Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Colorado River Delta

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The experimental restart of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant, which should get underway after the first of the year, is more than a technical experiment in operating the big desalination equipment. It is, I think more importantly, a fascinating experiment in cross-border collaboration, as I describe in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req):

Beginning next year, a coalition of environmental groups and government agencies spanning the Mexican border will add water to the Colorado River delta to help preserve a 60-square-mile wetland.

In a region where water is almost invariably taken out of rivers for drinking, bathing and growing food, leaving water for the ecosystem is rare. Doing it voluntarily, without a legal mandate, is unprecedented, participants say.

“I think it’s the first of its kind,” Jennifer McCloskey, head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma office, said of the agreement to pump 30,000 acre-feet of water over the next two years into the Cienega de Santa Clara.

Especially large hat tips on this story to Gregg Garfin, who first got me interested in the issue, and to Andy Revkin, who pointed me in Karl Flessa’s direction.

In Search of Bafflegab in the New York Times

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I’m pretty sure Michael Tobis and I share important goals and values. We both, I think, believe that political and public policy processes have the best outcomes when science is well understood and used by the participants. We both, I think, believe that journalism can and should play some sort of role in helping toward that end.

But in a discussion today in the comments on his blog, Michael and I show a very different understanding of how journalism is executing that role.

Michael is of the view that mainstream journalism, as evidenced in his chosen example by the New York Times, is failing. How? By sharing with readers the “bafflegab” of columnist John Tierney without any contradicting views: “Tierney on the one side and nobody at all on the other, in the most influential liberal newspaper.”

This is false.

Since the first of June, the Times opinionsphere, the part of its journalism that Tierney occupies, has published three op-eds on climate change by Thomas Friedman, two each by Paul Krugman and Ban Ki-Moon, plus one each by Greg Mankiw and Paul Hohnen and Jeremy Leggett, all expressing views consistent with the scientific consensus and in support of action in response.

These are not “nobodies”.

And what of the news pages? I went back through the last 100 hits on the Times’ search engine before I got bored. I found lots of good informative coverage of the international politics leading up to Copenhagen, John Broder’s piece on the national security implications of climate change, Cornelia Dean on the implications of three foot sea level rise, a terrific piece on the drying of the Amazon, coverage of the fake letters from Bonner and Associates to members of Congress, a look at the oil industry funding behind the astroturf citizen rallies. I found zero people quoted arguing that it was really the sun that was responsible, or that it hadn’t warmed since 1998 (update: See correction below), or that it was really El Nino, or that the scientific consensus was collapsing. There was no bafflegab that I could find in the news coverage at all.

Michael also made a more nuanced argument, by way of a question to Keith Kloor and myself:

Are you guys saying that the information presented to decision makers about climate has approximately the same balance as the information generated by the relevant sciences?

I would have to say that, after having taken a quick pass through the last 100 or so things published on climate change in the New York Times and only having found one or possibly two bits of bafflegab (both in the opionsphere), that the answer is, “Well, on balance, if decision-makers on climate change are getting all of their information from the New York Times, then yes.”

Last month, Michael took a perfectly legitimate shot at Marc Morano for gleefully noting every little cold spell without also acknowledging Austin’s record heat this summer. But that is what we do, right? Notice the anecdotes that support our notions of the thing and fail to notice the ones that don’t?

My intent here was not to single out the New York Times for scrutiny. It just happened to be the example Michael cited, and he made a testable claim. This is not merely a “someone is wrong on the Internet” problem, because it goes to the heart of Michael’s efforts to help improve the use of science in politics and policymaking – efforts that I support and agree with. If Michael’s misdiagnosing the problem, then his suggested treatments will be of little use.

update: I note that in my review I inexplicably missed Andy Revkin’s story from this week on the political implications of the “pause” in warming. I don’t think it counts as bafflegab. It unambiguously argues thus: “Scientists say the last decade of climate stability — which follows a precipitous rise in average global temperatures in the 1990s — is a result of cyclical variations in ocean conditions and has no bearing on the long-term warming effects of greenhouse gases building up in the atmosphere.” (emphasis added) But there is, in fact, one story in the hundred that does discuss the alleged lack of warming since the late 1990s.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Mike Connor

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I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western water giants who held the job before him, larger-than-life figures like Arthur Powell Davis and Floyd Dominy.

Connor, who’s only been in the job for a couple of months, was clearly thinking the same way. As he was preparing a talk recently, he reread the Dominy chapter in Cadillac Desert. And realized, he said, that there was less there than he might have hoped. From today’s story:

Michael Connor, the New Mexican who took over as head of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation three months ago, inherited an empire.

It is an empire built by predecessors like the famed dam builder Floyd Dominy, the man who built Glen Canyon Dam.

But when Connor went back to reread Dominy’s story recently in preparation for a talk, he realized how different things are today.

More than perhaps any other government agency, Reclamation shaped the West. The great dam builder of the 20th century, it is the agency behind Hoover and Glen Canyon dams.

Those days are gone, Connor said in a recent interview. “There was a lot of good,” he said, “and there was a lot of bad.”

BuRec: Not Enough In Green River For Transfer Scheme

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The AP’s Ben Neary has a significant story this weekend about a Bureau of Reclamation analysis of how much water really is available from the Green River for an interbasin transfer being proposed by entrepreneur Aaron Million. Million thinks there is a quarter of a million acre feet a year available. While studies are ongoing, the preliminary analysis from the Bureau suggests the real number is a lot less:

Malcolm Wilson, chief of the Water Resources Group for the Bureau of Reclamation in Salt Lake City, said the bureau’s draft study doesn’t support Million’s plans.

“I think Mr. Million’s aware of our numbers, and we’re not sure where he gets his,” Wilson said. “Certainly what we saw in this study, as you can see, does not support his numbers. But maybe he has something else.”

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Pecos Sunflower Edition

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From today’s newspaper, the story of a private property owner and a loose-knit coalition of folks around her working to preserve and restore one of the most remarkable stretches of Rio Grande riparian wildlands in the middle Rio Grande (sub. or ad req):

A gate that used to keep cattle in now keeps them out of what is likely the largest privately owned riverside habitat restoration project on the middle Rio Grande.

For more than a mile, along the river’s east bank, dense thickets of invasive salt cedar and Russian olive have been cleared, leaving isolated clumps of cottonwoods and the gentle curve of the river.

After a dry spell earlier this summer that left the river bottom nothing but isolated pools of water surrounded by dry sand, recent rains have brought the Rio Grande back to life. On a recent late Sunday afternoon, barn swallows and nighthawks darted over the open space, snatching bugs from the sky.

“The river has a personality,” said Matt Mitchell, a neighbor and member of a loose-knit coalition that has banded together to help Rhodes preserve and restore this isolated flood plain.

Virtual Water Made Actual

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Occasionally for lunch I slip away from the office, grab a sandwich from one of the places across the street, and head over to a little flood control pond about a mile from my office to check out the birds.

The sandwiches are messy, and inevitably little bits of lettuce spill out on the ground around me. Which, I’ve noticed, the local ants particularly love. I can only assume it’s the water content, since iceberg lettuce has very little nutritional value.

Imperial Valley farmland, courtesy Doc Searls

Imperial Valley farmland, courtesy Doc Searls

As I watched an ant struggle the other day with a piece of lettuce as large as itself, I was struck by the way this bit of virtual water had been made actual.

“Virtual water” is the term of art for importation of a water-intensive product. We don’t have enough water here in New Mexico to grow iceberg lettuce, so we import it from the Imperial Valley, along the Lower Colorado River. It’s a lot cheaper and less hassle to just import the lettuce, rather than schlepping the water all the way across the continental divide. It’s sunny in the Imperial Valley, and thanks to accidents of geography, law and history, the valley’s farmers have an awful lot of cheap water at their disposal for the growing of lettuce.

So here we have this vast apparatus of irrigation infrastructure in the Imperial Valley, refrigerated shipping to get the lettuce to Albuquerque, a sandwich shop, me – all to bring a bit of water to an ant. There are doubtless more efficient ways, but it has a sort of Rube Goldberg charm.

(photo courtesy Doc Searls, some rights reserved)

Our Southwestern Dystopian Future?

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I confess that my literary life list does not include Dune, Frank Herbert’s sci-fi epic. But perhaps it should.

For a show at the University of Toronto, architect Andrew Kudless has drawn on Herbert to design a dystopian future urban world in which we southwesterners dig down, building underground to preserve our water:

Sietch Nevada is an urban prototype that makes the storage, use, and collection of water essential to the form and performance of urban life. Inverting the stereotypical Southwest urban patterns of dispersed programs open to the sky, the Sietch is a dense, underground community. A network of storage canals is covered with undulating residential and commercial structures. These canals connect the city with vast aquifers deep underground and provide transportation as well as agricultural irrigation.

Or perhaps a bunker to hunker down in when we finally have to fight the water wars? Can we grow lettuce on the roof? Long term, is this what Cadiz is really heading for?

(h/t io9)

Just Add Water II

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When I started making noises about some sort of Colorado River project, one of the water wonks I know pointed me toward the delta, arguing it was a) central to understanding the Colorado, and b) widely ignored.

The problem, in short, is that essentially no fresh water flows there any more. An ecosystem once sustained by annual flows well in excess of 10 million acre feet per year now gets bubkes. Instead, I’m drinking it. I mean that quite literally. The glass of water to the right of my computer right now. Had my community not built a series of dams and a tunnel beneath the continental divide to convey this water to my drinking glass, said water would instead have dribbled into the delta. Think dead clams.

There’s some journalistic traction to the story right now, however. The water mavens of the Lower Colorado are not satisfied with taking almost all of the water. There’s one salty stream left, some frankly really crappy agricultural runoff from the farms around Yuma, too gross to put into the Colorado, so a drain was built to funnel them into what were barren salt flats. But, as an old Italian Catholic lady I knew in South Pasadena used to say, “The life force is strong.” At the end of the drain, a lovely wetland has grown up. But the mavens want that water, too.

Which is a long way of introducing Randal Archibold’s story in today’s New York Times about the struggle over the future of Cienega de Santa Clara:

But now the protracted drought in the Southwest has led water managers to rethink the possibilities for the wastewater, placing the preservation of the wetland, the Ciénega de Santa Clara, at the center of a delicate balancing act between the growing thirst of California, Nevada and Arizona and the delta’s ecology.

The biggest challenge involves a plan to take some of the wastewater, purify it at a desalination plant and direct it to other uses under a treaty that proportions the Colorado River among the Western states and Mexico.