Odds of Extra Water for Mead Drop

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It remains too early to say a whole lot about what to expect in the 2009-2010 water year on the Colorado River, but the odds of extra water to buck up Lake Mead are dropping. Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation put the chances at 50-50 that there would be enough water in Lake Powell to spill extra, above and beyond the normal 8.23 million acre feet, down past Lee’s Ferry and into Lake Mead.

The December “24-month study report“, which lays out the current thinking, now puts the odds at a bit better than one in three that there will be enough water in Powell next year, based on the byzantine operating rules, to allow extra water to raise the levels of Lake Mead.

Drought and Politics in Ecuador

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One of the points that Mickey Glantz makes is that drought, as a societal rather than a meteorological event, requires not just the rain to fail, but also a society’s institutions. So what’s happening in South America right now, in particular the political fallout from a reduction in precipitation, is intriguing. From Ecuador:

A drought in Ecuador is causing power blackouts throughout the country, slowing the economy’s recovery and helping to push Rafael Correa’s popularity to the lowest point of his presidency.

The approval rating of the firebrand socialist fell to 42 percent in a recent Cedatos Gallup poll, half of what it was in the early days of his government in 2007.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: E-Mails Don’t Put Water in the Colorado River

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From this morning’s newspaper:

Here in the Southwest, the question of whether we can trust climate science — not the few scientists involved in the e-mails, but the enterprise as a whole — matters a great deal because of what the science’s leading practitioners have been telling us in recent years.

Tucked away in a routine Bureau of Reclamation report released last month was this remarkable fact: The decade of the ’00s has been the driest 10-year stretch in the Colorado River Basin, in terms of the amount of water available for cities, farms and the river’s ecosystem, since record-keeping began more than 100 years ago.

Lake Mead, the massive reservoir that stores Colorado River water for Nevada, Arizona and California, is at its lowest level since it was first filled in the 1930s. Its upstream sibling, Lake Powell, is not much better.

With Albuquerque increasingly dependent on water imported from the Colorado River Basin for its water, and Santa Fe soon to follow, what happens there matters in New Mexico.

The shrinking river and dwindling lakes must have an eerie and unpleasant “told-you-so” feel for California water researcher Peter Gleick. In 1993, in one of the first detailed studies of the effect increasing greenhouse gases might have on the great river basin, he and a colleague predicted declining flows in the arid west’s great river.

Where’d All That Water Go?

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New data being presented by NASA scientists at this week’s AGU meeting shows how truly remarkably fast California’s aquifers are being sucked dry:

New space observations reveal that since October 2003, the aquifers for California’s primary agricultural region — the Central Valley — and its major mountain water source — the Sierra Nevadas — have lost nearly enough water combined to fill Lake Mead, America’s largest reservoir. The findings, based on data from the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace), reflect California’s extended drought and increased rates of groundwater being pumped for human uses, such as irrigation.

It is worth remembering here the regulatory environment. California doesn’t keep track of or regulate in any way groundwater pumping. It’s a classic “common pool resource”, and the farmers have no incentive not to pump in a drought like they’re in now. If Farmer Brown shows restraint, Farmer Jones down the road can still pump just as much. This is the sort of thing Elinor Ostrom talks about when folks don’t get together voluntarily to manager their commons.

Judge Throws Monkey Wrench Into California Water

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AP is reporting this evening that a state judge in California has thrown out the 2003 deal by which California agreed to stop using so damn much Colorado River water:

A California judge has tentatively invalidated a landmark pact to curtail the state’s overuse of water and allow other Western states to claim their fair share.

Superior Court Judge Ronald Candee ruled Thursday in Sacramento that the state improperly agreed in 2003 to pick up much of the cost of saving the Salton Sea in southeast California.

Restoration of the dying Salton Sea is a key piece of the 75-year pact, which calls for Colorado River water to be shipped from desert farms to San Diego. The deal was aimed at reducing California’s long overreliance on the river.

The QSA set up the means for ag-urban water transfers to help get California down to its 4.4 million acre foot allotment of Colorado water. It also provided some hope for restoration of the Salton Sea, whatever that might mean in practice.

More background from the Riverside Press-Enterprise.

Dead Pool, the Colorado River and the Solution Space

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In Dead Pool, James Powell sketches out an apocalyptic scenario facing the hydraulic society we’ve built in the West on Colorado River water. (It’s a great read. If you’re interested in western water, you daren’t miss it.) After building up the history, science, politics and policy that have developed over the last century, Powell lays out his hypothesis for what happens next, when increasing demand collides with decreasing supply and the web of institutions we’ve built to manage the whole thing collapses.

Lake Powell drops to “dead pool” in his scenario, the point at which no electricity can be generated and there’s no usable water storage left, just a stagnant pond with every acre foot that flows in simply passed on to downstream users. Litigation follows, and upper basin water users (including Albuquerque in Powell’s scenario) are cut off. They turn back to their dwindling groundwater, but that runs out, and slowly but surely the cities that depend on Colorado River water are abandoned:

Businesses and families begin to abandon Phoenix, creating a Grapes of Wrath-like exodus in reverse. Long lines of vehicles clog the freeways, heading east toward the Mississippi and north toward Oregon and Washington. Burning hot, parched and broke, the city that rose from the ashes achieves its apogee and falls back toward the fire.

It’s a scenario rooted in conflict, and while it is only one of many ways the conflict might play out, it has a plausible feel. What we’ve got here is not exactly a classic “tragedy of the commons,” but it has key elements of one, and Powell’s “dead pool” scenario is a spot on example of the collapse of such a commons.

At the same time I was reading Dead Pool, I’ve also been reading Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons. Ostrom won the economics Nobel for her work looking at commons where tragedies don’t happen. (Nothing like a Nobel to provide a marketing platform for one’s ideas. I’m really glad Ostrom won it!) In her book, Ostrom documents the development of the institutions for the management of Southern California’s groundwater basins. It’s an unholy mess, but Ostrom argues that it has worked – that faced with the risk of a classic commons collapse, the various government agencies and private water companies in Southern California cobbled together a set of institutional arrangements that avoided a collapse.

Two years ago, the seven basin states and the federal government established a shortage-sharing agreement. Is this an example of an Ostrom-style solution on the Colorado River? I’m not prepared to argue that the shortage-sharing agreement itself is the solution to the long term problem Powell lays out. But I’m intrigued by the possibility that the unholy mess that now exists as the “Law of the River” – the body of statute, policy and court decrees that govern the management of the Colorado’s water – in fact is the result of an Ostrom-style process for resolving our particular tragedy of the commons, and that the shortage-sharing arrangement is one example of how the conflicts get worked out.

Or are we just screwed? Perhaps this should be the topic of my next book.

(Picture courtesy U.S. Bureau of Reclamation)

My First Amazon Review

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Cynthia Barnett reviews The Tree Rings’ Tale:

Fleck has an eye for the detail that will grab a young person’s attention. My son was interested to learn that scientists in these different fields get to shoot down rapids, launch giant weather balloons and climb rocks. He also loved Fleck’s details about some of the makeshift tools scientists use to do their work. After all, using a Pringles can to store paper straws that in turn store super-skinny tree-bore samples is just the sort of thing kid-scientists do.

I highly recommend _The Tree Rings’ Tale_ to parents and science-minded readers 8 to elder, and to middle- and high school science teachers. I’m convinced that America’s water-supply problems are linked in part to a lack of scientific understanding about water that begins in childhood. _The Tree Rings’ Tale_ would be a strong textbook to help fill this gap, not only in the West where the book takes place, but in any state in the nation.

As a bonus, I was at the Rio Grande Nature Center Sunday afternoon with Mom and Dad. Their bookstore was closed, but I could see through the window my book on the shelf. The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (shipping in time for your Christmas gift-giving needs!)

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Engineering Marvels

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From yesterday’s newspaper, a slightly sheepish ode to my fascination with really, really big water engineering projects (sub/ad req.):

From the time I first toured Hoover Dam as a kid — “enough concrete to pave a strip 16 feet wide and 8 inches thick from San Francisco to New York,” as the Bureau of Reclamation likes to point out — I have been a sucker for society’s big plumbing projects.

In New Mexico, the plumbing doesn’t get any bigger than the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority’s new San Juan-Chama Drinking Water Project. With a price tag of $390 million, the project is arguably the largest public works project in New Mexico history.