Science Communication

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So I’m not sure how this happened, but apparently I’m all over the Internet this week as the token science journalist trying to defend my entire profession. Good luck with that, me.

  • Eli started it, and I tried to discuss things with him there. I figured I would get an indulgence since he was kind enough to single me out in the post as being, I think his words were “not a fucking idiot”. What was I thinking trying to engage in a thoughtful conversation? It’s Eli! I forgot. Stupid on my part. But there were some other participants in the comment thread who were pretty interesting, so it wasn’t a waste.
  • Stoat jumped in with a “me to too” to Eli. He also gave me a shoutout as being, I think he said, “not a fucking idiot“, one of the few “telling the truth”, but he has to say that, we’ve been co-authors. (I stand corrected)
  • Keith Kloor picked up the conversation, mostly to poke Eli (Eli and Keith don’t like one another – it’s kind of a soap opera), and the conversation thread was fun, though no one should have to read 100 comments. So forewarned. If you want to skip, though, the thread was my introduction to Andy, who was the smartest guy in the whole conversation. He excerpted his comment on his own blog.
  • Then Tom Yulsman joined in (disclosure: Tom and I once dined together on haunch of some forest creature – see link to photo at bottom of Tom’s post for a picture of the meal). I said mean things about Eli in the comment thread that I’m sure I’ll regret, but as I said, it’s a soap opera.
  • Michael Tobis and “willard” collaborated on an adaptation of Waiting for Godot that seems to have something to do with the discussion, though I’m not sure what. But the comment thread extended the conversation, for which I thank Michael.
  • Now I see Bart also has done a nice job of skipping through all the ill-tempered things we said and assembled a nice summary of the discussion that actually makes it look somehow reasonably coherent, putting Bart on par with Andy for actually having something useful to contribute to the whole affair.

There’s already six threads going with enough comments for a lifetime, so I’d prefer you don’t say the sames thing here that you’ve already said everywhere else. Unless it involves praise for my wisdom. Then please do come in and set a spell.

update: Clearly one way in which journalists suck is that we really badly need editors 🙂

River Beat: Bonus Water Likely

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The March forecast out today (pdf) for this year’s operations on the Colorado River is looking very good for the chances of extra water to be shipped downstream to help top off the dwindling supplies in Lake Mead. The magic word here is “equalization”, which means that under the river’s operating rules, there is sufficient extra water upstream in Lake Powell to allow some extra water to be released to raise Mead’s levels in the direction of “equalizing” the amount stored in each reservoir:

Reclamation estimates that an April adjustment to the Equalization Tier is very likely to occur in 2011. For this adjustment to not occur, the April-July inflow forecast volume would have to decrease from the current level (9.2 maf) to approximately 7.1 maf which would be a decrease of about 2.1 maf. In the past 32 years, only once has the forecast decreased by at least this volume from one month to the next. For this reason, Reclamation estimates the probability of an April adjustment to the Equalization Tier in 2011 to be approximately 97 percent.

Mead, Powell Storage

Mead, Powell Storage, data courtesy USBR

Equalization, importantly, allows the Lower Basin states to get extra water above and beyond the Colorado River Compact’s requirement.

As you can see from the graph (click to biggen), which I’ve updated to include estimated storage volumes for the end of the current water year, Powell is now forecast to end the year ever so slightly below last year’s level, while Mead will see the largest increase in storage volume since the 1990s. In elevation terms, the surface of Lake Mead is now forecast, thanks to the extra water, to end the water year (Sept. 30) at 1105 feet above sea level, 21 feet above last year’s level.

The runoff is the result of a snow season that has left much of the southern Colorado Basin terribly dry, made up for by a decent snow pack in the north.

Colorado Basin Map

Colorado Basin Map, courtesy CBRFC

As Shaun McKinnon reported today, Arizona is sucking a very dry dusty wind right now:

The numbers — especially the runoff forecasts — spell bad news for Arizona’s streams and rivers. With so little snow in the mountains, the streams and smaller rivers will dry up sooner, leaving less moisture for riparian systems. Rivers like the San Pedro, which is dry for long stretches in good years, and the Little Colorado could have particularly bad summers.

I had much the same to say about New Mexico in a story yesterday morning (sub/ad req):

The outlook for New Mexico’s water supplies this spring is grim, federal forecasters say, after a dry February sapped what little snow the state received earlier in the winter.

“It’s not looking real great at this point,” said Wayne Sleep of the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

Tallying up the snow at a network of measurement sites around the state, Sleep and his colleagues last week forecast just half the normal flow this year on the Rio Grande into Elephant Butte Reservoir.

But the farther north you get, the better things look, and all that snow melts and flows downstream in our direction. Yay nature.

Stuff I wrote Elsewhere: A Visit to Work Case 82B

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From this morning’s paper, a visit to Work Case 82B (sub/ad req) at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology, where they keep that which has gone extinct:

The Carolina parakeet on the top shelf of Work Case 82B, green with a dingy red head, looks little different from the other 30,000 stuffed birds in the research collection at the Museum of Southwestern Biology.

The most noticeable difference — the case is locked.

The special care needed in curating and caring for the Carolina parakeet and the other residents of Work Case 82B is, from a museum management perspective, entirely practical.

“You can’t get new ones,” said Andy Johnson, collections manager of the bird collection at the University of New Mexico research museum.

 

Fighting for Atlanta’s water: what was it I was saying about lawyers?

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In a thread last month, Francis offered this as one explanation for the prominence of lawyers in western US water policy discussions:

The states are co-equal sovereigns, and the feds have not invoked federal supremacy.

It applies elsewhere. In Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the state will go to court next week to argue for nothing less than Atlanta’s water supply:

On Wednesday, the state of Georgia will ask the federal appeals court in Atlanta to overturn a judge’s ruling that found it illegal for the Army Corps of Engineers to draw water from Lake Lanier to meet most of the metro area’s needs.

In that shock-and-awe ruling in 2009, Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson set a doomsday clock ticking. If Georgia, Alabama and Florida cannot arrive at a water-sharing agreement that is approved by Congress by July 17, 2012, metro Atlanta can only take the same amount of water it received in the mid-1970s.

That this may come down to lawyers arguing in court is an interesting outcome. The other potential solution is an agreement among states, which as I’ve discussed before in a post on former Reclamation commissioner Bob Johnson’s comments on the issue, seems to this westerner a perfectly reasonable approach given how wet it is out there:

The ACT and ACF basins have far more unallocated water to play with in sorting out the conflicts. “They’ve got 60 million acre feet of excess water,” he said. “On the Colorado River, we’ve got zero.”

But as a direct result of that lack of water on the Colorado, we’ve got a rich legal framework – the Law of the River – and accompanying personal and institutional relationships to go with it. “We have 80 years of fighting and working together,” Johnson said to the audience of Colorado River Basin water officials.

By comparison, in the wet climate of the southeast, water officials had few relationships with their colleagues in other states, and few institutional structures through which they could deal with problems when they arose, Johnson argued. In other words, they have plenty of water, but lack the tools they need to approach the problem of sharing. Because they’ve never had to think of it that way.

So while it may be true that we’ve got a lot of lawyers involved out west, the lawyering has so far avoided a major city going dry. But here we are, watching a federal court in Atlanta next week looking for a solution to what could be the nation’s biggest water problem: Atlanta (average rainfall 50 inches/125cm a year) going dry.

Links:

On Fear

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Daniel Treisman:

Among the countries for which I have data, the most robust correlates of fearfulness relate to countries’ religious traditions. Fear tends to be higher in countries where more people believe in Hell and where fewer believe in Heaven.

Flood Irrigation

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Chris Corbin argues that flood irrigation isn’t the bogeyman it’s frequently made out to be.

Some footnotes Chris and I came up in a twitter conversation:

This is all related to a post I’ve been cooking up, not yet completed, on the water policy version of the Jevons paradox. Its common formulation involves energy, and the assertion that efficiency measures don’t save as much energy as you think. Given groundwater recharge and return flows, the principle also applies to water.

 

The Great Stagnation

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I just finished and very much enjoyed Tyler’s Cowen’s The Great Stagnation (my first ebook too!).

Cowen’s argument, for those not familiar with it, is that the stagnation of the U.S. economy is not the result of anything we’ve done wrong, but rather the fact that we managed the impressive rate of growth over the course of the 20th century by doing all the easy things, educating people who didn’t used to be educated, expanding public infrastructure like interstate highways, etc. Those things are all done now, and we’ve benefitted enormously in terms of GDP. But he argues we shouldn’t expect to see similar continued rates of GDP growth because there’s no obvious similar low-hanging fruit.

He concludes with a sort of kumbaya that sounds almost hokey as I excerpt it, but it is a sentiment I share:

Be tolerant, and realize there are some pretty deep-seated reasons for all the political strife and all the hard feelings and all the polarization. Government revenue, and private sector revenue, simply isn’t rising at the rate of our demands and expectations. No matter what your particular political commitments, be part of the solution to the current rancor, not part of the problem. Don’t demonize those you disagree with.

3 million acre feet

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We will know in a little more than a month whether Lake Mead will get a flush of “bonus water” this year, and if so how much, thanks to the better-than-average snow pack in the Upper Colorado River Basin.

Right now, things look good. Current snow levels, as measured by the network of federally funded snow sensors around the mountains, are 22 percent about average on the tributaries that feed into the Colorado River above Lake Powell (numbers via the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center). With a bit more than two days left in the month, both Mead and Powell are close to the optimistic side of the probability distribution in the most recent US Bureau of Reclamation “24-month study” (pdf).

Hoover Dam

Hoover Dam cutaway, courtesy USBR

A lot is at stake. The current forecast calls for enough inflow into Powell to meet the criteria of “equalization”, which means letting more water out of Powell to “equalize” levels between it and its downstream sibling, Lake Mead, behind Hoover Dam. Without equalization, Lake Mead would drop close to the level that triggers a shortage declaration in the lower basin. The US Bureau of Reclamation makes the equalization decision based on a formula that takes into account the levels of both reservoirs. The bottom line is that the forecast calls for Powell to be high enough at the end of the 2011 that all of the extra water flowing into the system this year will be passed straight through, down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon and into Lake Mead.

As a result, despite the big snow pack, Lake Powell is forecast to end the current water year at pretty much exactly the same level it was at a year earlier – 3633 feet above sea level, 14.2 million acre feet in storage. Lake Mead, on the other hand, will have risen 21 feet, to 1105 feet above sea level, or 11.9 maf in storage.

So what’s wrong with this picture?

Let’s follow the numbers. Lake Mead gets 3.2 million acre feet of “bonus water” from Lake Powell – water delivered above and beyond the Colorado River Compact’s required 8.23 maf annual delivery, essentially all the extra water nature delivers in this above-average year. But its end-of-year storage will be just 1.85 maf above last Sept. 30. This is because the states of the lower basin use, year in and year out, more water than nature and minimum compact requirements deliver.

Depending on above-average winters does not a sustainable water policy make.

The first thing we do, let’s kill all the water lawyers…

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Let me preface this by saying I am fond of lawyers. We kid because we love! Please don’t sue!

I had a bright light epiphany yesterday when talking to a smart water policy friend who works both in the United States and internationally. He was hosting a group of Australians here learning about Colorado River management who observed thus. To paraphrase: “Y’all sure have a lot of lawyers involved.”

I spend a lot of time reading and talking to water lawyers. I am fascinated by water lawyers, and like some of them. (I kid! I love you all!) But it occurred to me that there is no other political or policy domain I work in that is as dominated by lawyers as western water.

Why is that?