New observations from NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellites reveal that massive amounts of groundwater are being sucked out of California’s Central Valley groundwater aquifers. The unsustainable withdrawals are unreported, unmonitored, and unregulated.

Between October 2003 and March 2009, more than 24 million acre-feet (30 cubic kilometers) of groundwater were pumped out of California’s Central Valley.  The withdrawals are more than 4.4 million acre-feet per year, more than three times previous estimates by California’s Department of Water Resources.

Preliminary studies show most of the water loss is coming from the more southerly located San Joaquin basin, which gets less precipitation than the Sacramento River basin farther north. Initial results suggest the Sacramento River basin is losing about 2 cubic kilometers of water a year. Surface water losses account for half of this, while groundwater losses in the northern Central Valley add another 0.6 cubic kilometers annually. The San Joaquin Basin is losing 3.5 cubic kilometers a year. Of this, more than 75 percent is the result of groundwater pumping in the southern Central Valley, primarily to irrigate crops.

Combined, California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin drainage basins have shed more than 30 cubic kilometers of water since late 2003. The overdrafts are leading to declining water tables, water shortages, decreasing crop sizes and continued land subsidence. The findings have major implications for the U.S. economy, as California’s Central Valley is home to one sixth of all U.S. irrigated land, and the state leads the nation in agricultural production and exports.

The California results come just months after a team of hydrologists led by Matt Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., found groundwater levels in northwest India have declined by 17.7 cubic kilometers per year over the past decade, a loss due almost entirely to pumping and consumption of groundwater by humans.

The twin Grace satellites monitor tiny month-to-month changes in Earth’s gravity field primarily caused by the movement of water in Earth’s land, ocean, ice and atmosphere reservoirs, thus directly ‘weighing’ changes in water content.

California experienced centuries-long droughts in the past 20,000 years that coincided with the thawing of ice caps in the Arctic, according to a new study published in Earth and Planetary Science Letters. The findings came from analyzing stalagmites from Moaning Cavern in the central Sierra Nevada.

Study co-author Isabel Montañez said the study found a link between a warmer Arctic and a drier California:

We can’t quantify precipitation, but we can see a relative shift from wetter to drier conditions with each episode of warming in the northern polar region,” Montañez said.

The researchers didn’t attempt to explain the connection between Arctic temperatures to precipitation over California, but pointed to climate models developed by others suggest that when Arctic sea ice disappears, the jet stream – high-altitude winds with a profound influence on climate – shifts north, moving precipitation away from California.

Arctic sea ice has declined by about 3 percent a year over the past three decades, and some forecasts predict an ice-free Arctic ocean as soon as 2020. Montañez warns a connection between Arctic sea ice and weather in the west is bad news:

If there is a connection to Arctic sea ice then there are big implications for us in California.

Recent research has found that the jet stream has been migrating northward at a minimum of 12.5 miles per decade, or 18 feet per day. As it moves north, high pressure and clear skies converge in its wake, leaving the South and Southwest hotter and drier.

Cristina Archer and Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology have been tracking changes in the average position and strength of jet streams. Archer says changes in the jet streams have global implications:

The jet streams are the driving factor for weather in half of the globe. So, as you can imagine, changes in the jets have the potential to affect large populations and major climate systems.

Scientists are predicting that under current trends, Colorado River reservoirs could dry up, even as the urban population that depends on those reservoirs for water and energy continues to grow.

Even conservatives, industrial interests and development boosters are waking up to the fact that the impacts of water shortages are likely to be catastrophic, around the globe.

A post by Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum: Europe looks at the water consumption of energy technologies.

Notice how enormously water intensive biofuels are – as Bardi says, “another drawback for a technology which has also a low EROEI, needs large areas, and competes for land with food production.”

The world’s water resources are already stretched thin – and climate change will make things worse. Rivers from China’s Yellow to America’s Colorado no longer can be relied on to even reach the sea. Glaciers are already melting, from the Himalayas to the Andes.  No glaciers, no storage, no water. Climate change threatens desertification around the globe, from the American West to Australia, northern China and Tibet, the Mediterranean basin including southern Europe. From Saudi Arabia to the American West, we’re drawing from and exhausting “fossil water” from ancient aquifers.

Bardi rightly points out that the world’s water predicament is yet another indication that we’re bumping up against ecological limits to growth:

Water is, of course, a renewable resource but a lot of the water used today is “fossil” water. It comes from deep aquifers which can be drained empty as it has happened, for instance in Saudi Arabia. In addition, climate change may further reduce the water supply in many areas of the world. How much these factors will affect energy generation worldwide in the near future is difficult to say at present, but surely the problem shouldn’t be underestimated. The EROWI problem, in the end, is just an indication that we are hitting yet another limit of our finite environment.

Our political and economic systems require that resource issues such as peak oil or water shortages be approached as problems to be solved by finding new supplies or sources – by yet more growth. But growth is itself the underlying problem. As Daniel Allen says in a post at The Energy Bulletin, limits to growth cannot be overcome by yet more growth.

Resource depletion is a predicament requiring adaptation to an entirely new low-consumption paradigm, rather than a problem to be solved with technological or social solutions.

Allen urges Americans to “start the conversation about what a lower-consumption, resource-poor society would look like, and begin the appropriate preparations.”

The world needs to begin that conversation, like right now. In ancient Greek thought, transgressions of limits inevitably in punishment by the gods. When it comes to transgressing limits, climate change would be Gaia’s ultimate penalty.

All reservoirs along the Colorado River could dry up by mid-century.

That’s the conclusion of a new study by Balaji Rajagopalan and colleagues of the University of Colorado in Boulder (CU-Boulder). If climate change results in a 20% flow reduction – as predicted in some climate change models – the chances of fully depleting reservoir storage in any given year will exceed 50% by 2057.

The study will appear in the journal Water Resources Research, published by the American Geophysical Union (AGU).

Similar research by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography published in 2008 warned the Colorado will reach that 50% chance of depletion as early as 2021. The new study assumed the Bureau of Reclamation would sharply cut water deliveries to cities, leaving more in the reservoirs.

The Colorado River system supplies water to tens of millions of people and millions of acres of farmland. But a new study by a pair of climate researchers at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, UC San Diego finds:

If human-caused climate change continues to make the region drier, scheduled deliveries will be missed 60-90 percent of the time by the middle of this century.

Even under conservative climate change scenarios, Scripps climate researcher David Pierce found that reductions in the runoff that feeds the Colorado River mean that it could short the Southwest of a half-billion cubic meters (400,000 acre feet) of water per year 40 percent of the time by 2025.

The paper, “Sustainable water deliveries from the Colorado River in a changing climate,” appears in the April 20 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Lakes Mead and Powell were built during and calibrated to the 20^th century, which was one of the wettest in the last 1,200 years. Tree ring records show that typical Colorado River flows are substantially lower, yet 20^th Century values are used in most long-term planning of the River.

The Colorado River situation is not unique. The Columbia River, China’s Yellow River, India’s Ganges, and the Niger in Africa all have seen long-term declines in flow, according to a new analysis by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colo., and the College of William and Mary in Virginia.

The New York Times reports that in Franklin County in arid eastern Washington, Easterday Ranches Inc. is proposing to build a feedlot for 30,000 head of cattle that would withdraw about 1 million gallons a day from the ancient Grande Ronde Aquifer. The region is among the driest in the country, averaging only about 7 inches of rainfall a year. The proposal has touched off a wave of concern among local farmers, who worry that their wells could dry up.

The groundwater problems in eastern Washington are among the most serious in the country. In Franklin County, the aquifer is receding about a foot a year, while groundwater levels in neighboring Whitman County are declining at an even faster rate of 1.5 feet per year. A state-funded study released in January found that the deep aquifer in eastern Washington – especially in Franklin, Adams, Grant and Lincoln counties – is in serious trouble because a significant percentage of the area’s wells are tapping into the deepest part of the aquifer, where the water is 10,000 years old and is not recharged by surface water. The study found that some deep wells could recede so much that landowners would not be able to access groundwater.

A 1945 state law exempts withdrawals to 5,000 gallons a day from permit requirements. A 2005 interpretation of the law by the state’s attorney general concluded that groundwater withdrawals for “stock watering purposes” were not subject to any restrictions. Among those entitled to virtually unlimited water supplies, according to the interpretation, were large-scale concentrated animal feeding operations, or CAFOs, like the proposed Easterday Ranches feedlot. Several bills in the Washington Legislature this year would have capped livestock water-use to 5,000 gallons a day, but all died under intense lobbying from dairy and agricultural interests.

Reporter Scott Streater says local and state leaders appear ready to approve the Easterday feedlot. The Franklin County Water Conservancy Board has approved a water-rights transfer between Easterday and a nearby farmer – a critical component of the project. The Department of Ecology has final decision making authority over the project, and officials have indicated they plan to approve the feedlot water withdrawals. Many local leaders also support the Easterday development, touting the 40 jobs it will provide, the projected $60 million a year in tax revenue, and the $20 million a year in corn alfalfa and other feed that will be purchased from local farmers.

It’s a sad story, one that we’ve seen before in many permutations. The greedy rush in and are encouraged and enabled to exploit a common resource for their own and their enablers’ short-term benefit – leaving those who are content with enough, the innocent but unlucky, future generations, and Earth herself to bear the costs.

The first two months of 2009 are the driest start of any year since the USA began keeping records over a century ago, leading to severe drought in Texas and California and shrinking reservoir levels in Florida.

DROUGHT MAP

USA Today reports Richard Heim, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center, saying the 2.69-inch average rainfall across the U.S. in January and February is the least amount of moisture in those months since NOAA began keeping records in 1895.

The dry winter could mean a longer and more dangerous fire season in the summer as grasses will dry out sooner and forests will be parched.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress points out that warming temperatures and drought are a deadly combination:

Temperature and annual precipitation are headed in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest. Warm weather droughts are more devastating than cool weather droughts. Forest-killing warm eather droughts – the “global-change-type drought” – are the future.

And not just in the American Southwest.

Australia is experiencing the ‘big dry.” Indonesia’s tropical forests are being devastated by fire, particularly in drought years.

A new study predicts that global warming will overwhelm any efforts to save the Amazon rain forest. A 2C rise in temperatures could result in 40% of the forest being lost, and 85% of the forest would be killed by a 4C rise.

A 2C rise is pretty much baked into the cake. Global temperatures have already risen 0.8C, and carbon already in the system will carry that increase to 1.5C. Even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next decade, there is only be around a 50% chance of keeping global temperatures rises below 2C. And the odds of achieving drastic cuts in emissions are between slim and none.

Achieving any cuts at all would take a political miracle. In Lane County, it’s proving to be an impossible task to get two noncontroversial “good government” proposals enacted by a “progressive” Board of Commissioners, after several years of exhaustive prep work and coalition building. What would it take to get something really hard done, something that requires the agreement and cooperation of prickly nations around the globe?

A team of scientists at the University of Kassel in Germany has made projections of per-capita water availability by applying Hadley projections on a finer geographical scale and modeling water flow in river basins.

Here’s a graphical representation for the year 2070, based on the IPCC “A2″ scenario where economic growth and technological change are “uneven” and population growth is “high”:

A new California Department of Water Resources survey indicates snow water content is 61% of normal for the date, statewide. The results prompted Director Lester Snow to warn:

“We may be at the start of the worst California drought in modern history. It’s imperative for Californians to conserve water immediately at home and in their businesses.”

DWR’s early estimate is that it will only be able to deliver 15% of requested State Water Project water this year to the Bay Area, San Joaquin Valley, Central Coast and Southern California.

December through January tend to be the wettest months but thus far the Sierra has only received one third of its expected annual snowfall.

Elissa Lynn, a meteorologist with the state, said the prospective drought can’t be attributed to but is consistent with global warming:

A third of normal is devastating.  January is the biggest month for precipitation in the Sierra. Climate change does indicate the possibility of more frequent droughts, but it’s hard to tell over a short time span.

Some farmers are leaving fields unplanted based on expected lack of water. The state’s largest irrigation district, Westlands Water in the major farming counties of Fresno and Kings, told growers on Wednesday to brace for zero water supply this year.

UPDATE: Secretary of Energy Steven Chu says California’s farms and vineyards could vanish by the end of the century, and its major cities could be in jeopardy, if Americans do not act to slow the advance of global warming. Chu says up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

“I don’t think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen. We’re looking at a scenario where there’s no more agriculture in California. I don’t actually see how they can keep their cities going, either.

Is there such a thing as ‘peak water’? There is a vast amount of water on the planet—but we are facing a crisis of running out of sustainably managed water. Humans already appropriate over 50% of all renewable and accessible freshwater flows, and yet billions still lack the most basic water services.

So says Dr. Peter Gleick, president of the Pacific Institute and one of the world’s leading water experts and lead author of The World’s Water 2008-2009. The new report addresses topics from “peak water” to climate change impacts, and warns that water will increasingly be the cause of violence and even war. The report warns that a swelling global population, changing diets and mankind’s expanding “water footprint” could mean an end to the era of cheap water.

By “peak water,” Gleick means “peak ecological water”- the critical point where ecological disruptions exceed the human benefit obtained. This point has already been reached in many areas of the world. A prime example is China, where water resources are over-allocated, inefficiently used, and grossly polluted by human and industrial wastes. Rivers and lakes are dead and dying, groundwater aquifers are over-pumped, uncounted species of aquatic life have been driven to extinction, and direct adverse impacts on both human and ecosystem health are widespread and growing.

A significant part of the problem is the huge, and often deeply inefficient, use of water by industry and agriculture. UN calculations suggest that more than one third of the world’s population is already suffering from water shortages. By 2020, water use is expected to increase by 40% from current levels, and by 2025, two out of three people could be living under conditions of “water stress”.