lack of rainfall.