Peter Gleick’s year-ender includes a discussion of one of my favorite topics: the misrepresentation of “consensus science”:

One such doughnut hole is what climate change skeptics call “consensus science.” They argue that just because the vast majority of serious climate scientists believe in the greenhouse effect – that humans are causing the earth’s climate to change in unprecedented ways – the consensus doesn’t make climate change “true.” Indeed, consensus doesn’t make something correct. But the theory that humans are causing unprecedented climate change is nevertheless a better explanation than any competing theory to explain the growing mass of evidence – coming from dozens of disciplines of science and millions of different observations. Such consensus among scientists is a tremendously powerful thing, for it indicates the strength of a theory.

(Hat tip Mike Campana, who runs a great little informal email list on water policy issues.)

Last Link in the Chain: Dam Will Help Wean ABQ From Its Dependence On Aquifer Water. But you really ought to check it out in the paper copy of the newspaper if you have a chance, for maximum benefit of Carol Cooperrider’s lovely graphic explaining how the city’s new Alameda dam works, and for Jim Thompson’s photos of the construction site. I was more instigator (I’ve been curious about the project for a while) than journalist on this one.

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.

The overnight low this morning in Albuquerque – 42 – was a record. Previous record – 41, back in 1982. (Via NewWest, we note that it’s a bit colder in Pinedale, Wyoming.)

(update Jan. 2, 2006: Ken points out that it dropped down to 38 before midnight, so that’s the official Jan. 1 low. I hate it when that happens.)

Tropical storm Zeta.

Atlantic sea surface anomalies.