Great video by Mark Betancourt on the threat to the deserts of Southern Arizona posed by invasive buffelgrass:
Giant Novelty Item Update
If You Want to Know How to Maximize Your Water, Ask the Israelis
Bloomberg has an interesting story about the business of squeezing the most out of that last drop of water. Talk about having skin in the arid land survival game!
Today, some 300 Israeli companies make equipment to deliver water or purify it with lasers or diffusion, putting them in a position to profit as climate change, population growth and food shortages strain supplies. With agriculture accounting for about two-thirds of global water use, the Israeli government predicts overseas sales of the technology will top $10 billion by 2017.
Coal-to-liquids
One of my crude measures of the long range energy picture has always been coal-to-liquids. At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal. Given Appell’s Theorem, it has seemed inevitable to me that, regardless of the climate consequences, people will end up doing this. The question has been why they aren’t pushing it now, with oil north of $120 a barrel? One possible answer is that the people who have skin in the game are not confident that oil will stay there.
Via Daniel Hall, I see that we’ve now got our first live CTL plant proposal. We’re not talking about a huge plant here. Daniel’s take:
It seems to me like CTL puts a backstop on how high oil prices can remain in the long run, at least if coal production is not constrained. Of course in a world with a price on carbon emissions the CTL fuel is going to have to be a good bit cheaper than oil on a production-cost basis, since CTL involves about 3 times the amount of greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil.
Climate Change and Forecast Skill
I’ve made a healthy journalistic living off of the Climate Prediction Center’s long-lead forecasts, seasonal prognostications about whether we can expect things to be wetter or drier next winter. It got so bad for a while that my sister started calling me Niña-boy.
The thing is, people want to know what to expect. Regular people do, I mean. As I’ve learned over the years, the people with real skin in the game – farmers and water supply managers, for example – are more cautious, planning their lives in a way that is robust to the range of variability they know to expect.
But regular folks want to know what it’s going to be like this winter, and I’ve used a lot of ink trying to tell them.
A new paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society by Robert E. Livezey and Marina M. Timofeyeva looks back at the first decade of serious seasonal prediction, since the Climate Prediction Center started doing this back in the mid-1990s. Turns out that a lot of the skill in the forecast, they write, can be explained by simple trend analysis:
The inescapable conclusion is that this lead-independent skill comes from use of long-term trends to make the forecasts and we show that these trends are almost entirely associated with climate change.
See? Climate change is good for something.
This was me once
I’m in recovery.
Pumping the Colorado
One of the quirks of western water law is the variety of ways the different states treat groundwater. In New Mexico, for example, the law recognizes that groundwater and surface water are inextricably linked. This is merely a recognition of hydrological reality. Pump groundwater, and eventually surface water soaks down to replace it, depleting a surface resource.
In Arizona, not so much. The hydrology is the same, but the law says one can drill to one’s heart’s content in one’s own backyard. I’ve heard stories of residents of Tucson, in defiance of high water rates, simply drilling a backyard well.
Now the Bureau of Reclamation is trying to crack down on such drilling along the Colorado River, according to Shaun McKinnon in today’s Arizona Republic:
Hundreds of people who illegally pump water from wells along the lower Colorado River could face a tough choice soon: Pay to acquire rights to the water or turn the spigot off.
The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which oversees the river in Arizona, Nevada and California, has proposed new rules that target the well owners, who drain as much as 5 billion gallons of water a year from the Colorado.
Most of the well owners are private citizens who have drilled their wells too close to the river. Instead of pumping groundwater, to which landowners have a right, they are drawing water from the river’s subsurface flow. Well owners must get approval to siphon water from the river’s surface or subsurface.
(Note that the New Mexico picture is not quite as rosy as I painted above, because of a state statute currently in the courts that gave a generous exemption for domestic wells.)
stuff I wrote elsewhere
The science communication minefield.
(And a shout out to Dot Earth readers who somehow found their way here on this fine summer afternoon – it’s nice out today! Quit the keyboard and go out and play!)
Eschew the Drive-through
Al Zelicoff’s energy tip of the week almost sounds like a no-brainer: skip the drive-through window. But it’s amazing how many of these really are no-brainers. The question: how to get them in people’s brains?
Energy Quote of the Week
I’m more interested right now in the correct questions than the clear answers:
Is the price of oil today too high given the fundamentals? Could be. Is it too low? Could be. But one thing I’m sure that’s too high is the confidence on the part of those who insist they know the answer.
James Hamilton, from a great discussion of the uncertainties surrounding global supply, demand and price.