Greenhouse gases and southwest “megadrought”

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Scientists have dubbed decades-long periods of aridity in southwestern North America “megadroughts“. We’ve had them in the past, and research has long pointed toward an increasing risk of them as the climate warms.

New research published last week by Cornell’s Toby Ault and colleagues has generated a wave of scary headlines – A Mega-Drought Is Coming to America’s Southwest, to cite but one – but co-author Ben Cook pointed out this morning that this paper is about more than a prediction of doom. The scientists modeled various greenhouse emissions scenarios and concluded, “An aggressive reduction in global greenhouse gas emissions cuts megadrought risks nearly in half.”

Here’s Ian James summarizing the key finding:

The researchers found that under a “business-as-usual” emissions scenario, the risk of a decades-long drought would be 90 percent in the southwestern U.S. if precipitation is unchanged. If there’s a modest increase in precipitation, the region would still face a 70 percent risk of a megadrought by the end of the 21 century. And if precipitation decreases under that warming scenario, the scientists estimated the risk at 99 percent.

If, however, humans reduce greenhouse gas emissions significantly and warming stays below 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) in the region, the researchers calculated the chances of a southwestern megadrought this century would decrease to less than 66 percent. If emissions are reduced further, they said, the chances would go down even more.

“Mitigation matters quite a lot for keeping risks relatively low, or low compared to the alternative, which is to just continue down our current path,” Ault said in a telephone interview. At the same time, he said, the impacts of rising temperatures in exacerbating droughts will “force us to rethink our expectations for how much water is going to be available in the Southwest.”

From the perspective of the science-policy communications interface, this is an important finding, and it’s important that we communicate and think about it in the right way. Gloomy “megadrought dooms us” headlines can lead to fatalism. But if people feel empowered – Hey there’s something we can do to make ourselves safer and reduce risk! – progress is more likely.

 

Turning off a river for winter

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After a great day-and-a-half gathering of the New Mexico water nerds in Silver City (the 61st annual New Mexico Water Conference, put on by New Mexico State University’s Water Resources Research Institute, I took a leisurely drive this afternoon along one of my favorite stretches of the Rio Grande.

Hatch chiles

Hatch chiles

The Hatch Valley (more formally known as the “Rincon Valley”, but if you’ve ever eaten the chiles you’ll know why the “Hatch” name stuck) is a working landscape, and the Rio Grande here is a river turned in service of that work. Two big reservoirs, Elephant Butte and Caballo, regulate the river’s flow into the valley, and that flow is entirely managed to meet the needs of farming and other human water uses.

The interstate hugs bluffs along the valley’s eastern edge, but if I have time I always take NM 187 along the valley floor. It doesn’t take much longer. It’s a way to see how we use water in New Mexico, turning it out of the river and growing stuff with it. It’s the tail end of chile season, I smelled some onions, I saw an old pump chugging up some groundwater onto an alfalfa field to squeeze out another cutting, and big stretches of pecan orchards.

Percha Dam, with no water, Rio Grand, Hatch Valley, October 2016

Percha Dam, with no water, Rio Grand, Hatch Valley, October 2016

But the river itself?

There was still some standing water in the Rio Grande’s channel. But when I got out to Percha Dam, the irrigation diversion structure at the head of the valley, the river itself was dry. This is a river entirely managed for human use. On Oct. 1, they turned it off.

As I said, it’s one of my favorite stretches of the Rio Grande. But it’s really weird to see a river turned off.

How “Cheap Talk” Helped Environmentalists and Water Managers Find Common Ground

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An excerpt from my book, published by Earth Island Journal: a case study in how “cheap talk” – the relative informality of a “working group” without obligations – helped calm conflict between environmentalists and water managers on the Lower Colorado:

In the short run, the relative informality meant that there was no concrete, institutionalized way to carry out the working group’s recommendations. But in the long run, the forum proved profoundly important. It is not that the ideas behind the recommendations were new. But the workgroup created space for a conversation that had never before been possible — about how those ideas could fit into broad solutions. For the first time, Arizona water managers acknowledged the importance of the Cienega, and they conceded that any solutions to Arizona’s water shortfalls couldn’t simply brush the accidental wetland away. Environmentalists, in turn, acknowledged that Arizona’s vulnerability to shortage was real, and that any solutions to the river’s environmental problems needed to recognize that reality. In the decade that followed, many of the ideas worked out in the Yuma-Cienega meetings shifted from “cheap talk” to official dialogue.

Some notes on measuring water

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There is something manifestly silly about the assertion, in table 5a of the Bureau of Reclamation’s 2015 Colorado River Accounting and Water Use Report, that the Imperial Irrigation District diverted 2,455,649 acre feet of water from river at Imperial Dam that year.

Park of the core curriculum for our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program students is an intensive field class in which students go out and measure water in a variety of ways (flow, chemistry, ecosystem properties, etc.). One of the class’s purposes, UNM engineering water guru Mark Stone tells the students, is to instill a healthy sense of the humility in the face of the difficulty of accurately measuring the parameters we’re using to manage water.

The notion that one can measure the flow of water with seven digit precision is absurd.

Hoover Dam stilling well, Oct 18, 2010

Hoover Dam stilling well, Oct 18, 2010

This is not to meant to be a criticism of the accuracy of the Bureau’s work. Far from it. One of the early tangents in the research I did for my book was a dive into the measurement of water, which included a memorable visit to the stilling well within Hoover Dam, where one of the river’s most important measurements is made. I developed the utmost respect for the people measuring water on the Lower Colorado River. They take their job seriously, and do it well.

Accuracy matters, and doing the work as accurately as one can matters a lot. But equally important is the credibility of the methodology, and the fact that the people using the numbers to make management decisions have a shared understanding that the numbers are good enough for the purposes at hand.

Jay Lund wrote about this last week, discussing disparities in the reported numbers for pumping from the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Jay cites seven different measures that in some cases differ by enormous amounts. Which one is right?

Measuring water is hard. There is no “right” number. What matters is that the numbers are collected for an agreed-upon purpose, and that there is confidence among those who need to use them that they are being collected in a fair and diligent way.

In the case of the USBR’s water accounting report cited above, the measurement and accounting is a requirement of the Supreme Court’s 1963 decision in the case of Arizona v. California for determining allocation of Lower Colorado River water. There’s a clearly defined purpose, and little argument over the methodology used. This is one of Elinor Ostrom’s points in her book Governing the Commons – that agreement on the numbers is critical to successful common pool resource management. They don’t have to be “right” in some absolute technical sense, so much as reasonable enough for everyone to agree to use them.

So did Imperial divert precisely 2,455,649 acre feet of water in 2015? Of course not. But we’ve all agreed that it’s the number we’ll use.

Happy New Water Year, Colorado River Basin! Now get to work….

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As the new “water year” begins, we’ve got some challenges in the Colorado River Basin.

It is worth noting some good news – despite a mediocre runoff year at 88 percent of average, storage in the basin’s two huge reservoirs, Mead and Powell, is almost exactly the same as it was last year at this time. (source pdf)

total storage, Mead and Powell

total storage, Mead and Powell

Lake Powell ended September with a surface elevation of 3,611 feet above sea level, five feet above last year. Lake Mead ended at 1,075, three feet below last year.

But it’s taken a lot of institutional duct tape to hold things together at those levels, and duct tape is not sustainable.

The current rules for allocating Colorado River water aren’t working. They allow farms and cities in Arizona, Nevada, California, Baja, and Sonora to take out more water than flows into the reservoir each year. Over short time scales in a variable system, that might make sense. The point of a big reservoir is to store water in wet years for use in dry years. But if there’s an imbalance in the long run, if we keep taking out more year after year, eventually we’re screwed unless the rules adjust as the reservoir drops.

Our current rules don’t.

I had a great pair of conversations over the last week with Ian James at the Desert Sun, who’s been doing some really thoughtful work about water use in the West (and around the world). He was kind enough to transcribe them to share with his readers some of my take on the Colorado River and why, despite its troubles, I am optimistic. This bit stuck out, when Ian asked about my assertion that “we need new rules” to govern the allocation of Colorado River water:

Clearly the rules are going to be that everybody, all of the three states in the Lower Basin, are going to be taking less water out of Lake Mead as Lake Mead drops. But how much less and how you allocate the details of those shortages, those have to emerge from the negotiations among California and Arizona and Nevada and the federal government and Mexico, and that’s the really important thing that I learned about how these negotiating processes work.

This seems like a no brainer – take less water out of Lake Mead! – but the details are hard. As I’ve been arguing over and over again in the interviews I’ve been doing to accompany the release of my book, communities in the West have shown repeated success in using less water when they have to. But no one wants to volunteer to be the one to use less, let those other people over there do it.

The “drought contingency plan” now under negotiation appears to have a good shot at fixing this problem. It’s a new set of rules to take less water out of Lake Mead, and by construction it would stabilize Mead’s levels as users agree to deeper and deeper cuts as needed until, at low lake levels, inflow and outflow would equalize. This is in everybody’s interest, but it is a classic collective action problem which is running headlong into what I view as the essential hurdle. State-to-state negotiators have developed a workable plan, but the no-one’s-in-chargeness problem of “polycentric governance” (eek! jargon! read Ostrom! take my class!) means one step remains. From my conversation with Ian:

The biggest pitfall, the biggest danger is that the people who are working at the basin scale, the people who are in this network of people working together across state boundaries, understand that we have to take less water from the system. They have to go home and sell that to a political environment that’s really locally focused. There’s this political pushback back home, and all these deals ultimately have to be approved back home.

We’re in the pushback phase. As we enter a new water year – most water accounting systems begin Oct. 1 – there’s a hurdle there in front of you, people, now’s the time you’re supposed to jump.

“It’s not all that high,” Fleck said with his characteristic naive yet generous optimism. “You can do it.”

Municipal water conservation – lots more room to move

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Central to my “decoupling” argument is the premise that, in addition to the water conservation we’ve already seen, we have significant opportunities to conserve yet more. This from  Dave Cogdill (California Building Industry Association and an adviser to the Public Policy Institute of California) puts some numbers to the thing:

New homes are quite water efficient, but about two-thirds of the state’s homes were built prior to water-efficiency standards. Our studies show that homes built after 1980 are two times more efficient in water use than those built prior to these standards—mostly due to water-efficient fixtures that are required for new construction. We could save 300 billion gallons annually—enough to supply 2.5 to 3 million homes—if the state’s existing homes had to comply with these standards.

Some great deals right now on my book

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Water is for Fighting Over

Water is for Fighting Over

The last month of my life has been remarkable. My book, Water is for Fighting Over: and Other Myths about Water in the West, emerged into the world, and people noticed it and they’ve been talking about it and I could not be more happy.

Nick Stockton interviewed me for Wired, Brad Plumer did a Q & A at Vox. Huffington Post, a review in New Scientist, and discussions with KJZZ and Sea Change Radio, and perhaps my favorite of all, a Q&A with Johnny Vizcaino at UNM’s Daily Lobo, with a fun visit to the Rio Grande with Diana Cervantes for pictures. As a UNM prof, the Lobo is my home town paper.

The folks at Island Press have been amazing to work with, even more so right now because until the end of the month (tomorrow, Friday, September 30) it’s their E-book of the month with a special price of $3.99 at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Google Play, and your local independent bookseller.

But you are an old like me and want the hardcover, you say? Until tomorrow (Friday 9/30). Island Press is selling everything at 50 percent off through tomorrow. Not just my book. All their great titles.

Advice to the new president?

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When the folks at Island Press asked a bunch of their authors to offer up advice to the incoming president, whoever that might be (“If you were advisor to the president, what would your top priority be and why?“), I tried to keep in mind a fundamental principle that guides my work – the art of the possible. I tried to think of things that were not simply generally aspirational, but things a president can actually do:

Maintaining and extending the collaborative relationship with the Republic of Mexico over the shared waters of the Colorado River should be a sustained priority. The 2012 agreement known as “Minute 319”, signed in 2012, included important water sharing provisions and for the first time allowed water to be returned to the desiccated Colorado River for the environment and the communities of Mexico. The deal was an important milestone, but it was only a temporary agreement. We need permanent solutions to the overuse of the Colorado River, and sustaining our partnership with Mexico is a critical piece.

The executive branch has few degrees of freedom on water management, but international diplomacy is clearly under the purview of the president and their appointees.

Lots of other cool suggestions from my Island Press siblings, I encourage a click. And if you like the sort of things we write, there’s a big sale going on now. Bargains galore on smart books.

 

Vin Scully and the importance of doing the work

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I’d like to tell a Vin Scully story.

Growing up in Southern California in the 1960s, radio was a backdrop to our lives. It was the AM radio era, and KFI 640 was often on in the house, whatever they were playing. I loved radio. I would listen to whatever, fascinated by the magic.

For a time, I even listened to hockey. I had never seen a hockey game. I had no earthly idea where the blue line was or what what “icing the puck” meant. I would construct these elaborate images in my mind to match the frenzied voices on the radio.

Carol Highsmith, via Library of Congress

Carol Highsmith, via Library of Congress

So I listened to baseball, not as a baseball fan, but as a child mesmerized by the magic of a distant communicator telling stories. During that time, Scully and his broadcast partner Jerry Doggett would swap innings, each solo in the booth. As a youngster, there was no distinction in my mind between the two, but eventually from the background emerged Scully the storyteller.

There’s an easygoing way to his stories, a fun bit of business he’s telling a friend over the backdrop of a lazy summer afternoon at the ballpark, a circling parallel narrative that never got in the way of the day’s game, but rather filled in around it.

There was a period, memory is hazy but I’m guessing it was the early 1970s, when one of the local TV stations, KTTV Channel 11, would carry the Saturday road games, and Scully and Doggett would also do the TV play-by-play – one on TV, the other on the radio simultaneously, then switching. By that time I’d become a huge Scully fan, so I’d switch the sound and get Vin Scully for the whole game – half his TV call, the other half his radio call. I loved those Saturdays.

The difference in approach was noticeable – more work to fill in the spaces on radio, less with the TV because we could see things for ourselves. Like John McPhee and Miles Davis, Scully is a master of staying out of the way of his own story, giving you what you need and no more. It was a communication clinic. (Listen to his call of Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series home run, or the final inning of Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, to see what I mean here.)

But there was something else that was to me, a young storyteller in the making, remarkable. The story he told one inning on the radio, the second little narrative that paralleled the game he was was calling, he’d tell again on TV. He made it sound like an easygoing tale, remembered spur-of-the-moment from a locker room conversation or an old game he called years ago. But in fact the easy storytelling was the result of meticulous preparation.

Vin Scully did the work.

I have a lot of different stories I tell myself about how I became a writer, but this is one of them: that I learned to love the craft of the telling of stories by listening as a child to Vin Scully.