Another indicator of the resilience of California agriculture

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Despite drought, the value of California cropland land has risen 5.4 percent this year, according to the latest U.S. Department of Agriculture survey data. No doubt my economist friends can help me here with an explanation of what this says about how the market is pricing questions about uncertainty, water supply and risk. Looks like maybe drought has slowed the upward growth? But in the two years before the drought set in, cropland value dropped, then began rising again during the drought. Dunno:

Source: USDA

Source: USDA

 

2015 elsewhere around the Colorado River Basin states:

  • Arizona: $8320 an acre, unchanged from 2015
  • Colorado: $1,910, up 3.8 percent
  • New Mexico: $1,440, down 0.7 percent
  • Utah: $3,300, up $1.2 percent
  • Wyoming: $1,370, unchanged

The best editor I ever had mostly wasn’t my editor

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Oh my, this picture of journalism:

Jim Timmermann

Jim Timmermann

That’s my old friend Jim Timmermann, the best editor I ever had, who died last week. He wouldn’t want me to bury the lede.

A few days ago, staring at a computer monitor in frustration as I tried to figure out what to type, I quipped thus….

There is a great risk in journalism of being distracted by “story”, by which I mean some arresting narrative that will grab your reader. “Story” is critical, but my point with that glib tweet was that it’s the wrong place to start, but that it’s often the only place to start.

Many years ago I had the great good fortune to work in the newsroom of the Pasadena Star-News with a smart young journalist named Jim Timmermann. We were kids, products of fine 1970s-80s-era liberal arts educations (Jim from Pomona College in Claremont, me from Whitman in Walla Walla) and largely self taught as journalists.

Jim was insatiably curious about how things worked. For much of the time we shared the newsroom he was the paper’s business editor, but he wasn’t much interested in stories about businesses. He wanted to understand the nature and structure of our community’s economy. He recognized that “business” was just a piece of that, and the stories came from understanding the thing and only then finding the stories that illustrate the thing. It’s sorta like the distinction between anecdote and data, though in neither case is the line separating the two clear, and in journalism it’s a difficult line to find as you’re in the midst of making a newspaper every day, doing inductive reasoning on the fly. It’s mostly an impossible goal, because you’re writing stories, explaining the world 500 words at a time, a collection of anecdotes, what I mean by “story” in my glib tweet. Impossible yes, but a good goal nevertheless. (Sorry, Jim, for the run-on sentences, but it’s my blog, and I’m in tears, and I’ve got no editor.)

I mostly didn’t work for Jim, but he was my closest colleague and good friend and we spent many hours talking about the thing, whatever that thing was lurking behind the anecdotes we were busily jamming into the newspaper every day. I don’t think either of us at the time grasped how hard a task it was, because we were young and had huge printing presses in the basement and ink delivered, I’m not making this up, in tanker trucks (if you were in the newsroom late enough in the evening, you could feel the building shudder when the press run started) and the great joy of making a newspaper every day.

Jim was a fine man, a deeply religious, moral man who loved his family and tried to make the world better with the modest tools at hand.

I also am reminded by Andrea Goodell’s lovely obituary that he was a Jeopardy winner. If I recall his telling of the story (this was before I knew him) he won a set of Skyway Luggage on Wheels.

The Cold War was so much easier – water project development as a matter of national security

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Sandia National Laboratories in the 1950s

Sandia National Laboratories in the 1950s

In 1960, the Cold War was a thing – the moral imperative of our global stand against the commies. At the time, Albuquerque, New Mexico, was one of the nation’s centers for nuclear weapons research, development, and management. What better reason for supporting water development?

From a May 20, 1960 hearing before the House Subcommittee on Irrigation and Reclamation on the San Juan-Chama Project came this, from John Bliss, New Mexico’s Upper Colorado River Commissioner:

Albuquerque is one of the most rapidly growing cities in the United States. Located there are large installations which play a vital role in our program of research and development for national defense. An assured water supply is essential for the continuation and possible expansion of that program in the Albuquerque area….

They built the project.

Stationarity, recurrence intervals, and our perception of weather and climate extremes

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Robert Osborne and Jonathan Overpeck published interesting pieces in the last couple of days reinforcing an important point about our perceptions and understanding of recurrence intervals in big weather and climate events. Osborne is in the southeastern U.S. and is writing about flooding (short term) while Overpeck is in the southwest and is writing about drought (much longer time scales) but their points have an important parallel.

Osborne spent some time debunking the “1,000-year flood” meme that sprouted around South Carolina’s October floods. They weren’t. And that matters because….

I am afraid that remembering this event as a 1,000-year flood event for the state absolves this event from reality to a statistical fantasy realm where no one lives, works and raises their families. A realm filled with locusts and wild beasts. A realm where we can go back to normal after the page is turned. There is no doubt we will turn the page in our State, but we don’t learn from fantasy tales. We learn from hard reality. We learn from remembering the bumps and the bruises. We adapt based on where we think the next hits are going to come from in the future.

Overpeck makes a similar point when he notes that a drought stretching back to 1999 in the Colorado River Basin does not constitute a “megadrought” – by which he means the kind of drought we know can happen here in the southwest:

Are we in a megadrought? As a scientist who studies Southwest drought, I face this question more and more often. The answer might not be what you think, but first let’s review what a megadrought is, and why we should worry.

Megadroughts are variously defined as drought lasting multiple decades, being unlike anything we’ve seen since Europeans came to the region, or an event with unprecedented consequences for society. The threat is real. The history of drought preserved in tree rings reveals several multi-decade megadroughts in the last 2000 years. The most famous ones occurred during medieval times, and were likely linked to Native American abandonment of settlements across the Southwest. The longest Southwest megadrought yet documented occurred nearly 2,000 years ago and lasted over 50 years.

So, are we in a megadrought now? The best answer is not yet, but we will be unless we act soon. Fortunately, we still have a choice.

Again, but in a different way, Overpeck is arguing (like Osborne) that we have some agency here, an ability to act that is lessened if we think of the crazy weather as “a realm filled with locusts and wild beasts. A realm where we can go back to normal after the page is turned.”

Librarian love for “The Tree Rings’ Tale”

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I’m happy to note that my book The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate (Barbara Guth Worlds of Wonder Science Series for Young Readers) was a November pick of the month by librarians at the Clovis-Carver Library in Clovis, New Mexico.

Not too early to think about a Christmas gift for that bright young person in your life! You can pick up a copy used for 3 cents on Amazon. (Really. 3 cents is a steal. Do it.)

Climate change, the Rio Grande forecast problem, and the death of stationarity

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Laura Paskus takes us this morning to the mountains of northern New Mexico, where the snow is melting earlier than it used to, and less of the ensuing runoff is making it into our Rio Grande:

[A]s bleak as southwestern springtime stream flow forecasts have been in recent years, scientists at the University of New Mexico are now saying that actually, they’re probably not bleak enough.

“The warm spring temperatures are one of the clearest observed climate change signals in North America,” says David Gutzler, a professor in the University of New Mexico Earth and Planetary Studies Department.

Gutzler is part of the New Mexico Universities Working Group on Water Supply Vulnerabilities, which has been working on identifying points of vulnerability in our societal-ecosystem-water system. One of their key findings, developed by Gutzler’s student Shaleene Chavarria, is that changes in the climate weaken the old forecast tools, which are used to relate winter snowpack to runoff the following year.

This is the point Chris Milly, Julio Betancourt, and colleagues laid out in an important paper a few years back on “the death of stationarity” (pdf). “Stationarity” was a foundational assumption in water management – that the range of observed variability in the past provides a usable picture of the expected range of variability and system behavior in the future:

In view of the magnitude and ubiquity of the hydroclimatic change apparently now under way, however, we assert that stationarity is dead and should no longer serve as a central, default assumption in water-resource risk assessment and planning. Finding a suitable successor is crucial for human adaptation to changing climate.

The Paskus piece is part of a new reporting project being done by New Mexico In Depth, a non-profit news organization based here in New Mexico.

Biker wedding, Albuquerque New Mexico

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Bandidos wedding, Pat Hurley Park, Albuquerque

Bandidos wedding, Pat Hurley Park, Albuquerque

Lissa and I were sitting this afternoon in Pat Hurley Park, up on the west mesa (best view in Albuquerque, check it out) when we heard the rumble of Harleys. A couple of dozen bikes, a full biker wedding. And, being an outlaw gang – Bandidos, whose regalia included New Mexico “bottom rockers” (see Jeff Proctor’s famous bottom rocker story for an explanation) – they of course rode right up onto the lawn for the photo shoot.

You can see it was a nice spot for their wedding pictures on a perfect fall afternoon.

I love Albuquerque.

Cadiz, scientization, and how Dan Sarewitz almost drove me out of journalism

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Ian James at the Desert Sun this week took on the journalistic task of rounding up the back-and-forth over the politics, law, policy, and science of the Cadiz project, a proposal to pump groundwater in the deserts of Southern California and ship it off for use in coastal plain cities.

Ian, who’s earned a reputation in recent years as one of the smartest reporters working on the science of climate and water in the arid southwest (the American Meteorological Society recently honored him for his work) does a solid job on the politics, law, and policy, and then does the best any of us can hope to do on the science in a situation like this, which is punt.

The science questions here are two, which overlap: would the project harm sensitive desert ecosystems and environments, and would it really yield the amount of water its proponents claim. The project’s supporters say their science clearly supports “no” to the first and “yes” to the second. The project’s opponents say the opposite.

Three years ago, I made a prediction: science won’t settle Cadiz. We have more science. The question isn’t settled.

scientization

In 2004, political scientist Dan Sarewitz wrote a paper that changed the trajectory of my journalistic career: How science makes environmental controversies worse. I had long imagined that my job as a science journalist was to understand what science had to tell us about important political and public policy questions and then explain it in a way that would help influence positive outcomes. By that time in my career (a couple of decades in) I had spent a lot of time at the effort, and it didn’t seem to be going well. Sarewitz’s paper offered an explanation:

[S]cientific uncertainty, which so often occupies a central place in environmental controversies, can be understood not as a lack of scientific understanding but as the lack of coherence among competing scientific understandings, amplified by the various political, cultural, and institutional contexts within which science is carried out.

The more I learn about groundwater hydrology, the more I realize it is an epistemological task steeped in genuine uncertainties. You can’t really look underground directly, data’s sparse, resulting answers you get are based really importantly on the modeling assumptions you make. And so it is not surprising under any circumstances to have different scientists come up with different answers. You sorta expect it.

Sarewitz isn’t making a postmodernist argument that permits any science to be true (ick that). Rather, it’s an up front recognition of the inherent limitations of the scientific enterprise:

[N]ature itself—the reality out there—is sufficiently rich and complex to support a science enterprise of enormous methodological, disciplinary, and institutional diversity. I will argue that science, in doing its job well, presents this richness, through a proliferation of facts assembled via a variety of disciplinary lenses, in ways that can legitimately support, and are causally indistinguishable from, a range of competing, value-based political positions. I then show that, from this perspective, scientific uncertainty, which so often occupies a central place in environmental controversies, can be understood not as a lack of scientific understanding but as the lack of coherence among competing scientific understandings.

Sarewitz maps what happens in the face of those limitations to the political and policy process. In “scientized” debates, political actors with differing value position attempt to win the argument about policy by winning the argument about science, picking from among competing scientific interpretations that which supports their value position. Importantly, Sarewitz is not arguing that the question of who pays for the science is influencing the results (though that’s an issue), but rather that this is an inherent problem.

It made the journalistic task seem hopeless to me for a time, but quitting wasn’t really an option. I had no other useful skills, though I did start joking about taking up welding. And there are, in fact, science-politicized debates (like the more egregious folks unwilling to deal with real climate science) where journalism can help. But Sarewitz also pushed me toward a bit more humility about how the nature of science related to the things I could accomplish with my journalism. And it forced me to look more closely at the value propositions underpinning debates over the genuine uncertainties in science-related political and public policy questions, helping me to sidestep some of the problems posed by scientization.

When I took to social media today to point to the connection between Sarewitz’s ideas and Ian’s Desert Sun story, the flack for Cadiz had this response:

 


Kinda made my point for me.