What exactly does the Basin Study mean we need to do?

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Juliet McKenna is on a roll. You should really just skip me and add her to your RSS feed.

Her latest entry is a look at the various ways of completing the sentence, “The Colorado River Basin Study is a call to action to….”?

Check out her great list. Here’s the reason the diversity of entires matters:

The diversity of the group starts to emerge when looking at tremendous range of options presented to address the projected supply deficit. And for this reason, the next step – deciding what action to take – may not be as harmonious as the first step.

And having seen some of the sausage-making, it’s pretty clear that even that harmonious first step wasn’t as puppydogs and flowers as it might seem.

 

Dust, runoff and the Vegas pipeline

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Juliet McKenna has done a fantastic back-of-the-envelope calculation about potential effect of dust created by Las Vegas, Nevada’s proposed groundwater pumping system.

Vegas, you’ll recall, wants to build a pipeline across the state, using groundwater from distant rural areas to fuel growth in that state’s largest metropolis.

McKenna notes that various analyses of the project have projected increasing dust as the groundwater pumping dries out the source region. Then she tries to connect the dots with recent studies of the impacts of dust-on-snow:

It has been estimated that dust events in the Rocky Mountains of the Upper Colorado River Basin could cause up to a 5 percent reduction in annual runoff to the Colorado River. More information from the National Academy of Sciences is here, and here. As an example, 5 percent reduction in runoff amounts to 700,000 AF of 14 MAF Colorado River of annual runoff. While this may be an overestimate both of the Colorado River’s annual flow and the reduction caused by dust, even a 1 percent reduction in a record low flow would still amount to more than 100,000 AF/year – more than the amount of groundwater pumping approved for Nevada. As a comparison, Nevada has an annual allocation of 300,000 AF of Colorado River water.

The cost of Arizona water

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An interesting note from the Montgomery and Associates water blog on the financial problems facing the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson.

If the Board leaves rates alone this year, some customers may be temporarily satisfied. However, financial problems will persist and grow, adding to uncertainty for the future. The next few months will reveal whether the Board plans to endorse a wait-and-see approach or pursue a more aggressive course to address its long-term structural revenue deficit.

So this happened

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2013 Earth Science Achievement Awards

The 2013 New Mexico Earth Science Achievement Awards will be presented on February 4 to John Fleck, for outstanding contributions advancing the role of earth science in areas of public service and public policy in New Mexico, and to Tien Grauch, for outstanding contributions advancing the role of earth science in areas of applied science and education in New Mexico. These awards, co-sponsored by the New Mexico Bureau of Geology and Mineral Resources, a division of New Mexico Tech in Socorro, and the Energy, Minerals and Natural Resources Department (EMNRD) in Santa Fe, were initiated in 2003 to honor those often unrecognized champions of earth science issues vital to the future of New Mexico. Selections were made following a statewide nomination process.

 

Anthropocene diaries: fight the man

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girdled tree, Albuquerque bosque, February 2013

girdled tree, Albuquerque bosque, February 2013

I’m going to make up a story. I’d like to think it might be true.

There’s an impromptu path I like to walk along the Rio Grande in Albuquerque that follows a narrow high spot of riverbank for something between a quarter and a half a mile. As you head north, the river’s on your left and to your right is a created marshland, part of an artificial cattail marsh (an ecologist I know who works on the project calls it a “wet meadow”) created as part of a local-state-federal habitat restoration project. It’s great for birding – a golden eagle to my left this morning, serene in a cottonwood across the river, and a riot of birds in the wet meadow to my right – downy woodpeckers, hermit thrush, flickers. In summer it’s a red-winged blackbird metropolis.

All along the path are old dead trees like this one, city garden invaders squeezing out the native cottonwoods, stealing their water (I think this is an elm?) killed by girdling them near their base. Some have been cut down outright, the logs left behind. But many have simply been killed and left standing.

I’ve no idea who did it. It doesn’t bear the hallmarks of the government-funded habitat restoration work that has been done throughout this reach of the river. The restoration crews chip the wood and spread the chips out across the bosque floor. It’s also obviously not the beavers (though there are a lot of small stumps left by beavers, and clear signs that the beavers had been moving back and forth between the river and the wet meadow within hours of my arrival this morning). There are clear saw marks.

I like to think it’s vigilantes, desperately trying to push back against the Anthropocene.

Anthropocene Diaries: Searsville Dam

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Keith Kloor had a nice riff the other day on the question of how we should decide what “nature” is supposed to look like, now that we’re kinda in charge:

It’s not my job to say what nature should mean in a world shaped primarily by humans–I’m still working it out, myself–but I know others feel this is a discussion we should be having.

Yup. Clumsily, it’s a discussion we’re having now, piecemeal, one prairie and watershed and treeline and backyard at a time. As, for example, the discourse underway today on the vastly altered peninsula south of San Francisco where Stanford University’s eucalyptus-decked campus (an Australian import) is so physically and culturally dominant.

Stanford, it seems, has a dam, which some folks thing ought to be removed:

Two environmental organizations filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Stanford University, claiming the school’s management of Searsville Dam and Reservoir harms steelhead trout and violates the Endangered Species Act.

So we’ve got our normal toolkit in place for these sorts of societal discussions – the Endangered Species Act, its blade dulled by the years but no one can remember where Richard put the sharpener before he left. Crap, but this kind of a job is a hassle with such a lousy tool.

And we’ve got the canonical argument:

There many issues to consider besides the steelhead, Lapin noted. Since the dam was built in 1892, the reservoir has created wetland habitat that would disappear if the dam is removed. And the land beneath the dam has been developed, leading to concerns about flooding.

Charging into the Anthropocene, which anthros get to decide?

drought at my house

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I get it. Albuquerque is not a wet place. With an average of 9.71 inches (24.7 cm) per year of precipitation at the PRISM pixel for my house, I live in a desert, a hair beneath the arbitrary 10 inch (25 cm) definitional cutoff. But this is f’ing ridiculous.

With January done, I’ve received 0.44 inches (1.12 cm) of precipitation since Oct. 1, the first four months of the “water year”. Driest start since I started keeping records in 1999. Here’s the Feb-Mar forecast map:

Feb-Mar forecast

Feb-Mar forecast

Turtles. All the way down.

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In today’s XKCD, Randall Munroe makes fun of the Wikipedia talk page for the new Star Trek into the Darkness movie:

Star Trek into the Darkness

Star Trek into the Darkness

And then the Star Trek into the Darkness talk page people discuss whether to include a mention of the XKCD comic on the Star Trek into the Darkness page:

I think this talk page needs a wikipedia article about this talk page. With an “in popular culture” section 99.226.191.43 (talk) 15:45, 30 January 2013 (UTC)

Turtles. All the way down.

 

advice for climate communicators

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from Dan Kahan:

[W]hen positions on a fact that admits of scientific investigation (“is the earth heating up?”; “does the HPV vaccine promote unsafe sex among teenage girls?”) becomes entangled with the values and outlooks of diverse communities—and becomes, in effect, a symbol of one’s membership and loyalty in one or another group—then people in those groups will end up in states of persistent disagreement and confusion. These sorts of entanglements (and the influences that cause them) are in effect a form of pollution in the science communication environment, one that disables people from reliably discerning what is known to science.

The science communication environment is filled with these sorts of toxins on climate change. We need to use our intelligence to figure out how to clean our science communication environment up.

An example or two may help:

How readily and open-mindedly people will engage scientific information depends very decisively on context. A person who hears about the HPV vaccine when she sees Michelle Bachman or Ellen Goodman screaming about it on Fox or MSNBC will engage it as someone who has a political identity and is trying to figure out which position “matches” it; that same person, when she gets the information from her daughter’s pediatrician, will engage it as a parent, whose child’s welfare is the most important thing in the world to her, and who will earnestly try to figure out what those who are experts on health have to say. Most of the contexts in which people are thinking about climate change today are like the first of these two. Find ones that are more like the second. They exist!

Dan’s sciency take on this subject provides a sort of post hoc explanation for why I abandoned the climate wars.