Adios, El Niño

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This’ll probably come as good news to my drought-plagued Australian friends. El Niño’s just about done. For us here in the U.S., the precipitation pattern – dry in Arizona, wet in Seattle – suggests that no teleconnection really got engaged in any sort of a big way, reflective of either how weak it was, or maybe just noise in the system. Dunno.

It’s worth noting that, despite such a weak El Niño, January was bonkers warm globally, according to the NASA Gistemp crew, warmest Earth has ever been, according to their numbers. No doubt Earth timed this to coincide with the release of the IPCC report. Clever planet.

Northern Flicker

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Flicker

Our most spectacular neighborhood bird, the Northern Flicker, paid a visit to the backyard pond this morning. The pond is really a stock tank whose purpose, in addition to the entertainment provided by its undirected ecosystem, is to serve as a watering hole for neighborhood birds.

Last weekend, Lissa banged through the ice and within a couple of hours there were half a dozen robins there drinking. This morning, our flicker popped down from the telephone pole along the back fence for a drink. I didn’t think he’d be able to get any, as the pond’s been frozen over lately. (Global warming? What global warming?) But he found a little bit of water showing over on one edge and plunked down on the ice for a long drink.

Water in the Desert

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Alameda DamOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

John Wesley Powell would be proud. From his 1878 “Report on the Arid Lands“:

There are two methods of storing the waste waters. Reservoirs may be constructed near the sources of the streams and the waters held in the upper valleys, or the water may be run from the canals into ponds within or adjacent to the district where irrigation is practiced.

We’ve had dams up the Rio Grande for some time, but Albuquerque is just now, more than a century later, getting its first dam. Lissa and I were out walking today along the river, and for the first time saw the dam raised. It’s a modest affair, design to create just enough head to divert water into a intake structure on the Rio Grande’s east bank, from which it will be pumped to a new treatment plant now under construction.

Those who revere Powell as the great proto-environmentalist would do well to note his language. “Waste water” was water humans weren’t using. The West’s natural resources, Powell believed, were there for the exclusive use of humans – and European immigrant humans at that. He’s revered because he understood, more than those of his days, that there were limitations to the exploitation of the West’s resources. But it’s important not to miss his central purpose, which was to squeeze every bit of human use possible out of West.


Hayduke Returns

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If you want to understand the contradictions of life in 21st century west, there are two books you must read: John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Arid Lands, and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. You also must understand that both were deeply insightful, and that both were also full of crap, and thinking through the contradictions within and between the two books is essential.
Coco points out that the Durango Herald points out that the Desert News points out that they’re making a movie of The Monkey Wrench Gang. It’s hard to imagine how one might make a film of the Report on the Arid Lands, but it’d make a terrific double bill.

IPCC Precipitation Map

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IPCC Precipitation Map

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

By what seems like a series of coincidences (or not?), I’ve been reading and writing and trying to write lately about maps – the information in them, the things cartographers leave out of them, their implications for understanding things about the world around us, and also the choices we make about what we don’t need to understand. So I’m launching a new category today on Inkstain: maps.

Today’s entry is Figure 6 from the IPCC report released yesterday. Given the frequent use of the phrase “global warming” as shorthand for this complex thing we all talk about, much of the attention ends up focused on temperature. This is reasonable, given that globally averaged temperature is an area of relatively greater understanding. But we don’t live globally. We live “here”, wherever “here” might be. And central to our life “here” is how much precipitation falls from the sky. Figure 6 in the new report attempts to convey in a visually understandable way what is known and not known about this centrally important issue.

The map’s color choices are obvious: brownish means dry, blueish means wet. (As an aside, I was at a talk yesterday where a guy used the opposite color scheme on a climate map – the red end of the rainbow for wet anomalies, blues and greens for dries – very confusing.) But beyond wet and dry, there’s a second kind of information that we also need to know, which is the confidence of the forecast. Places with no confidence are just left white. Places with higher confidence get a little stippled overlay.

I found this map very useful yesterday as I was writing about the IPCC report.

Skiing in Bolivia

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Who knew there was skiing in Bolivia? Not any more, apparently:

Their pride in the ski resort here, the only one in Bolivia, soon gives way to a grim acceptance that the glacier that once surrounded the lodge with copious amounts of snow and ice is melting fast.

Attributing the melting to the growing emission of greenhouse gases causing global warming, scientists say Bolivia’s skiing tradition could be extinguished when Chacaltaya’s modest ski run disappears forever in a few years.

No One Drought…

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I know that you can’t blame a single drought, heat wave, hurricane, etc., on climate change. But the current drought in Australia has clearly become part of the political dynamic there. Consider a couple of stories on the wire this morning. First this:

Immediate reductions in greenhouse gas emissions will not halt the continuing damage to Australia’s environment, a federal government researcher warns.

The CSIRO expects Sydney’s maximum temperatures to rise 1.6 degrees by 2030 and 4.8 degrees by 2070.

Average rainfall will decrease by 40 per cent and water evaporation rates will jump 24 per cent by 2040 under the scorching conditions.

And this:

With Australia gripped by its worst drought on record, the issue of climate change has emerged as a battleground in this year’s national elections.

Prime Minister John Howard has come under renewed criticism for not ratifying the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, making Australia the only major industrial nation other than the U.S. to reject the treaty that mandates lower emissions of global-warming greenhouse gases.