Drought and media bias

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Tom Curwen has a great story in today’s Los Angeles Times of the sort that I’d like to see more of – beyond “OMG California is toast” drought coverage to look at what works in the state’s water management, what sort of adaptive capacity exists in the places where water is not running out. Which, it turns out and breathless headlines notwithstanding, is much of the state:

National headlines ask: “The End of California?” News stories track the diminishing snowpack and disappearing reservoirs, and a small fish in the Delta is scapegoated, almond growers and consumers are shamed and the mythology of Western resolve is questioned.

The crisis has led many to wonder whether the state has lost its historic resilience.

But the drama hides reality and for those who have studied California’s long relationship with its water, the drought is serious but hardly a disaster.

“The sky is not falling,” said Jeffrey Mount, senior fellow with the Public Policy Institute of California.

Scary drought map that feeds the "bad news" meme

Scary drought map that feeds the “bad news” meme, only it really is bad!

Distance from my former career (newspaper journalism) has made more obvious something that bothered me while I was in it – the bias toward the bad. The incentives are deeply embedded in the newsroom culture – the knowledge that “gotcha” and failings and trouble are more likely to get you onto the front page, which is the currency of newsroom status (if not financial reward – the jobs mostly pay shit). A friend today shared an interesting bit of research that offers (for me, at least) a fresh explanation. It’s “You get what you want: A note on the economics of bad news“, by Jill McCluskey and colleagues (Information Economics and Policy Volume 30, March 2015):

In a framework where news is informative and consumers are risk averse, diminishing marginal utility implies that information about a negative income shock is more valuable than information about a positive shock, which leads to disproportionate reporting of bad news.

Seems like a reasonable model that could explain a quip from one of my editors that always bothered me: “We don’t write about planes that don’t crash.” I get that writing about the planes that crash is really important, diminishing marginal utility of information and all, but the fact that most planes don’t crash seems important as well. To only write about the crashing ones is to mislead.

Matt Stevens of the Los Angeles Times, who’s been doing a lot of really good drought coverage, had a viral story last month that captured the dilemma – California water officials deliver sobering facts on depleted wells. State water officials had told legislators that 1,900 California wells had gone dry. As has happened repeatedly in California drought coverage, Stevens zeros in on Tulare County, in California’s Central Valley:

More than half of the dry wells are in Tulare County, southeast of Fresno, state officials said. Most of the dry wells there are within the community of East Porterville, where hundreds of residents have gone without running water and volunteers have delivered emergency supplies.

But Stevens also points out that California has between 1 million and 2 million wells. So (contrary to a Times copy editor’s mistaken math) somewhere between 99.8 percent and 99.9 percent of California’s wells haven’t gone dry. I’ve talked about the Porterville problem before (and before that, when it was drought in Texas in 2012, the Spicewood Beach problem – if there’s just one place running out water, it’ll get a lot of media attention). Don’t get me wrong. If I was in California doing journalism, I’d be doing Porterville. In New Mexico in 2013, I wrote about Maxwell, which was our East Porterville/Spicewood Beach. But in retrospect, I realized I’d done it badly, and felt a need to come back and write another story to clean up the mess.

The question of what is going right, or at least not going wrong, in those 99-plus percent of not-dry wells seems like a critical question. What distinguishes East Porterville from the many other Central Valley communities that haven’t run out of water?

Curwen’s story offers a version of this, taking readers down into the weeds to understand the formation of the Santa Ana River Watershed Project Authority, one of a zillion institutional widgets that have evolved over the years to manage California’s increasingly scarce supplies of water. Things are tight everywhere in California, but most places where the water is not running out, which are most places in California, have a story like the Santa Ana.

It is in those myriad details that we’ll understand where future failures loom and how to avoid the next East Porterville.

University of New Mexico Water Resources Program: my newly remodeled career

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UNM Water Resources Program 573 class at Rio Grande Central Avenue Bridge, Albuquerque

UNM Water Resources Program 573 class at Rio Grande Central Avenue Bridge, Albuquerque

Thursday morning I found myself standing knee deep in the Rio Grande. Grinning.

University of New Mexico water resources faculty members Mark Stone (that’s Mark in the green shirt helping the knee-deep students learn to measure river flow) and Becky Bixby were out at the river with the summer field course students. It was a trial run for a multi-day field trip to the Valles Caldera, and a chance for me to tag along and…. Well, I’m not quite sure what I do.

When Bob Berrens, an old friend and the newly named head of UNM’s Water Resources Program, invited me a couple of years ago to join the faculty as an adjunct and help teach the introductory “Contemporary Issues” class, I hesitated. I was working at the newspaper full time and trying to write a book. But my eyes lit up when I realized the faculty appointment came with full university library privileges. Library privileges! Plus, look at this course description:

With a focus on southwestern US, students examine contemporary issues in water resource systems, including water quality; ecosystem health; alternative institutional arrangements and property rights regimes; stakeholder concerns; economics; water supply and demand, policy, management and allocation.

I’d want to take that class if I wasn’t teaching it! That’s fun stuff, right in my wheelhouse. I’ve never been big on planning my life, but once I began working with students any hesitation I might have had melted away. These are bright, engaged people who care about water and are hoping to make a career of it. If I care about helping to solve water problems, which was the whole point of my journalism, it’s hard to think of a better way to invest a bit of my time and energy. Huge potential returns. I couldn’t have planned it better.

As I drifted away from newspaper journalism, the Water Resources Program gave me an office on campus, which has turned out to be a delightful place to spend days in the company of people thinking about water – both students and faculty.

When it comes to the actual scientific task of measuring things, which Mark and Becky are teaching in the summer course, I’m just a dilettante, a dabbler, but I’m always happy to stand next to smart people and ask questions, which I did Thursday morning, mainly of the students. They were measuring the rate of water infiltration into the clay-y soil on the river bank, and the Rio Grande’s flow, and collecting samples of algae and other itsy bitsy life.

Mark demanded I clamber down the bank and into the river with the rest of them, for which I thank him, the Teva nearly lost in the muck notwithstanding. They were learning how to use an acoustic doppler current profiler, which I know all about having done a story on the history of stream gauging. When I say I “know all about it,” I mean that in the manner of the journalistic dilettante, by which I mean I know enough to slot it into a web of knowledge about how stuff works, but not nearly enough to do it myself or teach it to others.

There seems to be some value in my newly remodeled career to this intellectual habit of stitching together disparate elements needed to tell stories, and if I’m not entirely sure what a diatom is, the students can always explain it to me. As I mentioned, they’re pretty smart.

Moving toward drought

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A fascinating analysis by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program concludes that 57 percent of the nation’s population growth between 2000 and 2014 happened in places currently experiencing drought. Weird. But there also is this:

In the midst of these challenges, though, some of the fastest-growing places like Las Vegas, San Diego, San Antonio, and Austin are pioneering new ways to recycle and conserve water, while increasing flows into urban streams and rivers. These innovative steps represent crucial steps to address the country’s needed investment in water infrastructure, as states and localities look to overcome a host of economic and environmental costs in the years to come.

UC Davis team puts 2015 California drought impacts at 4 percent of the state’s ag economy

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The U.C. Davis drought team today released its estimates for the economic impact of the drought this year. Spoiler alert – it’s worse than last year.

Highlights:

  • 560,000 acres fallowed, which is 6 to 7 percent
  • $1.8 billion in direct ag losses (increased groundwater pumping costs and reduced sales), which is about 4 percent
  • Total agricultural employment will continue to grow, but the team estimates job losses, including spillovers, at 18,600 (meaning that without the drought, it would have grown even more)

The full report (pdf)

Hauling water: Navajo

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Many Navajo homes lack running water. Many more draw from shallow wells with poor quality water and resulting health problems. Now, my friends Olivier Uyttebrouck and Roberto Rosales report, this community could also lose its hauler, the grandma who trucks in the only clean water available:

As she pulls up outside a house, residents quickly emerge with barrels, jugs, even a large cooking pot – anything that will hold the precious liquid.
“These people really depend on the water truck,” especially the elderly and those who lack transportation, she said, tearing up as she described the living conditions of some families and children she serves. “That’s why I love my job.”

“Miracle May” leaves Colorado River reservoirs in much better shape than when the month started

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Precipitation departure from average. Source: PRISM

Precipitation departure from average. Source: PRISM

A month that Eric Kuhn of the Colorado River Water Conservation District in western Colorado called a “miracle May” has left the Colorado River’s two largest reservoirs in much better shape than we might have expected given the glum projections of doomsayers like me. Precipitation across the Colorado River Basin has been well above average, and while it has not been enough to make up for a dismal winter snowpack, it has been enough to improve things significantly at the margins, at a time when “at the margins” is where the basin’s managers have been eking out a scary existence.

In particular, a 2016 Lower Basin shortage declaration, which would have mandated reduced water deliveries to Central Arizona, seems a lot less likely.

Lake Powell is ending May with a surface elevation above 3,596 feet above sea level, four feet above the projection when the month began. That’s an extra 400,000 acre feet of water. Lake Mead, less dependent on weather and more dependent on releases from upstream, is nevertheless a foot above its projections, an elevation above 1,076.

The result is a forecast of more than 5 million acre feet of April-July runoff into Lake Powell, up from a forecast of just 3 million acre feet just a month ago. That is still well below the long term mean of just above 7 maf for April through July, but given the slim margins facing water managers right now the bonus water provides a crucial boost.

Before the storms hit, the Bureau of Reclamation forecast showed Lake Powell flirting with a key elevation threshold – elevation 3,575 come Jan. 1. The 2007 reservoir operation guidelines set that as a trigger point that would require water managers to hold more water upstream and reduce deliveries to Lake Mead. That would have meant a lot less water being sent downstream to Lake Mead beginning in October, setting off a cascade of decisions that could have triggered a shortage declaration in the Lower Basin as early as next Jan. 1.

I’ve been joking with basin water managers that they really need to try to avoid a Jan. 1, 2016 shortage declaration, because my book isn’t done. I want the book on the shelves when the shortage declaration hits, so I’ll be the person they call to go on the NewsHour and Diane Rehm and stuff. Fame and fortune seem within reach, but timing is everything.

The water managers often seem not to be amused by this schtick, for which I fully and completely apologize.

With an extra 4 feet of water in Powell as of today, and more likely because of our “miracle May”, a 2016 shortage is looking far less likely, though we won’t know for sure until the next round of model results come out after the first of the month. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest we’re still at risk of a 2017 shortage declaration, but the risk of one in 2016 has dropped dramatically.

Tree Rings and Megadroughts

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Mount Holyoke’s “Academic Minute” has a nice interview with Park Williams, who’s been using tree rings to flesh out the story of the current drought in the context of historic droughts, as it pertains to forests in the Southwest:

I study the year-by-year records left by these rings, and they tell a fascinating story more than a thousand years long, about life in a water-limited world. One of the most interesting chapters is a five-hundred year stretch ending in 1300 AD, when the Southwest was ravaged by a series of prolonged droughts. Climate scientists call them “megadroughts.”

Each megadrought lasted longer than a decade, and probably contributed to the abandonment of ancient cliff-dwelling cities such as Mesa Verde, in Colorado.

Currently, the Southwest is entrenched in a 15-year drought. Tree rings and climate data suggest that this ongoing drought is on par with some of the worst megadroughts of the past millennium.

Click through to listen to audio of Park telling the story himself. And just FYI, if you think this stuff is interesting and want to share it with a youngster you know, I wrote a book a few years back called The Tree Rings’ Tale for middle school-aged kids.

Rio Grande flows again through southern New Mexico

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My friend Phil King, a professor at New Mexico State University and water advisor to the Elephant Butte Irrigation District, has been following the water down through the Rio Grande southern New Mexico valleys as irrigation season starts:

 

For those unfamiliar with water management practices in Southern New Mexico, this is an odd place. The Rio Grande here, below Elephant Butte and Caballo dams, is turned off in the fall after irrigation season to store water. In the spring, it’s turned back on again, to deliver water to downstream farmers, who grow chiles, onions, pecans, and other crops with it. The dam was built in 1916, and irrigation season (even during the drought of the 1950s) always started in March at the latest. As Elephant Butte Reservoir dropped in the recent drought, that changed. 2013 was the first year irrigation did not start until May (skipping right over April). This is now the third year in a row the farmers have not received their first water until May.

ProPublica on the Colorado River Basin solution space

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Abrahm Lustgarten and Naveena Sadasivam at ProPublica have launched their eagerly awaited western water series with a great piece today on the impact of agricultural subsidies on water use in the Colorado River Basin. They focus on cotton, which uses a lot of water and, they argue, only gets grown because of the structure of federal subsidies:

Wuertz could plant any number of crops that use far less water than cotton and fill grocery store shelves from Maine to Minnesota. But along with hundreds of farmers across Arizona, he has kept planting his fields with cotton instead. He says he has done it out of habit, pride, practicality, and even a self-deprecating sense that he wouldn’t be good at anything else. But in truth, one reason outweighs all the others: The federal government has long offered him so many financial incentives to do it that he can’t afford not to.

I’m less disturbed than Lustgarten and Sadasivam by the specifics of the cotton subsidy in Arizona (some data that I’ll slip in below suggests why), but their underlying argument is incredibly important, because federal agricultural policy’s weaknesses here nevertheless provide the sort of opportunity that, properly managed, could allow us to wriggle out of the mess we’ve created for ourselves:

According to research by the Pacific Institute, simply irrigating alfalfa fields less frequently, stressing the plant and slightly reducing its yield, could decrease the amount of water needed across the seven Colorado River basin states by roughly 10 percent. If Arizona’s cotton farmers switched to wheat but didn’t fallow a single field, it would save some 207,000 acre-feet of water — enough to supply as many as 1.4 million people for a year.

There’s little financial reason not to do this. The government is willing to consider spending huge amounts to get new water supplies, including building billion-dollar desalinization plants to purify ocean water. It would cost a tiny fraction of that to pay farmers in Arizona and California more to grow wheat rather than cotton, and for the cost of converting their fields. The billions of dollars of existing subsidies already allocated by Congress could be redirected to support those goals, or spent, as the Congressional Budget Office suggested, on equipment and infrastructure that helps farmers use less water.

This, as a journalist/water nerd, is the particular strength of the piece (and makes me eager to read the rest) – not just identifying the problem, but also noting where the solutions might be found.

Now to the Arizona data. Despite the subsidies, Arizona cotton farming has steadily declined, with this year’s 115,000 planted acres the lowest going back at least through the 1950s:

 

Arizona annual cotton acres