Ag, Land Use and the Whole Crisis

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The failure of the Colorado River to reach the sea, Jonathan Foley argues, is evidence of dramatic challenges facing humanity that go beyond climate change. From an essay at Environment 360:

Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of this, 70 percent is used for irrigation, the single biggest use of water, by far, on the globe. As a result, many large rivers have greatly reduced flows and some routinely dry up. Just look at the Aral Sea, now turned to desert, or the mighty Colorado River, which no longer sends any water to the ocean, for living proof.

Foley, a climate scientist and head of the Institute on the Environment at the University of the Minnesota, argues for a more inclusive view of the set of global problems we face. He believes the argument in favor of action on climate change is close to being won. But the struggle to feed earth’s growing population, and the enormous implications that has for land and water use around the world, pose problems of similar scale to that of decarbonization of our energy system, Foley argues. And those problems right now, he believes, are getting short shrift.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: A Look at CO2 is Green

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A look at the science and financing behind the “CO2 is Green” ads running in New Mexico (ad/sub req):

It is hard to square Leighton Steward’s cheery message with the vast swaths of dead trees across the mountains of northern New Mexico.

“Fall of ’02 is when they started to die,” biologist Craig Allen told me a few years ago as we walked through a forest of piñon corpses in the Jemez Mountains.

The years 2002 and 2003 were very warm and very dry in the mountains of northern New Mexico. It’s been this dry here before, but this time around far more trees died. Why?

When Allen and a group of colleagues crunched the numbers, they noticed that, like much of the globe, New Mexico has been warmer in the 21st century than it has been since we’ve been measuring.

It was bark beetles that finished off the trees, but it was the heat of the drought of 2002-03 that made the difference between a garden-variety drought and the massive forest die-off, the scientists concluded.

Scientists say the reason for the warming is rising levels of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide from the tailpipes of our cars and factory stacks. That heat, Allen and his colleagues concluded, explains the widespread tree death.

So why does Steward, a charming 74-year-old Texan, say carbon dioxide emissions are a good thing?

Georgia Drought In Perspective

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Richard Seager’s new paper on Georgia drought has been well-covered by Cornelia Dean in the New York Times, and I’ll let her make its central point: that Atlanta’s problems “resulted from population growth more than rainfall patterns.”

Seager and his colleagues point out something that I banged away on a bit a couple of years ago – that the parched years that dried out Lake Lanier, which serves Atlanta’s water, were nothing out of the ordinary range of variability. (But they’re real scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature. I was just engaging in blog science.)

The Atlanta affair was a bit of a puzzle for those of us out West who think of drought and climate variability in very different ways. Here, climate varies on decadal scales – the “drought of the ’50s”, for example, arguably stretched from the late 1940s into the 1960s, or possibly, depending on how you measure, into the 1970s. It ebbed and flowed over both time and space, with wet places and wet periods interspersed among the dry, but it was a long haul.

Similarly, the wet period that followed stretched from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, before things started drying out again.

That decadal-scale variability is a characteristic, Seager and his colleagues write, of climate variability in the central and western parts of North America. On the east coast, droughts are a phenomenon of one to a few years, and periods as dry as the most recent one are a common feature of the Georgia climatology. But in the period between the last time this happened and the 2006-2008 drought Georgia’s population grew nearly 50 percent. Also worth noting – the period during which most of that growth occurred was unusually wet.

As I said back then, “If you can’t handle events within the normal range of variability, you’re screwed.”

Dr. Seager and his colleagues have a great set of web pages summarizing their drought research. Their work is a model of good outreach beyond journal publication to the interested public. The Georgia stuff, including a link to the Journal of Climate paper, is here. Their main drought page is here.

Water News

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Borrowing a page from Emily Green’s book, I’m trying (again) a sporadic roundup of some of the interesting water things I’ve been reading:

  • Henry Brean on the potential effect of the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s pumping plans on Great Basin National Park:  “I’d like them to know that we’re extremely concerned — very concerned — and we just don’t believe that the taking of water out of this little valley will be a good thing for the park.”
  • This old news to those who closely follow western water, but for those who don’t, my former Albuquerque Journal colleague Mike Taugher has been doing some great work on the political and monetary entanglements surrounding a federal review of endangered species issues in the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta: “Acting at the request of Beverly Hills billionaire and Kern County water baron Stewart Resnick, U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein is seeking a high-level scientific review of new endangered-species permits that farmers and others blame for water shortages.”
  • The Casper Star-Tribune in Wyoming opines on what has the potential to be one of the biggest struggles to come in western water, a proposal to pipe water – a lot of it – from Wyoming to front range cities in Colorado.
  • It started in India as drought, a horrible failed monsoon. Now the rains have come with a vengeance: “The sudden rains, coming after a severe drought, deluged villages and caused widespread disruption in the states of Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka.”

Jon Stewart Does Water

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I love Jon Stewart’s television program, but it’s rare that he does a subject of direct relevance to my little blogoworld. But last week, he did water. Specifically, a look at a Fox News discussion of the complex public policy questions surrounding California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c
Where the Riled Things Are
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show
Full Episodes		 Political Humor Ron Paul Interview

A Western Water Milestone

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Unbeknownst to me, Thursday was the centennial of the first electricity flowing from the generators at Roosevelt Dam, arguably the first great dam of the modern era in the West.

Roosevelt Dam, picture courtesy Salt River Project

Roosevelt Dam, picture courtesy Salt River Project

Located 60 miles up the Salt River from Phoenix, it was the highest dam in the world when it was built, according to Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire, (a great history of water in the western United States, and especially of the federal government’s role).

Worster describes how the newly formed Reclamation Service (now the Bureau of Reclamation) was invited in to settle conflict over the limited water in the Salt River by building a big-ass dam. With, of course, a hefty subsidy from the federal government, and a willingness to ignore a federal restriction aimed at ensuring that Reclamation’s projects benefit the small farmer of Thomas Jefferson’s dream.

The dam was not completed in 1911, but the power plant was finished while the rest of the dam was still under construction, in order to supply electricity for the project.

The Salt River Project people have a nice writeup of the centennial.

On Media and Bunk

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Michael Tobis believes the prevalence of bunk on the issue of climate change is “one of the principal characteristics of our time,” and that the media’s failure to effectively counter said bunk is a fundamental failing that stands in the way of action on climate change.

As I said in a previous discussion of this issue, I believe Michael and I share a core value: that political and public policy processes have the best outcomes when science is well understood and used by the participants. But Michael’s analysis of the media-public piece of this issue is increasingly unhitched from the data.

Much as the climate discussion has to be based on data that clearly shows an overall warming of the planet, rather than anecdotal references to single cold spells, we need data on what the broad public is really thinking, and on what the media is really saying, rather than anecdotes about John Tierney and George Will.

In 2006, according to an analysis by Max Boykoff, now at the University of Colorado, (summarized in a piece on Nature’s web site), 96.7 percent of the news stories in a broad sampling of the mainstream press accurately described the anthropogenic causes of climate change, while only 3.3 percent offered some “balancing” comment questioning greenhouse-caused climate change. Boykoff’s data suggest that the problem of what media critics call “false balance” has been steadily declining.

Jon Krosnick at Stanford has done scientific polling for more than a decade. His conclusion, from a talk he gave last year: “Americans overwhelmingly accept the scientific community’s view of global warming.” But when Krosnick slices up the data in political terms, he finds that Democrats and independents are more likely to believe the scientific consensus, while Republicans are more likely to views at odds with the scientific consensus.

What seems salient here is the combination of the two. Boykoff says the media have largely accurately described the situation. For whatever reason, Krosnick says that didn’t sink in for a subset of the public. Those who believe the bunk either disbelieved or were not aware of what the media was saying. The notion that people filter information based on their politics/values is well documented in the literature. In this case, a segment of people have chosen to reject what the mainstream media has told them because of their political/value filters.

This would strongly suggest that, to the extent that bunk of this sort persists, it is relatively impervious to media intervention. To the contrary, Michael seems to think the news media can somehow change the minds of people who have already chosen to disbelieve or ignore what they read in their morning paper.

The data from Boykoff and Krosnick suggests potentially fruitful areas of discussion about how the news media can more effectively help to ensure good public understanding of climate science. I welcome Michael’s contributions to that discussion.

Navajo-Gallup Water Project Moves Several Inches Forward

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Back in the 1970s, Congress asked the Bureau of Reclamation to study the feasibility of extending a water line across western New Mexico to carry water from the San Juan River to Gallup, New Mexico. Gallup’s a desert city, dependent on a limited aquifer. Gallup sits on the edge of the Navajo Reservation. The Navajos also don’t have a whole lot of water either – less, in fact, than Gallup. So in 1975, the Navajo Nation essentially said, “Hey, what about us?”

Today, in a Washington, D.C. news conference, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar announced that the Navajos (and Gallup) will finally get their water. Maybe.*

The project Salazar announced is classic Western water in a couple of ways. First, it’s big, muscular, expensive engineering. The pipeline to carry the San Juan’s water to Gallup and the waterless Navajo communities will stretch more than 200 miles. But it’s also one more case where, despite being legally first in line for “paper water” under the doctrine of prior appropriation and its interpretation by the U.S. Supreme Court, the Native Americans are last in line for federally subsidized “wet water”.

Albuquerque, for example, is now drinking its share of Colorado River, via the San Juan-Chama interbasin project, “the bulk of which was subsidized by the federal government,” as Charles Wilkinson notes in Crossing the Next Meridian. Similarly, non-Indian farmers and cities all across the West have been the beneficiaries of federal largess in the development of the water systems that underpin our hydraulic society.

Chuka Mountains

Chuska Mountains

It seems not unreasonable for the Navajos to get a piece of the action.

* The “maybe” is my way of characterizing the question of funding uncertainty. The Energy and Water Appropriations Bill that passed out of conference committee yesterday allocated $3 million for the first steps. The project has a complex funding mechanism to try to insulate it from the whims of Congress in the long term, but in the near term at least, it will need annual appropriations.

More:

Picture of the Chuska Mountains, licensed under Creative Commons, courtesy Teofilo

On the Risk of Overstating

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Two of my favorite climate scientist-communicators recently posted on the risks of overstating.

First is Simon Donner on Ketsana, the tropical storm that devastated the Philippines:

The climate policy talks in “nearby” Thailand have led to a number of sloppy media reports and climate activist statements about the role of climate change in Ketsana. For once, I actually agree with Roger Pielke Jr, that people need to stop crying wolf about climate change and extreme events. Asking about climate change after a prolonged summer heat wave that could have come right out of a doubled CO2 regional climate model simulation is reasonable. The effort to draw a link between climate change and tropical storms during a rather middling storm year (in terms of power) is scientifically questionable. When the storm in question has had such a terrible human tool, it is also a bit tasteless.

And in short order, William Connolley makes a similar point in a critique of Paul Krugman’s most recent effort:

So K is puzzled: In a rational world, then, the looming climate disaster would be our dominant political and policy concern. It could be that we don’t live in a rational world (evidence: cars kill far more people than terrorists but we aren’t about to declare an undying war on cars). But another possibility is that the evidence for a looming disaster is weaker than K thinks.