California in a Warming World

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The problem with climate change is change. It’s a simple thing, really, but it’s a point sometimes missed. It’s not that it gets warmer or colder or wetter or drier. It’s that it gets different, and the societal systems we’ve put in place to cope with what used to be “normal” become less useful.

A case in point: California. I just ran across this paper from the October Journal of the American Water Resources Association. It’s from a group at UC Davis that ran global 12 climate change scenarios against California water supply models to see what happens as things warm up. As you might expect, the snow melts sooner:

Even most scenarios with increased precipitation result in less available water because of the current storage systems’ inability to catch increased winter streamflow in compensation for reduced summer runoff.

Available water supplies decrease in 9 of the 12 scenarios they looked at. It’s worth noting, too, that in a number of scenarios the Davis team looked at, the decrease in available supply as a result of warming is comparable to the increase in demand from growing population in California. In other words, vulnerability as a result of climate change is comparable in this analysis to vulnerability as a result of societal change.

That’s “Estimated Impacts of Climate Warming on California Water Availability Under Twelve Future Climate Scenarios,” Tingju Zhu, Marion W. Jenkins, and Jay R. Lund, JAWRA, Oct. 2005.

Feed Conversion

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Over lunch today, Nora and I were trying to solve the world’s problems, and the conversation drifted to feed conversion ratios – how much food you have to feed to a chicken, pig or cow relative to the amount of food you get out as a result. If you’re going to eat meat, chicken seems to be the best bet, according to numbers in Naylor et al. in the Dec. 9 Science:

FCRs for chickens and hogs on an edible weight basis are roughly one-fifth and one-third, respectively, that of cattle.

In other words, it takes five times as much food in to get a pound out of your dead cow as it takes with a chicken, and three times as much for the cow compared to the pig. (Worldwatch suggests similar ratios, as does the farmed salmon industry’s trade association.)

Heeding the Cassandras

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Chris Mooney has a piece in Seed about heeding the Cassandras – the scientists who saw trouble coming and tried to warm people. In this case, it’s Al Naomi, who works for the Corps of Engineers:

Pre-Katrina, he was pushing for a study of how to bring the city’s hurricane protections up to Category 5 levels. That’s what Naomi doesn’t like being right about: the imminence of disaster. That’s why, now, he’s “up to his eyeballs” in work. (Better than in water, but still.)

It’s a good piece, but it stops before the question gets really interesting.

Any time we have a natural disaster, it will be possible to find such Cassandras after the fact who saw the looming danger and suggested a way to protect against it better. Their proposed solution will inevitably have been expensive, but in retrospect it will look darn good. The problem is that we don’t have unlimited resources to protect against all such dangers, the forecast of which is always probabilistic, even with the most insightful Cassandras at work. And we do have Cassandras at work across our great land, from the New Madrid Fault (a lot more we could do there) to the San Andreas Fault (a lot more we could do there) to the urban wildland interface all across the U.S. to the…. Well, you get the idea.

The interesting problem is how we decide which Cassandras to listen to and how we prioritize the expenses they suggest we incur.

The Semicolon

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Santa gave Kurt Vonnegut’s new book to Nora and me for Christmas, and I finished it this morning. Perhaps when I’ve more time I’ll jot down some ideas about Vonnegut’s significance to me as a writer (or perhaps I already have, though the idea deserves a bit more development than you’ll find there). But for now, I’ll just leave you with this bit of advice to writers. He offered it in a talk here in Albuquerque in 2002, and he repeats it in the book:

Do not use semicolons.

He also has bad things to say about Bob Hope.

Daybook

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stuff I wrote elsewhere: 2005 Duke City’s 6th Hottest Year:

Albuquerque is getting warmer.

The year ends as one of the wettest and warmest years in history here. The warmth is a trend, while snowless mountains suggest the wet is not.

readings: An interesting window into a world I don’t travel in: Teenagers Mix Churches for Faith That Fits.

music: One of the CD’s lost in last year’s car burglary was my Best of the Velvet Underground. I just discovered that I’d loaded a bunch of the songs onto my Palm. Sweet.

Daybook

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book: I’m rereading bits and pieces of Rivers of Empire, Donald Worster’s 1985 book about water and the west. When I read it 20 years ago, I was sympathetic to Worster’s argument that the concentration of power required for great irrigation works defined the social and political structures of the west. Not entirely convinced, but sympathetic. At the time, I was living in LA and spending a good deal of time writing about water politics. I’m still not entirely convinced, viewing the guarantee of an available water supply a necessary but not sufficient condition for the political and social structures I see around me today. Which brings me to my….

Quote of the day: “The idea that nature has something to do with the shaping of culture and history is an idea that is both obviously true and persistently neglected.” – Donald Worster, see above.

word(s) of the day: “slow-worm,” a legless lizard. (You can tell the difference by the eyes. Lizards have eyelids.)

days: Our saint-of-the-day is Thomas Becket, who got whacked in his own cathedral by four knights (“Will no man rid me of this turbulent priest?”) 835 years ago today, causing everyone to feel so bad that he was sainted two years later. This is also Admission Day in Texas, commemorating its membership in The Union. Various people were whacked in the leadup to that event as well.

Music: A certain Christmas elf (who shall remain nameless because of questions involving federal copyright law) gave me a great mix CD with Bob Dylan, k.d. lang, Kenny Wayne Shepherd and a rockin’ version of “Mustang Sally” by Buddy Guy.

Getting Lit Up

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While we here in Albuquerque were busy this holiday season setting ourselves alight, the residents of Tokyo appear to have tried a different approach. We had fun here. James suggests the Tokyo version is not worth the bother:

This picture really doesn’t do them justice – they were much more boring and inconsequential than they appear. Folks, save yourselves the bother, look at the posters on the trains, and stay away.