Markets in Everything*: Beatification

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Barro and McCleary get to the bottom of one of the central questions in 21st-century economics – beatification:

We classify these blessed persons regionally in accordance with residence at death. These data are combined with time-series estimates of regional populations of Catholics, broadly-defined Protestants, Orthodox, and Evangelicals (mostly a sub-set of Protestants). Regression estimates indicate that the canonization rate depends strongly on the number of candidates, gauged by a region’s stock of beatifieds who have not yet been canonized. The beatification rate depends positively on the region’s stock of persons previously canonized.

* MIE meme stolen from Tyler Cowan and Alex Tabarrok

Endangered species grow pals – the climate change connection

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Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition

Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition

While shopping recently at the Dollar Store, Nora and I came across the new frontier in climate change communication – inexpensive toys.

The Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition, is apparently collectible, and was a bargain at just $1. (It’s the Dollar Store.) Its package includes this helpful background:

Penguin populations have decreased by nearly 80 percent in some areas, and the majority of scientists agree that rising temperature due to climate change is the primary culprit.

It does not cite a source, but I find the information entirely credible. What incentive would the maker of an inexpensive children’s toy have to be other than fully authoritative in its packaging?

As an added bonus, when one places the grow toy in a medium container full of room temperature water, it apparently will grow to several times its original size, but it can be shrunk again simply by removing it from the water and allowing it to dry. This will apparently provide hours of fun, though I’m hesitant to remove the penguin from its packaging, as it might reduce its collectability.

One note of caution, however. It is a choking hazard, with small parts, and is not for children under three years of age.

On the implications of pumping California dry

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So what if we pump California’s Central Valley aquifers to empty? On The Public Record twiddles on the back of an envelope:

Before this report, my rough feel was that about one million acres of irrigated lands in CA are supported by unsustainable groundwater withdrawals. If overdraft is 10 MAF/year in the Central Valley, it makes me think my prediction of a loss of 3 million acres of irrigated ag is conservative, rather than the wild-eyed provocation one finds on blogs these days.

I’ve no idea if the number is right, but the order of magnitude seems reasonable, and it’s clearly Big Number of acres that are unsustainable, however off the calculation is and in whichever direction the error is to be found.

River Beat: Updated Forecast

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Forecast flow on the Colorado River as a whole and major tributaries is down. I was otherwise occupied yesterday and missed the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s monthly briefing, but Kevin Werner has posted his slides.

January Precip

Some high points:

  • January, as you can see from the accompanying image, was remarkably dry across the basin, a big switch from a wet December
  • The February-March-April forecast, driven by La Niña, calls for odds of drier than average conditions over much of the basin, especially the south (just what we’ve been seeing to date)
  • For New Mexico, a drop in the forecast flow on the San Juan
  • A drop in the forecast Lake Powell inflow, but still above average (USBR (pdf) is saying 105 percent for the water year, we’re still waiting on this month’s update on the effect that’ll have on Mead and Powell levels for the year)

Nuke Plant Developer Makes Water Economics Pitch

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It’s interesting to see Aaron Tilton’s approach to selling Utah officials on his proposed Green River nuclear power plant proposal’s economic use of water:

“Water use in a nuclear power plant is very economic,” Tilton said, calculating the power’s dollar output at $127,569 per million gallons, to agriculture’s $5,080. “The benefits are real in terms of jobs, tax base and labor income.”

The envisioned plant would employ 825, compared with 22,500 farmworkers, while agriculture taps 82 percent of the state’s diverted water. Per million gallons, he said, that’s 50 nuclear-energy jobs to 13 farm jobs.

If approved by state and federal regulators and built by Blue Castle Energy, the plant would use river water rights leased from San Juan and Kane counties.

Pumping California’s Central Valley Dry

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New analysis of the tricky problem of quantifying California’s groundwater depletion uses data from NASA’s GRACE satellite to come up with some startling numbers:

Here we use 78 months (October, 2003–March, 2010) of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to estimate water storage changes in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins. We find that the basins are losing water at a rate of 31.0 ± 2.7 mm yr?1 equivalent water height, equal to a volume of 30.9 km3 for the study period, or nearly the capacity of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.

Can you say “unsustainable”?

  • Citation: Famiglietti, J. S., M. Lo, S. L. Ho, J. Bethune, K. J. Anderson, T. H. Syed, S. C. Swenson, C. R. de Linage, and M. Rodell(2011), Satellites measure recent rates of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L03403, doi:10.1029/2010GL046442.
  • More in the press: Groundwater Vanishing in the Central Valley, Pat Brennan, Orange County Register, Feb. 8, 2011

Listening to the Forecast

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Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored:

So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at least four days out – in plenty of time to get people in northern Pakistan’s valleys out of the way. The problem was not with the meteorological and hydrologic science either internationally or in Pakistan. Instead,disaster was ensured when flood warnings were not taken sufficiently seriously by regional authorities, media, and residents.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brutal Cold, Brutal Choices

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From the morning paper, a look back at how New Mexico’s natural gas outages happened (sub/ad req):

Eventually, as the cold gained the upper hand and gas lines emptied, crews closed valves, cutting one community after another off of the gas grid — first Tularosa, then down to La Luz and Alamogordo on the gas company’s southern system. To the north, Red River went first, followed by Questa, Taos and Española in a trail of fallen dominoes that did not end until company officials made the decision to cut service to Placitas and Bernalillo.

Ken Oostman, the gas company’s vice president for technical services, said, “We were very fearful that we could lose the entire system.”

Energy and water, Utah edition

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With a nuclear power plant proposal taking shape in Green River, folks in Utah are trying to get out in front of the energy-water nexus. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

In parts of the country with dependable water supplies, nuclear power naturally fits with plans to boost the nation’s investment in clean energy sources. While nuclear power plants pose unique safety challenges, they produce energy without adding to the carbon emissions that are dangerously warming the planet, just as solar panels and wind farms do.

But here in the second-driest state, nuclear power’s water requirements should be cause for delaying construction of any such plant until the ramifications are clearly understood.

I’ve honestly not been sure whether to take the Blue Castle project seriously. But others clearly are.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Explaining the Cold

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From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req):

[I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees above normal.

“We’re getting what they’re supposed to be getting, and they’re getting what we’re supposed to be getting,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Guyer.