Big tech data centers spark worry over scarce Western water

 

I read a shorter article about this in the Daily Courier. This article is much longer and answers some of my questions. But the writers and the worriers seem to think that the water in the Columbia and other major rivers comes only from rain and snowmelt.

The water in our rivers mainly comes from springs that pours out of cracks in the Earth's crust from the mantle, which is soaked with water. Otherwise, our river would run out in the 100-day droughts we have had in recent years.

The Columbia River is a mighty river indeed. The Rogue River doesn't compare. But the 3.9 million gallon water right that Google bought with their land is nothing next to what the City of Grants Pass pulls out of the Rogue every day. Our plant can produce 20 million gallons of clean water per day. We put much of it back in the river, cleaned to drinking water standards after sewage treatment, and so does Medford and its suburbs.

Associated Press reporters seem to think that water is a scarce and precious resource, when it is the most abundant and automatically recycled resource on Earth, next to air. The water cycle plus modern water and sewage treatment make it really hard to waste water, except by letting it run straight to the sea without being used along the way.

"About an hour’s drive east of The Dalles, Amazon is giving back some of the water its massive data centers use. Amazon’s sprawling campuses, spread between Boardman and Umatilla, Oregon, butt up against farmland, a cheese factory and neighborhoods. Like many data centers, they use water primarily in summer, with the servers being air-cooled the rest of the year.

"About two-thirds of the water Amazon uses evaporates. The rest is treated and sent to irrigation canals that feed crops and pastures."

And "evaporation is waste," we were told in Landscape Management by a teacher who was selling us on drip systems. It is a common trope among modern water conservationists. But evaporation is not waste; it makes humidity, clouds and rain.

West of the Rockies, our water vapor, from any source, makes clouds and rain in the local area first if there is enough of it. (Water-rationing rates in our cities keep that from happening as much as it used to.) What is left blows uphill and upstream on the prevailing western wind, making rain as it rises, filling creeks and rivers before the remainder goes over the mountains to join vapor from other sources, like irrigation, and make more rain.

Drought is a self-fulfilling prophecy in Oregon, because it is declared every time we don't get enough snowpack to keep our reservoirs full. They fail to take into account the effects of irrigation, evaporation, and the water cycle. Real conservation of fresh water is keeping water from running to the sea so fast.

Beavers did it before man came to North America, building dams and swamps until every rivulet, creek and small river valleys were filled with their dams and swamps. Water tables were high and the continent was full of game. After they were nearly wiped out, man began to do some of what they did with bigger dams and watering farms and cities, storing water in the soil that not only grew plants but kept rivers higher from runoff, above and below ground.

Now our cities are mostly dry ground with only a portion of the residents actually watering their properties, and have started burning because of that dryness, not only within them, but in the countryside around them, because there is less watering vapor to spread out and keep things moist.

Water is the basis of life. That doesn't make it scarce or precious; it makes it vital to living and living well. Brown and yellow is not the new green. It is the ugly color of fire danger and less life, because there is less water in the land, even right down next to the river in the photo with this article.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/wireStory/big-tech-data-centers-spark-worry-scarce-western-80730977?fbclid=IwAR1z7jbzkg_1dwcoXVIjeDSs1iSdWyo442kq_cDh-_mZvMJkS79pKDC_F3c

Asking public servants to ignore the law

Yesterday, I got a call from a person who was totally frustrated with the way the City Council doesn’t listen to her and her neighbors when asked to not allow the Sobering Center and now Foundry Village to be built in their neighborhood. She was also upset that the public were told to not speak about the very reason they were at the meeting, not wanting drunks and homeless people in their neighborhood. She was saying that they never listen, so why should she complain about our water and sewer rates?

Land use hearings always have specific criteria that one can speak to, and outside of that, they cannot rule. They give the rules in the introduction and the applicable criteria in the presentation. That you don’t like the kind of people that use a service in your neighborhood isn’t allowed in the criteria.

Last night, there was a delegation of 8-10 people with a couple of speakers who implored the City and Council to enforce the city code against camping in parks, so regular taxpayers can enjoy them. Several Councilors explained that their hands were tied by state and federal law as well as a court order to allow nightly camping in all parks but the All-Sports Park and are not allowed to evict campers for violations of code or camping rules without 72-hour notice. The city is being sued for criminalizing homelessness with camping bans.

You want the Council to listen to you? Don’t ask them to ignore the law. On the few occasions when they have listened to people who didn’t want certain people in their neighborhood, they have been overruled by the Land Use Board of Appeals (LUBA).

In the case of campers in the parks, if the City ignores the court, it will be found in contempt of court and likely lose their case. We will probably have to put up with campers in our parks until the city builds sufficient shelters to meet their need.

One Councilor keeps pointing out that little houses, small pallet shelter campgrounds and a warming center will not meet the need and not get campers out of our parks. All of them will also have restrictions on who can use such shelter beyond being peaceful and law-abiding, because they are limited and people in the neighborhood don’t want those without shelter lining up early to get in.

What can meet the need is a couple of large hostels, cheap places to shower and sleep for $5-$10 per night, one for families and one for adults only, to keep kids separated from sex offenders. Think of a building like a grocery store with a large open space where there would be hundreds of cots, 6 feet apart, surrounded by: bathrooms; showers; lockers; a dog kennels; a meeting rooms for classes; a reading/dining room; and a parking lot planted with fruits and vegetables in planting strips, all fenced for use only by its customers. No food service, and few rules: be quiet and peaceful; don’t show anyone your guns or drugs; don’t litter or make a mess around one’s bed. Violators could be temporarily or permanently trespassed or made to pick up litter for minor infractions.

When it comes to asking the Council to reform our water rates to pay all the overhead with base rates and only marginal unit costs with unit rates, they have the power to do so. There is nothing in state or federal law that requires water-rationing rates.

You can ask by email, phone calls, writing on the city Facebook page, in person when you meet them, or a 3-minute comment at City Council meetings, first and third Wednesdays at 6:00. Control your anger; don’t attack them; and speak nicely if you want to influence them. They are public servants, but they are not only your servants. Don’t expect instant action; they need a lot of people contacting them frequently to be convinced to change a rate system that has been in place for over 20 years and to buck what has been instituted in cities around the world over the last 35 years.

Join Friends of the Restwell Center to support hostels and fill out your City survey to support use of ARPA funds to build them. It’s due October 22nd. https://www.facebook.com/groups/1681019735495611

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook and contact the council about water and sewer rates every month.

Earth is reflecting less light comment

 

Earth is reflecting less light. It’s not clear if that's a trend | Science News

I shared this article because, while it mentioned the possibility of climate change being involved, it did not talk about trace gases being the cause. I had dropped Science News for about 2 years because they had been selling trace-gas-caused climate change with a heavy hand, mentioning it every chance they got. I was curious today and looked at the latest articles. This one wasn't even in the email; it was on their site. The others didn't mention anything about climate change in the blurb. I also saw that they aren't allowing comment on threads, but one can give feedback by email.

So I wrote an email to the author, pointing out that I had seen the disappearance of our morning clouds and fall and winter fogs, and that climate change is a likely cause, but it is not being changed by trace gases, but by lack of water vapor in the air because of water rationing rates around the world. There is also brown grass, bark and rock landscaping where there had been green grass, and less snow on mountaintops, causing drought declarations in the West.

I will have to read more SN articles and may subscribe again.

Why Should We Save Water?

 

            I agreed with ninety-five percent of the Mayor’s Proclamation, “Imagine a day without water,” I really liked the word, “vital.”  I agreed right up to the end, where she asked us to please help the city provide clean, pressurized water by conserving it.

          How does buying less of the product the utility is selling help the utility, the ratepayers or anything in any way?  Selling water is now vital to paying its overhead.

Utilities are high-overhead businesses.  From the time our water system was built until the nineties, we paid all the overhead, the monthly expenses of the system, in monthly base rates, and only marginal unit costs in unit rates. 

No matter how much or little we used the service, the overhead was paid every month and base and unit rates stayed low and stable.  If we had a breakdown in the plant that kept it from treating any water for a month or more, the overhead and unit costs would still be paid, and our water utility would not go bankrupt.

Since sometime in the nineties, ratepayers have been charged rationing rates on water, with a lower base rate and higher unit rates.  Unit charges were most of my bill in summer of 2001.  But few people stopped watering until 2006, when rates were restructured to greatly discourage irrigation.  The base rate dropped more, and units were hiked enough to make many people stop watering, the easiest use to cut, as the Great Recession began.  Banks didn’t water their repossessed properties, either.

Two years later, Staff told the Council that the new rates were working too well.  People had conserved so much that the utility was unable to pay its overhead!  Staff asked Council to raise the base rate back to where it had been before, which would stabilize the rates. 

But use kept dropping, and both base and unit rates kept rising.  Unit rates are too high.  We’ve been chasing the overhead and cheating on maintenance ever since as rates keep rising faster than inflation. It is the easiest overhead item to cut, just like watering is for homeowners and banks.  Now our ninety-year-old water plant is slowly falling apart and we have to build a new one.

I had a live-in boyfriend.  After two years, I knew I couldn’t marry him.  After ten years, I decided to stop making the same mistake every day and gave him thirty-day notice. 

We’ve had over twenty years of water-rationing rates, fifteen years of seriously rationing rates.  When will we stop making the same mistake? 

                             

Three-minute comment to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-20-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

Join Ratepayers for Fair Water and Sewer Pricing on Facebook

 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com

Heron's bill is blooming in fall. Time to kill it.

 

Heron’s bill (Erodium sp., AKA fillaree or storksbill) is blooming in fall.  It used to be one of the earliest flowers in the spring; this is new.  But many spring shrub flowers bloom again in fall in Grants Pass.  It started sprouting in midsummer in watered parts of the Reinhart Volunteer park, possibly because of cloudiness from Southwest monsoons getting this far north, and wildfire smoke shading, humidifying and cooling us for several weeks, after a long stretch of very hot weather in July.  Wood is made mostly from carbon dioxide and water, to which it returns when burned.

Large and coarsely divided

      red stem, coarse short leaf

finely divided, flat rosette

                                                                                                            young, fine, fluffy

            Its leaves are long and divided, growing in a rosette from fall through winter.  They can grow flat or fluffy, coarsely finely divided, with petioles that can be red, green, or shades between of pink or orange.  They hybridize readily.  As it blooms, it grows to about knee-high unless mowed.  If it is only mowed, it keeps making seed, like any annual weed, flowering and seeding under the mower blades.  Mowing thus does not control its spread.  Beating young plants into the dirt with a weed whacker can thin them out considerably.  Doing it again can finish the job.

Mowed heron's bill with fat petals.  Note the long, upright seed pods, center

             It has five-petaled 1/4 "-3/8" pink flowers whose petals vary from thin to fat.  They make seed pods 2-4 inches long that stick straight up as they grow and ripen.  The pods split into two seeds of about ¼ - 3/8 inches long with barbs on the seed and a long tail that spirals as it dries and pops the seeds off the plant.  The tail has a straight part at the end that sticks out at right angles to the seed and spiral.  When it gets wet, the spiral unwinds, and with the tail sticking to the ground, screws the seed into the ground at the other end—or into your pet’s fur, or eyes, nose, or ears.  It grows all over Grants Pass in neglected areas.

            I used to wait until heron’s bill bloomed to kill it, the blooms being the easiest way to find it, and not being certain that it would not come back if cut earlier.  But the flowers close by late morning; it makes seed fast; and it is harder to see after being mowed.  So I now kill it as I see it all winter, and it does not come back.  

            The easiest way to kill heron's bill is to pull it from soft soil.  In hard soil, I cut it under the crown, through the root, rather than trying to pull the taproot.  As an annual, it has no buds on its roots and dies if the crown is cut off, unlike dandelions and other perennials. 

            My favorite weed cutting tool has long been carbon-steel gardening scissors.  But this year, I have been cutting under weed crowns with a folding box cutter, that I keep in my back pocket.  I've also used a hula hoe, which get most of the crowns, and then go back and get the rest a few days or weeks later.  This year, I found hand hula hoes at Bimart that I can keep in my back pack and cleared most of a wet patch this fall.

Seedlings en masse

            As shocking as it might seem as a natural gardener, I am willing to use glyphosate to kill large expanses of weeds, as it is the most natural and safest of herbicides, being an amino acid, glycine, with a phosphate group attached.  It is only absorbed through green surfaces like stems and leaves.  Bacteria eat it in soil; it does not absorb into roots or bark.  Worms and pill bugs love it and multiply under its influence, as it is rich in nitrogen.  It is also a broadleaf and annual plant fertilizer, being also rich in phosphorus for making flowers and seed.  

            Worms and pill bugs attract moles, which make a mess.  Broadleaf fertilizer grows broadleaf weeds, but perennials like clover or creeping Jenny (Lysimachia) can be planted two weeks later and suck up that fertility, helping crowd out the weeds.  I think that the city at one point sprayed glyphosate all over the wild areas along the walking path from Greenwood to the pedestrian bridge in Reinhart Park and didn't plant anything to soak up that fertility, as all the plants along it are common annual and/or broadleaf weeds, mostly noxious.

Tiny heron's bill after glyphosate spraying in early spring.  

            Another problem arises if glyphosate is used on baby weeds when temperatures stay below 75 degrees F.  They can immediately make flowers and seed instead of dying.  The dwarfing effect can persist for two generations, leaving one having to manually kill a lot of tiny seeding weeds

            Without such influence, weeds tend to crowd each other out as bugs eat the losers in the struggle for light and nutrients, leaving many fewer, much larger weeds to flower, which is the easiest time to pull a plant.  When annual plants flower, the roots shrink as stems and flowers grow, and the stems become tough by the time they flower, which makes it easy to pull them.

Cranesbill, Mid-February

            There is a related plant, called cranesbill (Geranium sp.), with slightly smaller fringed pink petals and short seeds that don’t stick into your pets.  The leaves are round and divided, with long petioles.  It is not nearly as noxious as heron’s bill, though it is listed as a noxious weed in Oregon for its takeover habit.  Ironically, heron's bill is not.  It is easier to pull than heron’s bill, and not near as common in Grants Pass.

Edited 10/15/21 and republished online at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com  

Gardening is easy if you do it naturally.  Like Garden Grants Pass on Facebook. 

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Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener          541-955-9040        rycke@gardener.com

Water-rationing has Consequences

 

Tubbs fire, Coffey Park, Santa Rosa, before and after

            The eighties were considered a wet decade.  Water was so cheap to use that we thought of it as free.  It was the height of sprinkler irrigation. 1986 was the first year we heard two nonscientific themes all over the media: burning fossil fuels is causing global warming from too much carbon dioxide; and fresh water is a scarce and precious resource that we must conserve. 

          Change began quickly as some cities, like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland, and Seattle, grabbed that idea and ran with it, lowering base rates and charging high unit rates for using water.  The area around those cities and to their east got dryer and hotter.

The first sign of trouble was the fires in the Hollywood hills around Christmas, as katabatic Santa Anna winds, caused by high pressure, cold, and dryness, flowed down out of the Sierra Nevada and blew every spark into brushfires with high-speed wind and high heat at lower elevations.  Seems like nobody connected the almost-yearly fires to the change in water pricing.  It being a Southern California problem, people joked about the winter fire season in Southern California.

Meanwhile, water-rationing rates were spreading across the country and around the world.  Grants Pass started them in the nineties in a small way.  But City Manager David Frasher and the City Council got serious and introduced tiered rates in 2006.  Grants Pass started getting fires from dry weeds and brush, and wildfires got closer to the city as lightning storms turned dry.

Jokes about California’s fire season stopped in 2017 when the Carr fire burned much of Redding in August, and the Tubbs fire burned huge, tight subdivisions in Santa Rosa in October.  In November 2018, the Camp fire burned most of Paradise and killed eighty-five people.  These were all katabatic-wind-driven fires.

In 2019, the West got a brief reprieve from big fires after Congress legalized hemp, which had to be watered.  In 2020, we had a rainy May and June and a cloudy July.  But after water masters made farmers stop using unpermitted water in July, temps rose to well over a hundred degrees in August. 

High heat built up a high-pressure bubble that covered the West coast from Mexico to Canada.  September 8th brought us katabatic winds from highlands under that dome, causing the biggest fire disaster of the last fifty years, as fires started in cities and burned them, all over the western half of our west-coast states.

 

Speech to the Josephine County Commissioners and the Grants Pass City Council, 10-6-2021

 published at GardenGrantsPass.blogspot.com

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 Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener                  541-955-9040                rycke@gardener.com