Colorado River Aqueduct, looking north into the Cadiz Valley in the Mojave Desert of southeastern California, March 2012 photo by John Fleck

I have a prediction: clarifying the science will not settle the political argument over the proposed Cadiz water project in the deserts of California.

Chris Clarke wrote this today about Cadiz, a proposal to pump water from beneath the Mojave Desert and pipe it to coastal Southern California cities:

According to an independent hydrologists’ evaluation of the proposed Cadiz Valley water project, project backers used flawed models and incomplete data to forecast the amount of water they could pump out of a desiccated valley in the Mojave Desert.

To which public relations consultant Laer Pearce, who has been flacking for the project, had this to say (scroll down to the comments on Chris’s post):

It is incorrect and misleading to your readers to refer to this new study’s authors as “independent.” They were hired and paid by the National Parks Conservation Association, a longtime opponent of the Cadiz water project and an advocacy group dedicated to resisting commercial enterprises in and around national parks. It is based in Washington, D.C. and has annual revenues of $61 million.

In contrast to the modeling done by the Association’s hydrologists, the studies undertaken by Cadiz are more comprehensive and, most importantly, have been peer reviewed by some of the nation’s leading hydrology experts who serve on the Groundwater Stewardship Committee. This committee will continue to monitor the aquifer as the project progresses to ensure that there are no impacts to the environment.

Which is richly ironic – to accuse project opponents’ scientists of having a lack of independence while citing the work of scientists hired by the project’s supporters. No doubt Pearce is paid to say things like that with a straight face.

Full disclosure: I’ve avoided writing about Cadiz because I haven’t had the time to do the necessary journalistic due diligence on the technical questions involved. If I had time, I would, but I’m not sure it matters, because it’s clear that this is shaping up as a case study in what John Bass recently called “design and the problem of ‘contradictory uncertainties’“. John invokes the work of political scientist Dan Sarewitz (which in meta fashion I pushed on him) regarding the way science does not settle political controversies. John here is writing about the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, but his argument applies, I think, with a few tweaks, to Cadiz:

My money is on a stalemated, status quo Groundhog Day future, until there is a shift in consciousness and consensus (either rightward or leftward) similar to the one that led to the great environmental movement of the late 1960’s. If that consciousness shifts right, then property rights and Randian selfishness ideology will have won out. If the shift is to the left, toward environmental justice and a willing footing of the bill for remediative machines and regimens, then our evolution will have continued.

The “stalemate” part may apply more effectively to the Delta than Cadiz. But it’s clear that, like in the Delta, science won’t settle this. Values will.

The water model in the western United States has generally involved Party A getting a bunch of water via a dam, canal, pipe, etc., while Party B (usually some broad group of taxpayers, either state or federal) pays for it. Economists will tell you that this tends to lead for building more giant concrete thingies than would otherwise be found to be economically optimal. But whatever, I like living here.

The current discussions over California’s Bay Delta Conservation Plan have a new sort of earnestness of late, as a realization among water users sinks in – OMG, we’re going to have to pay for our water ourselves? Wyatt Buchanan did a great job with this theme yesterday in the San Francisco Chronicle:

[W]hile urban users may be able to afford the yet to be determined price increases, agricultural water users may not. The price of water could more than double for farmers, though it is too soon to know how high the increase would go, said Tom Birmingham, general manager of the Westlands Water District, which covers 600,000 acres serving about 600 farms.

“There is a breaking point at which the project is no longer feasible,” Birmingham said. “It’s a significant concern,” though he said officials can’t evaluate the cost effectiveness until the outstanding questions are resolved.

California radar storm estimate, evening 3/14/2012

As I write this, California’s being pounded by a particularly impressive storm.

According to Mike Dettinger, it’s an “atmospheric river” storm, one of the type he and other climate/water researchers have been studying increasingly closely because of their importance to California’s water supply. As I wrote last year, California has the most highly variable precipitation in the country (as measured with the standard deviation divided by the mean), with annual water supply strongly influence by the presence or absence of a handful of these AR storms. From a paper last year by Dettinger et al:

If just a couple of storms do not arrive in California, or yield significantly less precipitation than needed, in a given year, that year’s precipitation total and water resources suffer disproportionately, compared to other regions. Alternatively a relatively few large or “extra” storms may result in a particularly wet year.

This year, we seem to be having a year that was extremely dry getting a last-minute reprieve by an AR blast.