Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: On Snow

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This whole Up Front thing we’re doing at the Journal, with a rotating cast of writers doing front page columns on pretty much whatever amuses or intrigues them, is a bit of an experiment. My entry today was more experimental than usual, not sure if it worked entirely, but it was fun.

The back story: I had a different topic in mind that for newspaper production reasons was pulled out from under my feet. (It ran as a straight feature story last Sunday.) I needed to do some kind of a March 1 snowpack update anyway, I’d just been on a delightful bike ride in the snow, and snow is just plain cool.

The result. Snow. What’s up with that? (sub/ad req)

The little clumps of snow pelting us last Thursday as a friend and I rode bikes in the Albuquerque foothills were just right: enough to be beautiful, but not so much to be dangerous or even annoying.

Above us, clouds shrouded the top of the Sandias, and my riding buddy got it right when he said mountains just look right with snow on them.

New Mexico’s mountains have looked right for much of the winter. With a warm El Niño in the Pacific driving storms our way, this has been a good snow year in New Mexico. Not great, but if you like snow, it has been good.

The classic El Niño southern storm track has left most of the state’s southern mountains piled with more than twice as much snow as normal for this time of year. Most of the snow measurement stations in northern New Mexico are slightly above average.

Somewhere up in those clouds above the Sandias last Thursday was what Kerry Jones, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office, later explained to me was the “dendritic growth layer,” the place where snow is made.

Toward a More “Patient-Centered” Climate Science

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Academia’s institutional culture fails to reward the critical work of tailoring climate science to the people who most need to understand its implications, according to a fascinating new paper by Kristen Averyt, in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Averyt is deputy director of the Western Water Assessment, a University of Colorado-based group that walks the talk she’s talking about here, working with water managers around the West to provide policy-relevant information on climate and climate change. (Gregg Garfin and the folks at the University of Arizona’s CLIMAS project are another example of similar work here in the West.)

This is about the all-important question of adaptation to a changing climate. Given the climate change already in the pipeline, and the lack of progress in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, understanding the nature of a changing climate is a critical political and policy question.

Too often, Averyt argues in her BAMS paper, academic climate science rewards publication in technical journals at the expense of the sort of interdisciplinary work with the people and institutions that need the science being produced to support their decisions:

Unfortunately, there are two major hurdles preventing climate scientists from successfully building integrative research frameworks that include decision-makers in the scientific process. The culture of the academic climate science community fails to teach the younger generation of post-graduate students how to work with decision-makers in order to develop successful applied science strategies, and it fails to reward junior faculty members for focusing on multi-disciplinary, user-involved climate science.

One of the problems, Averyt argues, is an academic system that rewards publication in the peer-reviewed literature at the expense of other forms of policy-relevant scientific publication:

The science that informs climate adaptation planning decisions is not necessarily published in traditional, peer reviewed journals, but often in assessments and guidance documents categorized as “grey literature.” Despite the importance of grey literature in decision support, these scientific efforts are not held in the same esteem as peer-reviewed publications, and often do not carry the same weight in hiring, tenure, and job promotion decisions. Yet such “grey” literature can at times undergo even more rigorous reviews than the journal process (e.g. IPCC, CCSP Assessments).

Scientific education also generally fails to teach young scientists what Averyt describes, by way of metaphor, as a sort of “patient-centered” outreach to the consumers of the science they are producing:

As a first step, scientists must learn to hone their bedside manner. An imperative component of linking users with research is building stakeholder relationships, particularly with the regional and local entities that will likely make most of the decisions related to climate adaptation. Again, medicine can serve as a guide here for the climate sciences. During medical school and nursing classes, professors teach students about the importance of constructing professional trust when working with patients, as studies reveal better outcomes for patients who trust their medical caregivers. Similarly, scientists must learn to value and use the information coming from “patients.” This model needs to be applied to some aspects of climate science: the upcoming generation of climate researchers must have the opportunity to learn how to work with “patients” beginning in graduate school. Then, junior scientists should be encouraged to use integrated approaches to answer the novel research questions shaped by these relationships.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Teaching About Nature Around Us

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From this morning’s newspaper, a piece about the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program (sub/ad req). I’ve been hearing great things about BEMP for ages, and finally did what I should have done years ago, which is call up Dan Shaw, one of the program’s directors, and ask if I could come hang out and do a story.

I’m so glad I did:

This little patch of bosque on the river’s west side, just south of the Montaño bridge, must be the most intensely studied bit of ecosystem in Albuquerque.

Located behind Bosque School, it is home turf for the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program.

The 13-year-old research and education program started with a group of Bosque students looking at the after-effects of a 1995 fire near Tingley Beach. But while the riverside woods behind Bosque School are still its base of operations, the program today involves some 5,000 students and teachers each year studying 25 sites along a 140-mile stretch of the Rio Grande.

Western Water in the Health Care Debate?

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How seriously do Westerners take their water conflicts? Arizona Sen. John McCain brought it up yesterday during the White House health care debate. From the Washington Post’s transcript:

There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One’s called California, the other called — called Texas.

I won’t talk about California, because the Arizonans hate California, because they’ve stolen our water.

(thanks to Lissa, my personal health care policy expert, who was watching yesterday)

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More on Feinstein and the Minnow

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Rio Grande silvery minnow

Rio Grande silvery minnow

Because some things should be printed on paper and thrown on people’s driveways, in this morning’s paper I revisit Dianne Feisntein’s comments on the Rio Grande silvery minnow:

Rio Grande silvery minnow, meet California’s delta smelt.

Y’all have a lot in common. But perhaps not as much as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have Californians believe.

California is embroiled in a political war that looks very much like the drought-driven 2003 legal and political fight over the fate of the Rio Grande silvery minnow, but on a much larger scale.

Feinstein wants Congress to intervene and override Endangered Species Act protections for the tiny delta smelt to ensure water deliveries for some of California’s farmers.

As precedent, Feinstein cites action taken by New Mexico’s congressional delegation in 2003. But in her zeal to defend California farmers’ water, Feinstein is rewriting New Mexico history.

Green River Nukes and Water

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The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy.

Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the Blue Castle nuclear power plant proposed for Green River, Utah.

Located on the Green River northwest of Moab (map), the town of Green River is home to the John Wesley Powell River History Museum, and if Aaron Tilton has his way, it will also be home to Utah’s first nuclear power plant, as Rachel Waldholz reports in High Country News:

The Green River proposal has sparked intense skepticism. Critics ask where the funding will come from, where the electricity will go, and, of course, what will happen to the waste. But the first hurdle is more immediate. In the Utah desert, this possible climate change solution is colliding with one of its projected consequences: water scarcity.

Blue Castle needs some 50,000 acre-feet annually — enough water to supply up to 100,000 homes — to cool the reactors of its proposed 3,000 megawatt plant, which would produce enough electricity to power nearly 3 million households.

It’s not yet clear whether to take this project seriously. Nuclear power folks expect new reactors to be built at existing reactor sites, and to be built by existing power companies. Blue Castle fits neither criteria. But the water part of the story, as Tilton tries to win permission to move water rights from elsewhere in the state to Green River to cool the plnat, makes it a fascinating case study in how we move water around the West to cope with our growing energy needs.

The Recycling of Falsehoods

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One of the things my colleagues and I found when reviewing the history of the ’70s global cooling myth was the consistent way alleged evidence was recycled through the literature by those perpetuating the myth. It was easy to verify the recycling in two ways. First, there were characteristic mistakes and elisions introduced early that were then repeated verbatim by other authors. Second, we found in many instances that the original text, taken as a whole, said something quite different than the recycled version.

Journalists, scholars, and anyone trying to think well have an obligation to drill down as close as they can to the original source of the material as they can. To do otherwise, recycling quotes merely to prove one’s point without doing the due diligence to ensure the quote really does support that point, is cheap sophistry, as Benny Peiser, Christopher Monckton and others seem to have done in their repeated recycling of a quote from Sir John Houghton that Houghton never seems to have uttered.

Boslough in SI: Playing By Different Rules

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Writing in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer, physicist Mark Boslough argues that scientists are being held to a higher standard in the media and political debate over climate change than those who oppose them:

Denialists have attempted to call the science into question by writing articles that include fabricated data. They’ve improperly graphed data using tricks to hide evidence that contradicts their beliefs. They chronically misrepresent the careful published work of scientists, distorting all logic and meaning in an organized misinformation campaign. To an uncritical media and gullible non-scientists, this ongoing conflict has had the intended effect: it gives the appearance of a scientific controversy and seems to contradict climate researchers who have stated that the scientific debate over the reality of human-caused climate change is over (statements that have been distorted by denialists to imply the ridiculous claim that in all respects “the science is settled”).

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The View from Rattlesnake Point

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Courtesy USFS, head of Elephant Butte, circa 1999, as the Rio Grande peters out into a delta choked by its own sediment

Courtesy USFS, head of Elephant Butte, circa 1999, as the Rio Grande peters out into a delta choked by its own sediment

From this morning’s Journal, the struggle to help a river get to its destination when it doesn’t really want to go there on its own (sub/ad req):

RATTLESNAKE POINT — Without Jason Thibodaux’s help, the Rio Grande would have a hard time making it past this sediment-choked desert flood plain.

Around a bend in the muddy, shallow river, a heavy equipment operator supervised by Thibodaux scooped sand from the main channel, building a berm on the east bank.

The goal, Thibodaux explained, was to keep the river flowing downstream toward Elephant Butte Reservoir. Without the help, the river would peter out into the flatlands on either side of its narrow channel.

State and federal water agencies began the project nine years ago when drought dropped water levels at Elephant Butte, the Rio Grande’s largest water storage reservoir. Elephant Butte “became disconnected from the river,” explained Chris Stageman, who manages the work for the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission.

Each year crews have had to return, digging and shaping the channel to coax the river’s water supply downstream to the reservoir.

Without the effort, the water in this stretch of river would just spread across the flood plain and disappear, said Mike Harvey, a Colorado hydrologist who has worked in the area. “It’s just hung out to dry, basically,” Harvey said. “It just evaporates.”

update: Eric Perramond has a nice look at the key meta issue here:

The challenge for EB is keeping the Rio Grande channelized enough so that water eventually reaches the actual reservoir, instead of spreading out in a typical distributary delta like so many others that occur around the world, when a river meets ultimate base level (the sea). Here, it’s the constant battle between slope, sediment supply, and the currents of the river that dictate where the river struggles to make it to the dead pool of the dam. And unlike the Nile or the Mississippi deltas that are slowly disappearing, this inland Rio Grande near-delta actually re-forms every year. Given the amount of sediment thrown from semi-arid mountain landforms, it’s no surprise that flood and sediment control are a major concern. Throw in impervious cover, and you speed up the work that water can actually do in carrying sediment long distances in New Mexico.