“Today we are standing on dry grass where there should be five feet of snow,” Governor Brown said at a press event in the Sierra Nevada mountains. “This historic drought demands unprecedented action. Therefore, I’m issuing an executive order mandating substantial water reductions across our state.”

To combat the state’s ongoing drought, the governor has ordered the State Water Resources Control Board to implement a 25 percent reduction in water use by local water agencies. He’s also calling on water districts to adopt conservation pricing, a streamlined permitting process for water projects and an investment in new water infrastructure technologies.

“People should realize we are in a new era,” the governor said. “The idea of your nice little green lawn getting watered every day, those days are past.”

Water everywhere, but only fraction from the sea

While conservation is the key element of the state’s short-term drought response, those latter provisions of the governor’s plan have many Californians turning to desalination as a promising long-term solution to the state’s water needs.

“The Governor’s Executive Order issued today is consistent with the policy goals established in the state’s Water Action Plan and clearly demonstrates his commitment to developing new local water supplies including seawater desalination,” said Scott Maloni, vice-president of Poseidon Water, a water development company that specializes in desalination.

For hundreds of years, sailors have found ways to remove salt and other impurities from the earth’s salt water and turn it into drinking water. Today, that process has gone high-tech at more than 17,000 desalination plants in 150 countries around the world. According to the International Desalination Association, more than 300 million people use approximately 21.1 billion gallons of water produced from desalination every day.

However, outside of the Middle East, where desalination is a vital component of the region’s water portfolio, desalination is responsible for just a fraction of the world’s drinking water.

“Even with all of the water in Earth’s oceans, we satisfy less than half a percent of human water needs with desalinated water,” Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and author of the book, The World’s Water, pointed out to Scientific American. “The problem is that the desalination of water requires a lot of energy.”

As of 2013, the California Department of Water Resources estimated that desalinated water cost $2,000 an acre foot, or double the price of water from other sources. But, the high energy production costs aren’t stopping enterprising companies from entering the desalination market, rather it’s a lengthy and bureaucratic permitting process.

Desalination plants battle lengthy permitting process

Next year, a $1 billion desalination plant in Carlsbad is expected to come online and produce 50 million gallons per day — after years of permitting battles with city governments and state agencies.

“They went through seven or eight years of hell to get here,” Tim Quinn, executive director of the Association of California Water Agencies, told the San Jose Mercury News last year. “But they stuck it out. They got it done. If it succeeds, it will encourage others to try. And if it fails, it will have a chilling effect.”

Poseidon Water, which spearheaded the Carlsbad Desalination Project, is now working to gain final approvals from the California Coastal Commission on a desalination plant in Huntington Beach that would also produce 50 million gallons per day.

“A streamlined permitting process will significantly help our proposed Huntington Beach project become a reality,” said Maloni of Poseidon Water. “We are looking forward to bringing this project before the Coastal Commission for their approval this year and finally bringing a drought-proof water supply to millions of coastal residents.”

If the company gains its final discretionary approval from the Coastal Commission, the plant is scheduled to be operational by 2018. That’s not soon enough, given the state’s dwindling water supplies. Earlier this year, the Orange County Water District announced its intention to buy all of the 56,000 acre-feet of water produced by the plant.

“Desalination should be front and center”

The longer the drought persists, the more likely parched water agencies will be to add desalination plants as a component of their water portfolios.

“While conservation is a must, looking at ways to overcome the obstacles that have thwarted previous efforts on desalination should now be front and center in the water deliberations,” writes Joel Fox, editor of Fox & Hounds Daily. “Proposals to desalinate water from the Pacific Ocean have run into environmental concerns and cost issues. … The thinking on the cost issue is changing, however, because of the severity of the drought, the increased value of water, and potential energy resources to make the process work.”

In order to change thinking about desalination, it will require overcoming challenges from environmentalists, who view desalination as a precursor to more development.

“If you’re going to do something like desal, you want to make sure you’re doing everything you can in terms of conservation, water recycling, water re-use,” Susan Jordan of the California Coastal Protection Network told KQED, “and you don’t want unsustainable development that just perpetuates your problem, or the state’s problem.”

Has California built any dams in the past 55 years as its population has more than doubled – and as a drought rages? Yes – but not by the state.

Peter Gleick of the Pacific Water Institute recently stirred the waters about whether California has added any new water storage dams since 1959. The title of his article in the San Francisco Chronicle, “The Number of New Dams Built in California in the Past 50 (or 40, or 30, or 20) Years is Not Zero.”

Gleick is correct that five new dams were built in California since 1959 with a total capacity of 8.6 million acre-feet of water. However, we need to distinguish.

No water has been added to the State Water Project or federal Central Valley Project for farms and cities. The State of California has built no new dams since 1959.

However, the federal government and three local water districts have built the five dams Gleick mentioned.

The five dams are irrelevant because they do not effectively produce more water for the State Water Project and the federal Central Valley Project that provide water to cities and farms. Both the state and federal water systems depend on the largest reservoir of the Sierra snowpack that holds 15 million acre-feet of water.

So, while Gleick’s “not zero” is correct, it also could be calculated as “not much more relevant than zero.”

The dams listed by Gleick include:

Federal dams

1. New Melones Dam

The New Melones Dam, with a capacity of 2.4 million acre-feet of water storage, is the United States’ first “green dam.”  It was re-built in 1978 by the federal government.  It is no longer able to meet its original obligations to provide flood control protection and agricultural irrigation except in a rare wet year.  All of the water in the dam is now required only for fish flows during normal years. Rep. Jeff Denham, R-Modesto, has attempted without success to get as little as 100,000 acre-feet of water dedicated for agricultural irrigation.

2. Warm Springs Dam (Lake Sonoma)

Warm Springs Dam in Sonoma County was built in 1983 and holds 381,000 acre-feet of water.   The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation operates the dam for flood control and fish flows; and for agricultural irrigation operates when enough water is available.  Warm Springs Reservoir is not counted on the list of state and federal reservoirs for water storage purposes as it serves only Sonoma County.  

Local dams

3. New Spicers Meadow Dam

The New Spicers Meadow Dam was built by the Calaveras County Water District in 1989 and holds 189,000 acre-feet of water.  It diverts water from the Stanislaus River that flows into the San Joaquin River and ultimately the Sacramento Delta.  The purpose of the reservoir is to provide drinking and agricultural water as well as hydro-power to Stanislaus and Calaveras counties only. Since it diverts water from the Delta, the State of California does not count it as contributing to water storage.

4. Los Vaqueros Dam and Reservoir

Los Vaqueros Dam and Reservoir was built by the Contra Costa County Water District in 1998 and holds 160,000 acre-feet of water solely dedicated to serving Contra Costa County.  The reservoir was built because during dry years water from the Sacramento Delta became salty.  The reservoir is also not counted by either state of federal authorities for water storage purposes.

5. Diamond Valley Lake

Diamond Valley Lake is an 800,000 acre-feet off-stream reservoir located in Riverside County in Southern California.  The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California built it in 1995.  It is also not counted as contributing to statewide water storage. It is a backup reservoir that holds surplus water for droughts and emergencies for Southern California only.  The reservoir is connected to the State Water Project by the 44-mile Inland Feeder pipeline.  Diamond Valley Lake only takes water from the State Water Project when surplus water is available for storage for future use.

California climatologists such as Jeffrey Mount, Peter Gleick and the California Climate Change Center have predicted for some time an apocalyptic disaster in the Sacramento Bay Delta from a rise in sea level and flooding due to global warming. 

But the real world disaster about to hit the Delta is coming from the reverse of the climatologists’ prophecies.  Ocean saltwater is about to contaminate the Eastern portion of the San Francisco-San Pablo Bay due to a drop in fresh water levels and lack of water flows, although the temperatures have been warm.  By about June of this year, the lack of freshwater inflows to the Delta due to drought and low reservoir levels would allow an ocean saltwater surge to contaminate the largest source of California’s drinking water and its largest estuary.

On March 14, Capitol Radio interviewed Paul Helliker, Deputy Director of the California Department of Water Resources about the expected saltwater surge in the Delta.  The interview was about three temporary dams having to be put into place to save California’s Delta drinking water supplies from being contaminated from salt by seawater intrusion. As Helliker summed up the possible disaster, “If salinity increases significantly in the Delta then the water will be unusable.”

Without enough flow of fresh water released from reservoirs to hold back brackish ocean water, a large amount of California’s largest drinking water resource, the Delta, would be lost.  It would be a statewide disaster that would negatively affect California’s economy.  Some 25 million people and 3 million acres of farmland depend on Delta water. The Delta has a $1 billion water-related recreation economy comprised of 8,000 jobs.  South of the Delta is a $25 billion annual farm economy.

The mixing zone for salt and freshwater in the San Francisco-San Pablo Bays is called “X2” and is usually located between the cities of Pittsburg and Antioch in the San Francisco Bay.  In a wet year, the X2 line is pushed westerly toward the ocean by freshwater; in a dry year it is pushed easterly by saltwater toward the inlets of the Sacramento and San Joaquin Rivers.

A false dam for a false river

This imminent disaster could be prevented by the placement of three rock dams by May 1: one dam at False River near the inlet of the San Joaquin River and two dams north of the Delta in the Sacramento River. The Delta gets its fresh water mainly from the Sacramento River from the North and the San Joaquin River from the South.

A critical choke point is False River near the inlet of the San Joaquin River at the East end of the Bay.   If seawater penetrates past this point, then river water becomes contaminated.  The proposed False River temporary dam would serve as a barrier to repel saltwater.

The two critical points for temporary dams north of the Delta are Sutter Slough and Steamboat Slough.  The temporary dams at these locations would help to keep fresh water from the Sacramento River flowing to push seawater out toward the ocean.

False River probably gets its name from the fact that it branches from the San Joaquin River just at the place where the river flows into the Bay.  It is not the true river.  False River runs through Franks Tract, a sort of false island recreation area that alternately becomes submerged in wet years and floats in dry years.  Placing a gate or dam at False River has been proposed since the 1930s.

Temporary dams

According to Helliker, temporary dams were successfully used during the drought of 1976-77, at the time of Jerry Brown’s first term as governor.  And the idea of temporary dams was a part of Brown’s emergency drought declaration in January of this year.

The estimated cost of a gate as of 2007 was $20.975 million.  That is only about 1/1000th of the $18.7 billion in water bonds issued in California since 2000.  Despite how critical a saltwater barrier gate would be in a drought, the gate still remains uncompleted.

The plan to build a temporary dam would be accomplished by a crane placing rocks from a barge.  The temporary rock dam would have to be removed later.

As an example of how the temporary dams could be done, the makeshift Hills Ferry Barrier is erected seasonally to prevent salmon in the San Joaquin River from following false migratory paths from freshwater streams to the ocean and back, as shown in the following picture:

By Wayne Lusvardi

Re: Some California Water Policies to Avoid for the Next President

Dear President (Obama or Romney):

Congratulations on gaining the trust of a majority of the American people in your election victory.   The people of California will also place trust in you as the top decision maker on the organization chart for the federal portion of California’s water system, the Central Valley Project.

Most Californians don’t realize that about half of the state’s water system is financed and run by the federal government.  As you probably already know, this came about during the Great Depression of the 1930s. California was so broke it couldn’t borrow money with bonds for water projects.  So the U.S. government had to take over California’s planned expansion to its water system.  This was also the only way at the time to resolve the conflict over water between farmers and growing cities.  The Central Valley Project mainly serves farmers. The State Water Project and the Colorado River Aqueduct mostly serves cities.

There are some water policy experts, such as Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute on Water Policy, who believe: 1) a 21st century water policy should be developed; 2) the spotlight should be on national security issues related to water; 3) the role of the United States in addressing global warming problems should be expanded; and 4) climate change risks should be integrated into all federal water planning and activity.

But it is all gobbledygook to say that water policy needs to form more blue ribbon water commissions composed of elite experts, conduct more studies and hire more consultants like themselves.  We had a phrase we used to say when I worked for one of the largest regional water agencies in California: “Government agencies hire consultants to tell them what they already know but want to have validated.”

Contrary to the establishment water experts, here is where federal water policy could be reoriented toward for greater prosperity for all in California and the United States:

Continue the Policies of the Last Century, Not This One

Water experts are calling for a new water policy to replace state and local water governance by: 1) forming blue ribbon water commissions to usurp representative government; 2) “strengthening” the abusive Clean Water Act and Safe Drinking Water Act; 3) socializing water infrastructure financing, contradicting the “user-pays” principle; 4) using the Farm Bill, trade laws, and plumbing and tax codes purportedly to improve water productivity by nationalizing it; and 5) having the Federal government enforce “environmental flows” for all major river systems.  These all are nice sounding platitudes that have little to do with the reality of federal and state water policy in California.  Such policies literally let our prosperity flow out to the ocean.

As Rep. Tom McClintock, R-Calif., has pointed out, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation built more than 600 dams and reservoirs in the last century, most more than 50 years ago.  The Bureau has built 15 reservoirs in California since 1910, but the last one was in 1979.  Lack of new reservoirs is not due to a shortage of potential rainfall.  Even in a dry year such as 2001, California had “only” 145 million acre-feet of rainfall and imports.  In a typical dry year, that is enough water for 290 million urban households or 145 million acres of farming (Cal State University, Stanislaus).

The problem is capture, storage, and treatment — not drought, not waste by cities or farmers, not global warming, and not necessarily population growth. California only has about six months of excess water storage in its combined state-and-federal water system even in a wet year.  What serves as the critical drought buffer for California is water stored in the Sacramento Delta — which once was an inland sea.

Nationalizing state and local water regulations and enforcement is a non-solution.  All this will do is socialize the financing of water infrastructure projects and create more artificial jobs programs that do not increase our economy.  Such policies will also put a bigger hole in our national debt.

Featherbedding for Duplicate Water Security Not a Priority

Again, there are those water consultants who apparently are targeting the public purse used to prevent potential terrorist threats to our water system.  Most of this has already been addressed by the Drinking Water Security Act of 2009 and by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Water Security Department.  This includes Homeland Security Presidential Directives.

Though I am no security expert, I have some familiarity with the subject. I worked at one of California’s largest water agencies for 20 years.  I once conducted a mass valuation of probable damage losses to thousands of private properties in the event of breach or failure of its dams or reservoirs by accident or by intentional acts.  The valuation was conducted for insurance purposes and included a statistical probability analysis of the risk of dam failure.

First, it is difficult to contaminate large regional water storage reservoirs because most contaminants would likely dissolve (“the solution to pollution is dilution”). How any contaminant would get by urban water treatment plants is another dubious issue.

My understanding is that the greatest water security risk is not at the national, state, or regional level, but at the local level.  Thus, any such terrorist acts could likely be used for psychological terrorism.  Most law enforcement agencies in California have undergone training in rapid helicopter deployment to protect dams and reservoirs should such any threat arise.  I have witnessed such training exercises first hand.

Once again, featherbedding for unneeded consulting contracts for water security should not be given a greater priority than it already has.

Refocus Water Quality on Local, Not Global Issues

Water quality experts are calling for greater U.S. international aid in meeting basic water needs, preventing outbreaks of water-related diseases such as the cholera “perfect storm” in Haiti in 2010, and expanding funding for water scientists and educators.

Certainly, U.S. foreign policy should include aid where possible to ameliorate outbreaks of water-borne diseases in poverty-stricken areas of the world.  The cholera epidemic of 2010 in Haiti, which killed 7,500 people, is cited as the reason for greater international water quality funding. However, epidemiologist Dr. Renaud Piarroux of France points out that conventional water quality policy is misguided.  The cholera outbreak in Haiti was not, as commonly believed, due to a “perfect storm” of an earthquake and hurricane followed by a hot summer.  The source of the cholera probably came from human waste from an encampment of U.N. disaster relief peacekeepers from Nepal that were deployed near a tributary to the Artibonite River.

Contrary to the experts, apparently the outbreak was facilitated by the “environment” — the river environment — that proliferated and spread cholera.  The river environment was the killer, not solely the cholera bacteria.  This is the reverse of U.S. water-quality policy that focuses on toxic substances to the exclusion of the “environment.” Mistaken U.S. environmental policy is based on the notion that the environment is pure and that man-made substances despoil it.  For after all, if you can’t sue a river or shake it down for money by a lawsuit, how can it be at fault?

Like many “environmental” health issues, it is not some toxic substance that is the sole cause. Rather, it is the environment that traps the substance and concentrates it at harmful levels. It is not the environment that needs protection; it is humans who need protection from the environment.

The main principle in toxicology is: “the poison is the dosage.”  Pollutants trapped in stagnant urban air basins, natural or man-made chemicals trapped in underground water basins, and asbestos trapped in energy-tight buildings all can lead to health threats.  The focus on chemicals and toxic substances, instead of entrapping environments, is misplaced.  Nearly every substance is potentially harmful — including pure H20 ingested by humans — if it is concentrated at toxic levels.  Thus, both federal and state water quality regulation is misplaced.

The U.S. should re-focus its misplaced water quality policies at home — especially its misguided policies on perchlorate regulation — before exporting such misinformed and potentially harmful policies abroad.

California Has Been Managing Climate Change Forever

Again, water experts are lobbying to “integrate climate change risks into all federal water planning and activity.”  They want to: 1) expand efforts to assess the growing impacts of unavoidable climate change on U.S. water resources; 2) improve the “smart management” of both energy and water resources; and 3) integrate strategies for adapting to “climate change” in new construction and operation of existing water systems and reservoirs.

Mr. President, what planet do such experts come from? Certainly not Planet California, where climate change is something we have been trying to manage forever.  Certainly, not from the Colorado River Basin, the Southeastern United States — which is experiencing drought — or anywhere else on Planet Earth.

Elitist water policy in California is like a futuristic scene out of the Edgar Rice Burroughs science fiction novel, “A Princess of Mars,” where “water which supplies the farms of Mars is collected in immense underground reservoirs at either pole from the melting ice caps, and pumped through long conduits to the various population centers.”

The above absurd description, based on early belief in “canals” on Mars, sounds like Gov. Jerry Brown’s current proposal to construct massive tunnels under the Sacramento Delta as part of the state’s “climate change” policy. Southern California needs water, but doesn’t need the massive cost of tunnels required to avoid the environmental vetting process.

So-called “climate change” science is a modern version of a religious-like self-fulfilling prophecy.  The more you study it, the more you will find it.  California’s cyclical dry spells are often used as proof of global warming.  The public’s attention is focused on feeling that it is hotter, then they believe it.

California experiences wet monsoon-like rainfall every few years that fills its lakes, reservoirs and the Sacramento Delta.  This is followed by dry spells, where we rely on water stored during the wet years.   The climate has always changed in California. The water system has been built to convey water from the Delta or the Colorado River to lessen the probability of impact from regional droughts.

Like most of modern day environmentalism, climate change science is just the re-branding of something state and federal water agencies have been doing for more than a century.  Climate change science is an industry full of would-be technocratic elites who want to grab funding and take power away from the process of representative government.

We should not place our precious natural resources in the hands of elite technocrats pluming for federal funds for environmental overkill of our economy and representative form of government.

Sincerely,

Wayne Lusvardi

The views expressed are those of the author and not CalWatchDog.com or the Pacific Research Institute.

Last fall, Government Motors assaulted the John and Ken radio show by pulling ads from the show because the talk show hosts favored restricting immigration. I wrote it about it then. If Government Motors had been a private company, that would have been no problem. Private companies can do what they want. But Government Motors, formerly General Motors, is owned 32 percent by the U.S. government.

Now, Government Motors is assaulting the Heartland Institute, a conservative think tank, because it’s a skeptic on global warming. Reported the Los Angeles Times:

“Citing its corporate stance that climate change is real, General Motors announced Wednesday that its General Motors Foundation would no longer be funding the Heartland Institute, a free-market think tank that has attacked human-caused global warming as ‘junk science.'”

Again, if GM were General Motors, a private company, no problem. But it’s Government Motors. It’s run by the fanatical “climate change” Obama administration.

It was just last month that global-warming fanatic Peter Gleick admitted he tricked Heartland into turning over to him internal documents, a clear violation of privacy laws.

GM even admitted its decision was based on the Gleick deception. The Times:

“The development is fallout from the release of Heartland Institute funding documents in February, which showed that GM contributed $15,000 to Heartland in 2010 and 2011. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and a MacArthur “genius” grant recipient, revealed in February that he had assumed a false identity to obtain some of those documents.

“In a statement released to the press, Heartland Institute President Joseph Bast said: ‘The General Motors Foundation has been a supporter of The Heartland Institute for some 20 years. We regret the loss of their support, particularly since it was prompted by false claims contained in a fake memo circulated by disgraced climate scientist Peter Gleick.’”

It’s clear that the Government Motors action is payback for the Gleick scandal. The Obama regime is the head “climate change” advocacy regime in the world. It controls Government Motors. So it’s using Government Motors to undercut Heartland.

GM is the Yugo of American car companies.

If Government Motors is so concerned about “climate change,” it should go out of business and tell people to walk.

———————————————————-

Correction: The article was corrected on the percentage of GM owned by the government. Relying on Wikipedia, I originally posted it at 61 percent. It’s now 32 percent, as a reader (below) pointed out. However, GM also is partly owned by the UAW, now basically part of the U.S. government, and by the Canadian government. — John Seiler

If the theory of man-made global warming were such a self-obvious truth, the result of scientific consensus, then why do its advocates keep committing fraud to advance it? Even more disturbing, why are some writers willing to defend this behavior?

The latest embarrassment for global-warming activists came Feb. 20, when Peter Gleick, founder of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, admitted that he committed fraud to obtain documents he thought would embarrass a conservative think tank that has been a leading debunker of some of the overheated claims of the climate-change Chicken Littles.

The memos, which reveal Chicago-based Heartland Institute’s political and fund-raising strategies, provided little to embarrass Heartland, but the subterfuge to obtain them has damaged the reputation of a respected intellectual in the environmental world. Gleick, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow, doesn’t seem brilliant now, having taken a leave of absence from the institute and facing public embarrassment and possible prosecution. (Heartland contends one memo was fabricated, which Gleick denies, but the scandal could get uglier.)

After Gleick admitted and apologized for his action, Los Angeles Times columnist Michael Hiltzik defended him: “It’s a sign of the emotions wrapped up in the global warming debate that Gleick should be apologizing for his actions today while the Heartland Institute stakes out the moral high ground.”

“Peter Gleick lied, but was it justified by the wider good?” asked James Garvey of the liberal British newspaper the Guardian. He compared Gleick’s action to that of a man who lied to keep his friend from driving home drunk. “What Heartland is doing is harmful, because it gets in the way of public consensus and action,” Garvey argued. “If his lie has good effects overall — if those who take Heartland’s money to push skepticism are dismissed as shills, if donors pull funding after being exposed in the press — then perhaps on balance he did the right thing…. It depends on how this plays out.”

Cheating Is Good?

In his view, anything that gets in the way of “consensus” — i.e., everyone agreeing with Garvey — is dangerous, so why not cheat, as long as it “has good effects”? Let’s reserve judgment based on how it plays out.

What would these people argue if a conservative who argues that, say, public-sector unions are bankrupting the state, pulled a similar fraud to get his hands on documents from union officials? Would they be defending that? Of course not. These writers are advancing a Machiavellian political agenda, not advancing a consistent ethical principle.

When it comes to global warming, the ends apparently justify the means. People from all political persuasions do stupid things to advance their causes, but what bothers me most are respectable people who justify behavior they would never tolerate from their foes. That type of ideological fanaticism is corrosive of our democratic society.

It’s easy to chide the hypocrisy of Gleick. He had been the chairman of an ethics committee for a scientific association. His column blasting dishonesty still sits on his institute’s website. It’s harder to explain away his deceit as a mere aberration in the climate-change drama.

In the “Climategate” scandal in 2009, “Hundreds of private email messages and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change,” according to a New York Times report from the time. The emails showed that the scientific community is so invested in this climate-change ideology for financial and ideological reasons that it would rather cook the numbers than level with the public about the reality of the threat. A follow-up release of emails in 2011 provided even more evidence supporting skeptics’ claims.

Bogus Email Account

In this scandal, Gleick created a bogus email account in which he pretended to be a Heartland board member. Then he contacted the organization and asked for documents from a recent board meeting. He released them anonymously on the Internet and to journalists while claiming to be a Heartland insider, according to the institute’s explanation.

Although he offered his regrets, Gleick’s mea culpa was laden with excuses: “I only note that the scientific understanding of the reality and risks of climate change is strong, compelling, and increasingly disturbing, and a rational public debate is desperately needed. My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and by the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

How do you base a “rational public debate” on deceit?

It’s not as if the documents added anything to the debate. They didn’t show any enormous investment by big corporations. They proved, as one writer noted, that donors give money to organizations whose work they endorse. What a revelation. Isn’t that also what happens on the environmentalist side?

Marc Gunther of The Energy Collective admitted that “the leaked Heartland documents didn’t prove very much.” He slammed allies in the global-warming movement for praising Gleick and comparing him with a whistleblower. Clearly, not all believers in man-made global warming defend the indefensible.

But there is something about global warming that attracts the “ends justify the means” crowd. It’s the same fraudulent ideology that California’s state government has embraced as it implements a first-in-the-nation cap-and-trade program that won’t do a thing to cool our state, but will raise taxes on businesses and drive many of them elsewhere. Advocates of AB 32, the Global Warming Solutions Act of 2006, which authorizes the scheme, were hardly fonts of honesty and rational debate.

Hey, if Planet Earth is in danger, then anything goes in the political realm also. That ideology is far scarier to me than a little warmer weather.

– Steven Greenhut

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

The environmental movement is suffering from a cluster of scandals.

First there was Climategate.

Then there was Climategate 2.0.

Now, there’s Climategate 3.0 — also called “Gleickgate.”

Climate activist Dr. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute of water policy in Oakland may face criminal charges that he deceptively obtained data from a conservative think tank, the Heartland Institute, then “doctored” it and disseminated it on the web to libel that organization. Gleick has admitted he is the source of the leaked data but denies he produced the doctored document.

Andrew Revkin, the Dot Earth columnist for the New York Times, says Gleick’s admission that he deceptively obtained emails from the Heartland Institute will destroy his reputation and career.

Centrist professor of foreign affairs at Bard College Walter Russell Mead states on his Via Meadia blog:

“Reckless and sensationalist actions like Gleick’s are a reminder of the wild and loony side of the green movement — no group certain of its own arguments should feel the need to stoop to this level, and it will take a long time for the movement to be trusted again in the eyes of the public.”

The ClimateChangeDispatch.com website is reporting Gleick is likely to face criminal charges which could involve serving jail time for libeling the Heartland Institute.  The Heartland Institute has reportedly called the FBI into the case.

Liberal economist Megan McArdle, writing at The Atlantic magazine online, says she is “very surprised a man of Gleick’s stature would take this sort of risk, on such flimsy evidence.”

What did Gleick do?  Writing in Forbes magazine, James Taylor, a senior environmental policy analyst at the Heartland Institute online, explains it:

“In short, Gleick set up an email account designed to mimic the email account of a Heartland Institute board member. Gleick then sent an email from that account to a Heartland Institute staffer, in which Gleick explicitly claimed to be the Heartland Institute board member. Gleick asked the staffer to email him internal documents relating to a recent board meeting. Soon thereafter, Gleick, while claiming to be a ‘Heartland Insider,’ sent those Heartland Institute documents plus the forged ‘2012 Climate Strategy’ document to sympathetic media and global warming activists.” 

In the liberal magazine The Atlantic, Megan McArdle explains the heart of the ethical problem involved:

“Impersonating an actual person is well over the line that any reputable journalist needs to maintain. I might get a job at Food Lion to expose unsafe food handling.  I would not represent myself as a health inspector, or regional VP.  I don’t do things that are illegal. 

“Nor would I ever, ever claim that a document came from Heartland unless I personally received it from them, gotten them to confirm its provenance, or authenticated it with multiple independent sources. And ethics aside, what Gleick did is insane for someone of his position — so crazy that I confess to wondering whether he doesn’t have some sort of medical condition that requires urgent treatment.  The reason he did it was even crazier…. I would not have risked jail or personal ruin over something so questionable, and which provided evidence of…what? That Heartland exists?  That it has a budget?  That it spends that budget promoting views which Gleick finds reprehensible?” 

According to Mark Gunther ,writing at the EnergyColletive.com Website, Gleick likely sees himself as something of a hero who possibly hopes to use the discovery process in any legal action taken against him to embarrass the Heartland Institute.  But embarrass them with what: That they used donors’ funds to exercise their First Amendment right of free speech?

Ironically, it is reported that Gleick was chairman of the American Geophysical Union’s Task Force on Scientific Ethics until he resigned last week.

Dr. Gleick may have perpetrated a fraud and libeled the Heartland Institute. But that is not the only action of Dr. Gleick that has been questionable.

Slick Gleick’s Water Tricks

Here at Calwatchdog.com, we have previously taken Dr. Gleick to task for his misleading op-ed columns in newspapers across the state saying:

1) There “isn’t enough water to satisfy 100 percent of demand” in California;
2) Agriculture consumes 80 percent of all the water in California; and
3) There are eight times as many water rights given away as there is water available in an average year.

All of the above statements by Gleick about California water are partial truths and overblown distortions that are never put in context.  Nor are the assumptions about such statistics disclosed as would be required by any ethical scientist.   Let’s take a quick look at Gleick’s claims.

1.   Gleick: Not Enough Water To Meet 100 Percent of Demands.

According to data from Cal State University at Stanislaus, there is on average 194.2 million acre-feet of precipitation and imported water in California per year (see table below). An acre-foot of water is enough to supply two families per year; or one acre of farmland. Deducting the 39.4 million acre-feet of water that goes to the environment on an average year, that would leave 154.8 million acre-feet of water.  That would equate to enough water for 774 million people per year. (154.8 x 2 x 2.5 persons per household.) Or it would be 154.8 million acres of farmland. So much for Gleick’s claim that there isn’t enough water to supply 100 percent of demand in a year.

Contrary to Gleick’s widely disseminated claims, there is enough potential water.  The problem is not necessarily a shortage of water caused by waste by agriculture or cities but capture, storage, conveyance, and treatment of potential water resources.

2. Gleick: Agriculture Uses 80 Percent of All Water.

According to the California Department of Water Resources official statistics, agriculture uses 42 percent of all “dedicated” water for human use in an average year.  In a wet year, agriculture uses 28 percent of the water and in a dry year, 52 percent.
To claim that agriculture uses 80 percent of the water one would have to assume that every year is a dry year and that the pool of water one is referring to is the total amount of water for “human use.”

A percentage is the ratio between a whole and a part.  If you make the whole smaller, the part appears bigger.

There are three concentric rings of water in California (see table below):

1. The largest amount of water is total precipitation and imported water, which is 194.2 million acre feet per year on average;
2. The next largest is total “available” water, which is about 82.5 million acre-feet on average; and
3. The smallest amount is water for “human use,” which is 43.1 million acre-feet of water on average.  Gleick uses this amount to determine the percentage of agricultural use of water, but only on a dry year.

In other words, one would have to assume the smallest amount of water — water for “human use” — and a continuous drought to say that agriculture uses 80 percent of all water in California.  Failure to disclose these preconditions is misleading.

California depends on “monsoon-like” rains in wet years to fill reservoirs. Cites and farms depend on the water from wet years until the next cyclical wet year.  To accurately report how much water agriculture uses, “average” data must be used, not data from a dry or a wet year.  Gleick uses data from a dry year and the narrow supply of water for “human use” — not total potential water or all available water — to derive his 80 percent figure. He also presumes there is no water storage or groundwater resources available.  Cities and farms often use groundwater during dry years to offset less imported supplies.

To repeat, 42 percent is the official figure the California Department of Water Resources uses for average agricultural water use.  This is about half of what Dr. Gleick claims.

And if we take into consideration all the water supplies from precipitation and imported water in a wet year, then agriculture would only use about 8 percent of total potential water.

It is misleading to not disclose the assumptions on which an estimate is based.  Dr. Gleick never discloses what circumstances would result in agriculture using 80 percent of “dedicated” water supplies. Such circumstances would include:

* Wet or dry year;
* Total potential water;
* Available water;
* Water only for human use;
* Whether all storage reservoirs and groundwater basins are empty.

When assumptions are not disclosed, it is not ethical science that is reported but propaganda.

3. Gleick: Eight Times Water Rights Have Been Contracted.

It is likely true that eight times as much water has technically been contracted as there is water available from various water sources.  But under what conditions is this true?  As Mike Wade of the Agricultural Coalition explains: “The truth is water rights permits are issued for time and place of use, not gross quantity.”

For example, it is typical to grant greater water rights during a wet year. And then by comparing the amount of water in those wet year grants to the water in a dry year, one can fallaciously conclude that the water rights granted are eight times the amount available in a dry year.  But in a dry year, it is typically not permitted to draw water or only draw to less of it.

The exercise of water rights is based on contingencies such as rainfall.  It can also be based on court adjudicated restrictions such as the “safe yield” of a groundwater basin so that the basin is not depleted.

So it is misleading to say the contracted water rights are eight times the capacity. If it were true that water rights granted were eight times the amount of available water, this would have perpetrated a contractual fraud.  And such frauds and disputes have historically been brought before courts of law for adjudication.  One would have to assume there is no court system to adjudicate the claims of those who hold water rights to make the outlandish statement that water rights exceed water supplies.

Many Phish Swim In Unpure Water

We will await the outcome of any future legal actions to report what, if any, alleged crimes Gleick may or may not have committed with Heartland Institute documents.  Gleick’s self-admitted reckless and apparently delusional actions in the Heartland scandal don’t aid in the credibility of his interpretations of the data about agricultural water usage.

What Gleick admittedly did is called “phishing” in Internet language, which is defined as: To request confidential information over the Internet under false pretenses in order to fraudulently obtain credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal data.

There is a saying, “Water that is too pure has no fish.”

So of Gleick’s actions, we could say, “Unpure water has many phish.”

Percentage of Agricultural Water Under Various Scenarios (Million Acre Feet)

Peter Gleick is a fraudster.

The president and co-founder of the Oakland-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security confessed this week that he used a stolen identity to obtain internal documents from the Heartland Institute, a public policy organization known for challenging the scientific and political orthodoxy on climate change.

Gleick decided he would stop at nothing to put a hurt on Heartland, which has the temerity to suggest that the threat posed by anthropogenic planetary warming might be just a tad bit overstated by climate-change alarmists. So Gleick  posed as a member of Heartland’s board of directors, gaining access to information to which he had absolutely no right.

‘Serious Lapse’

Gleick acknowledged “a serious lapse” in his “professional judgment and ethics,” while at the same claiming, in effect, that the devil — Heartland — made him do it. He was frustrated, he explained, “with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous, well-funded, and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists and prevent this debate, and the lack of transparency of the organizations involved.”

So how did the UC Berkeley-trained scientist, a former recipient of a MacArthur “genius” grant, advance the cause of transparency in the climate change debate? By anonymously leaking the sensitive materials he stole from Heartland to sympathetic journalists and to fellow climate change activists.

For all the sound and fury directed at Heartland by Gleick’s leak, it really was much ado about nothing. They are only surprising, wrote Time Magazine, “if you’ve paid exactly zero attention to the climate debate over the past decade.”

And as to the “well-funded” attack on climate change scientists, surprise, surprise, surprise, the Heartland memos, wrote Time, “indicate that fossil fuel companies don’t seem to be spending that much money on climate denial.”

What does that mean? That Heartland has not been bought and paid for by Big Oil, as Gleick and his fellow climate change activist so often claim. It means that some of us — I’d dare say most if not all of us — who question the conventional wisdom on climate change have come by our skepticism honestly.

When I hear Gleick and others insist that it is beyond scientific dispute that human activity has precipitated global warming, I am reminded of a scary Newsweek story in 1975 warning of “global cooling.”

Global Cooling

The scientific community was just as certain in 1975 that a new Ice Age was in the offing as it is today that a planetary meltdown will take place unless enlightened lawgivers in places likeSacramentodo something to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.

Indeed, it was because of climate change hysteria — based on worst-case scenarios laid out politically-motivated scientists, driven  by environmental extremists who want us all living in little boxes, little boxes and driving around in Teensy smart cars — that the Legislature enacted AB 32, the nation’s most Draconian global warming law.

The law requires California to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020, eight short years away. It also requires that 33 percent of the state’s energy mix come from renewable sources — solar, wind, hydro — by the turn of the decade.

Robert Stavins, director of Harvard University’s Environmental Economics Program, blogged last year that, “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions will require greater reliance on more costly energy sources and more costly appliances, vehicles and other equipment.”

Is it worth it? Yes, if climate change truly is the life-or-death threat suggested by Gleick and other activist scientists.

But what if the scientific community is dead wrong about climate change (just as it was back in 1975, when the overwhelming consensus was that a dangerous planetary cooling was underway)?

Then California’s global warming law makes no scientific or economic sense.

That’s the quite reasonable point that the Heartland Institute and other climate change skeptics are trying to make. And that’s why they are under attack by climate change activists like Gleick, the fraudster.

– Joseph Perkins

By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Dr. Jay R. Lund, Director of Watershed Sciences at U.C. Davis, posted the comment below at Calwatchdog.com on April 6 in response to my article, “Not A Shortage of Water Mythmakers”:

You can get roughly 75 percent of human water use in agriculture being agricultural in several ways, some from DWR [Department of Water Resources] and others from reading reports by local agencies and backing out water use from pretty well-understood fundamentals (like crop net water use rates, acres of crops, populations, and urban per-capita use rates). The numbers vary a bit with your assumptions, of course, but pretty much any reasonable estimate shows agriculture being the largest human use of water in California, by a fair bit. Many such estimates are a bit squishy, which is not surprising, but they provide some insights anyway.

So for further clarification to readers, I created the contingency table below from state data that breaks down the percentage of agricultural water used for a wet year, average year and dry year as a portion of:

• • * Total precipitation and imported water (total potential water);
  • * Total dedicated supply for urban, agriculture, and environment (total available water);
  • * Total urban and agricultural use only (total human water use).

Context of Discussion

The point of my April 5 article was to provide a counterpoint to the claim made by Dr. Peter Gleick, Ph.D., that there “isn’t enough water to satisfy demand” and that agriculture uses 80 percent of all water supplies.

When the public reads there isn’t enough water, I believe reasonable people would assume this to mean all water supplies from all sources — not just the amount of water available in California’s system of dams, canals, reservoirs and pipelines.

By analogy, how much water falls on all my property in a year, not just in the rain gutters that catch limited water runoff only from the roof?

What I think the public wants to know is how much total water is potentially available even if it is not “developed” or “captured.” When you’re making the Chicken Little claim that “we’re running out of water,” then the assumption is you’re talking about total potential water.  Otherwise you’re misleading the public that there is no more water available after agriculture uses 75 percent and cities use 25 percent.  But that isn’t the case in the real world.  There is much more water potentially available after agricultural use, especially in a wet year.

Agricultural Water Use Defined Narrowly — 8 percent to 19 percent

Using the above-defined terms as a basis of narrow comparison, agriculture uses 8 percent in a wet year, 14 percent in an average year, and 19 percent in a dry year, according to commonly used data from the California Department of Water Resources.

Agricultural Water Use Defined Broadly — 78 percent to 80 percent

But if you want to define the total amount of water broadly to be only the amount of “developed” water for urban and agricultural uses, then the percentages for agricultural use would be 78 percent in a wet year, 79 percent in an average year, and 80 percent in a dry year.

To arrive at a high percentage of agricultural water use of from 78 percent to 80 percent, you have to exclude that the environment gets 35 percent to 64 percent of all the dedicated water.  This might be construed as lying with statistics to puff up the number.

Agricultural Water Use Defined by the State

Agricultural use of all “developed” or “available” water supplies in California’s water system runs from 28 percent in a wet year, 41 percent in an average year and 52 percent in a dry year.  This is the range of percentages used by the California Department of Water Resources as reflecting the amount of water used by agriculture as a percentage of their closed water system, not the entire amount of water that falls in the state.

The DWR indicates that this number is projected to drop to 39 percent by 2020.

Measuring Assumptions, Not Numbers

What is revealed by this breakdown is that assumptions control the numerical outcome.  Pick a number. Any number will do, depending on your assumptions.

It is unethical for public officials and experts to use numbers without disclosing their assumptions.  But in water politics, water numbers are apparently what you can get away with.  And Dr. Gleick has apparently gotten away with not disclosing a “whopper” set of unrealistic assumptions for too long.

Who cares if agriculture uses 75 percent of a bucket of water, when there is a bathtub of water available — as well as a swimming pool of total water that could be potentially tapped?

If you are an environmentalist, you will use the number that says agriculture uses 80 percent of water supplies based on an assumption that every year is a dry year and that water that falls on the environment cannot be included in your conclusion.  Those are pretty misleading assumptions in the opinion of this writer.

Water is a mirror pool that reflects what ever number you may want it to.  But the definition of reality is something I can’t wish away.  And it is difficult to wish away that in a dry year 145 million acre feet of water fall on California, and in a wet year 335 million acre feet of water.  The percentage of agricultural water used is estimated unrealistically high.

PICK A NUMBER – PERCENT AGRICULTURAL USE OF WATER

California Water Balance Summary

For Water Years 1998, 2000 and 2001

Distribution of Dedicated Supply to Various Applied Water Uses

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By WAYNE LUSVARDI

Does California have enough water?

Peter H. Gleick of the Pacific Institute in Oakland thinks not. He wrote yesterday in “Myths of California water shortfalls” that it is a myth there is enough water to meet 100 percent of the demands in California. But is Gleick exposing myths, or is he subtly posing his own counter-myths?

Dr. Gleick, PhD, is co-founder of the Pacific Institute (not same as the Pacific Research Institute, CalWatchDog.com’s parent institute).

Gleick’s group is a think tank for “water, sustainability and justice, and globalization” that is funded by a wide array of corporate, government and foundation sponsors, but whose board of directors is all green.

Mythical “Not Enough Water”

The curtain should be pulled back, says Dr. Gleick, on “one of the most common myths of California’s water situation — that there is enough water to satisfy 100 percent demand.”

Gleick asserts that it isn’t “some terrible person, agency, or water policy, or fish” that is “depriving humans of desperately needed water, even in time or record snowpack.” The real fault is in over-subscribed commitments to deliver “all the water they want all the time…resulting in eight times as many water rights given away as there is water available in an average year.”

Let’s take a look at Gleick’s claim.

California hasn’t built any resource reservoirs in decades, so his contention of lack of supply is superficially true.

But Gleick avoids focusing on the more important issue of the total supply of precipitation and imported water.

For example, California is considered a state in perpetual drought. But in 1998 — a wet year — rainfall and imports totaled 335 million acre-feet (MAF) of water, or enough water for 670 million urban households. That also would be enough water for about 1.675 billion people. Or 335 million acres of farming — more than ten times the current farming acreage of about 25 million acres.

And 64 percent of that water went to the environment, not farms, not industry, not cities and not suburbs.

Moreover, agriculture and industry, not urban cities, conserved 6.65 million acre-feet of water. That’s enough for 13.3 million urban households or 6.65 million acres of farming.

In a dry year in California such as 2001, there was “only” 145 million acre-feet of rainfall and imports. What was enough for 290 million urban households or 145 million acres of farming.

The problem is capture, storage and treatment — not drought, lack of conservation, the amount of water used by agriculture, global warming, unsustainability or population growth.

Mythical Eight Fold Water Rights

Writes Mike Wade of the California Farm Water Coalition, one of Gleick’s online adversaries:

He [Gleick] claims that the State Water Resources Control Board has acknowledged that there are eight times as many water rights given away as there is water available in an average year. The truth is that water rights permits are issued for time and place of use, not simply gross quantity.

A prime example is for power generation. A user may have a water right permit to generate power on a specific river. But such is not a consumptive use of that water. Multiple permits for the same water only mean that we are efficiently using it over and over again.

You would think Gleick would herald that as water-use efficiency, something he claims to support. But he doesn’t do that because it would pull the curtain back a little too far.

Mythical 75 percent of water goes to agriculture

Or let’s look at the widespread “fact” propagated by Dr. Gleick among many others that agriculture uses 75 percent to 80 percent of all “human” or “developable” water in California. Farmers say they use only 41 percent of water, while Gleick says the real number is 80 percent.

I contacted David Baryohay at the California Department of Water Resources (DWR), who said:

It is estimated that about 75 percent of California’s “Developed Water,” such as State Water Project and CVP (Central Valley Project), is delivered for agricultural purposes. However, the total ag use is about 43 percent (1995), reducing to 39 percent (by 2020). The data can be found in California Water Plans (1998, 2004, etc. — no operable link provided).

Mr. Barohay clarified that:

Developed water means water that is being captured by SWP (State Water Project) and CVP (Central Valley Project) projects. This water is runoff from precipitation and snowmelt that is being captured behind State and Federal dams and reservoirs. Groundwater and locally owned and operated water systems are not part of developed water. Water for agriculture is raw water (untreated). For use by humans (as potable), it must be treated before consumption.

In other words, agricultural water is raw water fit for irrigating crops but not for drinking water for humans. So Gleick’s contention that agriculture uses 80 percent of “human” water is like comparing apples with oranges — raw water with treated water.

However, his contention that it uses 80 percent of all “developable” water would render his claim in error. That’s because DWR indicates that agriculture uses 28 percent of dedicated supply in a wet year or at most 52 percent in a dry year.

According to DWR statistics, agriculture uses a mere 8.2 percent (27.7 MAF/335.5 MAF) of all precipitation and imports in a wet year. And only 23.4 percent in a typical dry year (34.1 MAF/145.5 MAF). I could not find third-party validation for Gleick’s 80 percent figure.

Mythical claim that drought was good for agriculture

The agricultural industry did not suffer during the recent past drought, claims Gleick, as “the total value of California’s agricultural products broke all records.”

Gleick conveniently ignores that farmers in one California valley undeniably did have their water cut off; and that farmers just shifted to use of groundwater supplies and alternative crops that use less water.

But Gleick is also opposed to farmers having the right to use groundwater given to them by the courts, federal laws or common law. He wants to undo the rule of the law and replace it with “groundwater management authorities,” presumably controlled by environmentalists rather than courts or a jury of common persons.

Southern California has had a long record of decentralized, self-governing — but adjudicated in state courts — water basin management without the need for some politicized, bureaucratic groundwater management agency.

Mythical No More Money for Large Water Projects

Another one of Gleick’s online adversaries, identified as “valuequestor,” refutes his statement, “There is no money for huge new projects to capture more” (water):

Really, Mr. Gleick? But we have money for bullet trains… yet “no more politically or environmentally acceptable places to build” dams. Acceptable to whom? I can’t think of a better public works project and can think of quite a few acceptable locations.

Gleick conveniently avoids discussing California’s five water bonds totaling $18.7 billion. That money mainly has gone for greenbelts and open space in wealthy northern California enclaves, without developing one new dam or reservoir. (See “New Year’s Water Bond Resolutions,” Calwatchdog.com, Dec. 27, 2010).

Mythical species extinction

“Taking as much water as we already do is driving fish, plants and other wildlife to extinction” is another one of Gleick’s mythical statements.

California decided long ago to value the downstream habitats of rose gardens, lawns and warm water fish such as bass and catfish in water canals, over upstream coldwater fish such as salmon or smelt. The “environment” can work either way — either as a warm water or cold water ecosystem. The choice is cultural and political, not environmental or scientific. If you get Channel Catfish instead of Coho Salmon it is called pollution; the same with “native” and “invasive” species.

To go back to an entirely primitive cold water ecosystem, as Gleick seems to want, would mean repealing civilization and modernity itself. It would mean going back to a time when the sea periodically flooded the Sacramento Delta and split California in two in near-tsunami fashion, wiping out nearly all human and animal habitats.

But there probably was abundant salmon fishing in Sacramento after the Delta flooded. And there probably were plenty of fish for baking sasa-kamaboko, a fish cake, in Sendai, Japan after the Tsunami of 2011; just no restaurants or homes to eat it in.

Dr. Gleick is a formidable green-water advocate. And being green and from the Bay Area in California typically serves as a cover for northern California water, including semiconductor manufacturing plants that consume as much water as a small city of 50,000, according to some environmentalists.

Mythmaker

As far as can be determined, Gleick is the primary source of the widespread myth that agriculture uses 75 percent to 80 percent of all “human” or “available” water in California, depending on whether Gleick wants to define total water supplies narrowly or broadly. This pernicious myth has been repeated so widely that even water officials believe it to be a fact (even this writer once did).

It is easy to proclaim all your opponent’s positions on water policy as myths when you assume a quasi-religious role as a mythmaker. Gleick is like a religious apocalyptic prophet of doom, only dressed up as a scientist. And like religious false prophets, his prophecies are typically inflated.

Declinist

In short, Gleick is what is called a “declinist,” who always portrays California’s water situation as declining due to farming and cities. While one of Gleick’s major rhetorical strategies is to call his opponents’ positions all myths, his declinist paradigm is mostly a myth that doesn’t hold water.

Gleick’s typical rhetorical device is to narrowly define his terms, then assert that the use of water by farms and cities is oversubscribed, overused and unsustainable.

This is somewhat comical when:

* Water is cyclical or recycled by nature;
* The same amount of water is on the earth now as millennia ago;
* As cited above, the amount of water precipitation in California could support a population of 100 million and a huge agricultural economy, while lessening the decimating impacts of flooding on wildlife as well as human habitats and life.

As they say in any contest, “know your opponent” and his methods.