OK! I saw a news story this morning that has me thinking!

[DayCruiser]

So how long have you lived in California?

What has that got to do with anything? How long have you lived there? I bet not longer than 100 years. How long has CA been there? 100s of 1000s of years: I have been to Southern and Northern CA. Much of the Southern part looked like a sand bar to me:


http://www.usatoday.com/story/weather/2014/09/02/california-megadrought/14446195/


Megadroughts have parched the West, including present-day California, long before Europeans settled the region in the 1800s.
Most of the USA's droughts of the past century, even the infamous 1930s Dust Bowl that forced migrations of Oklahomans and others from the Plains, "were exceeded in severity and duration multiple times by droughts during the preceding 2,000 years," the National Climate Assessment reported this year.
The difference now, of course, is the Western USA is home to more than 70 million people who weren't here for previous megadroughts. The implications are far more daunting.
Overall, "the nature of the beast is that drought is cyclical, and these long periods of drought have been commonplace in the past," according to Mark Svoboda, a climatologist at the National Drought Mitigation Center in Lincoln, Neb. "We are simply much more vulnerable today than at any time in the past. People can't just pick up and leave to the degree they did in the past."

 

[bruceb58]

I have been to Southern and Northern CA. Much of the Southern part looked like a sand bar to me:

LOL..thought so!

 

[sam60]

I'll just have a beer.

I'm with Joe. No win in the water debate.

 

[bigdee]

They don't actually take the salt out. They return it with the discharge water. If 100gal goes in, 50gal fresh comes out and 50gal goes back to the ocean twice as salty.

In todays world a by-product seldom gets "thrown out". That salt water can easily be converted into chlorine...which a water plant would need anyway.