Las Vegas, look out: A bad year in the Colorado Basin hints at the system’s failure mode

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Colorado River supply and demand, historical and projected, courtesy USBR

Colorado River supply and demand, historical and projected, courtesy USBR

In the work I’m doing now on the Colorado River Basin for my book, I’m trying to get beyond simply extrapolating supply and demand curves and then running around with my hair on fire. The hair-on-fire thing is easy to do, because the current supply and demand curves, as the Bureau of Reclamation frankly noted last December, are heading in a direction that’s physically unreal.

The question is what happens in the gap between the projected orange line veering upward and the blue line veering down. I’m interested in the specifics of that failure mode – who will come up short as the gaps between supply and demand become real, and how might we expect them to respond? It’s not enough to simply say “Phoenix (or Las Vegas or Los Angeles or Denver or the Imperial Irrigation District or Albuquerque) is screwed.” Because those water users will do something in response to try to minimize their screwedness. Who are they, and what will they do in response?

Buried in the tiny print of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s latest 24-Month Study (pdf) is a hint about what seems to me to be the most likely answer to my “who” question: Las Vegas, look out. (warning, wonkiness ahead, click through for more)

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Las Conchas, 10 months on

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I went back two weeks ago to the Las Conchas fire zone, where an unprecedented blaze tore through New Mexico ponderosa forests that will never be the same – “Not in our lifetimes,” as one forester put it. My story:

During a daylong hike last week across an area that once was dominated by ponderosa pines, Allen and his colleagues saw a single clump of live trees. The fire burned so hot as it rolled out of the high country that it completely incinerated vast areas of lower-elevation piñon and juniper woodland.

“That whole landscape, which I’m intimately familiar with, is now foreign to me,” said archaeologist Gauthier.

To help nature along, the Santa Fe National Forest has identified 30,000 acres with either a high or moderate chance of successful reforestation, and carefully chosen ponderosa pine seedlings are being cultivated for planting next year. But that first wave of planting will cover only an estimated 1,500 of those acres.

“We’re going to plug away at this for the next 10 years to see where we get,” said National Forest ecologist Williams. “The limiting factor is going to be how much money we get to do the work.”

Riddle, who oversees the Santa Forest’s Jemez Ranger District, where the fire started, was frank about the prospects for reforestation of the burned landscape.

“Not in our lifetimes,” she said. “It won’t be a forest like it was.”

 

Will taxpayers bail out delta water exporters?

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Jeffrey Michael runs the numbers and suggests the marginal cost of water from a new Peripheral Thingie (canal or tunnel beneath/around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) will be prohibitive for agricultural users asked to foot a share of the bill:

According to the draft BDCP, the marginal cost of new water the contractors get out of the tunnel is going to be $1,000 af ($1.2 billion in debt service and new operation cost for an average of 1.2 maf of new water). Environmental deficiencies with the draft BDCP could mean even less new water, driving the marginal cost of new water supplies even higher for the contractors.

My question, posed in a comment on Jeff’s blog, is whether this project will collapse under this economic reality, or whether, as some California water veterans have suggested to me, the project will move ahead anyway in classic Western water tradition, subsidized by state and/or federal taxpayers. I’d love to hear the thoughts of the California water wonks in the audience.

Q: When is an April 1 snow survey not an April 1 snow survey?

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A: When April 1 falls on a Monday.

That’s the conclusion of a clever bit of work by Tom Pagano, former NRCS forecaster who used to do the Rio Grande forecasts before he went on to bigger and better things. “Bigger and better” has included a stint in Australia and a current world tour of the water forecasting world that has made for some delightful blogging. Tom’s a clever forecaster always looking for ways to improve the product (he makes an appearance in my book if you want to know more about how snow is measured and how that then translates into a river forecast) and his peripatetic existence apparently also includes time for some clever science.

For a new paper, he analyzed the day of the week for some 300,000 snow measurements and found that in recent years, the snow measurement folks have been increasingly likely to go out early and take their readings if the normal measurement date falls on a weekend. That could mean that the “April 1 forecast” is based on an underestimate of the amount of snow on the ground because of a bias toward missing end-of-the-month storms if they happen to hit on a weekend. He’s got a nice blog post explaining the result:

Some years it doesn’t matter, it all just depends on the weather around the first of the month. When you average it over many stations and many years, collecting the data 3 days early means that February 1st measurements are roughly biased 5% of normal too low, and May 1st measurements are about 5% too high.

 

The climate change-steroids analogy in reverse?

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Much has been made of the analogy that climate change is like steroids for our weather. But what if we’ve got the thing backwards? Here’s baseball sage Tim McCarver:

It has not been proven, but I think ultimately it will be proven that the air is thinner now, there has been climactic changes over the last 50 years in the world and I think that’s one of the reasons that balls are carrying much better now than I remember. You know, the ball that Ramirez hit out and the ball Freese hit out, I didn’t think either one was going to be a home run, yet they made it.

Joe Buck’s response:

So that’s your inconvenient truth?

drought kills seem to be reducing streamflow in the arid southwest

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The authors acknowledge that the result when they looked at the effect of piñon die-off from the Four Corners drought a decade ago seems counterintuitive:

Basins with the most tree die-off showed a significant decrease in streamflow over several years following die-off, and this decrease was not attributable to climate variability alone. The results are counterintuitive compared to responses to reductions in tree cover by harvest that have shown an increase in streamflow, although such increases are more substantial for locations with higher precipitation than where the piñon pine die-off occurred.

That’s Maria-Teresa Guardiola-Claramonte and colleagues in Journal of Hydrology last year. They looked at a number of basins along the Colorado-New Mexico border, along with controls elsewhere that did not suffer piñon die-off, and found consistent reductions in runoff coefficients (watershed runoff as a fraction of basin precipitation).

Anyone know of other work on this question?

Should we embrace the Bellagio Fountain?

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Bellagio Fountain

Bellagio Fountain

Humans here in the West use and therefore value water for basically three sorts of reasons:

  • for domestic use (cooking, bathing, drinking, flushing away waste)
  • for economic purposes (agriculture being the most obvious, but also things like computer chip manufacturing)
  • for environmental purposes (water in the river to look at and enjoy, for recreation, or because of the intrinsic value we place in water in the river and the ecosystems it supports)

It’s de regueur rigueur for writers of a certain sort to make fun of the Bellagio Fountain in Las Vegas, as an example of grand excess in a water-scarce land. But I was thinking about the different ways we value water when I read this item from Vegas Inc.:

The Panama Canal, the Eiffel Tower, Sydney Harbor and the Bellagio Fountains.

All made TripAdvisor’s list of “most talked about attractions.”

Only 16 attractions made the cut, two for each major region in the world. The Bellagio Fountains joined New York’s Central Park as North America’s most talked about destinations.

The travel website based its picks on attractions that received the most reviews over the past year. The Bellagio Fountains received thousands, bringing its total to more than 5,000. All but 160 visitors rated the attraction as “excellent” or “very good.”

That’s a pretty high-value use of that water, I guess.

Isenberg: you want more storage? who’s gonna pay?

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Phil Isenberg, head of California’s Delta Stewardship Council, gets to the heart of the matter in the discussion of the possibility that California needs more water storage capability:

The council agrees with Assemblyman Logue that water storage is a critical component of any solution to meet the state’s water supply and environmental needs. Over the past several years, almost $20 million has been spent to plan new or expanded reservoirs in the Central Valley. The studies show these projects will be expensive — for example, more than $1 billion to enlarge Shasta Dam. Unfortunately, no water customers who would benefit from new dams have yet stepped forward to share these projects’ costs. (emphasis added)

This gets to the heart of an issue I’ve been thinking about: the possibility that we’ve really seen the last of the West’s great concrete, that we won’t see more dams and conveyances simply because the next ones would be far more expensive than the ones we’ve already built (the low-hanging fruit having been plucked) and the traditional subsidizers, state and federal taxpayers, are tapped out.

$10 bill on the sidewalk

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There’s this old joke.

Two economists are walking down the street when one points to the ground and says, “Look, a ten dollar bill!”

The second economist replies, “That’s crazy. If that was a ten dollar bill someone would have picked it up already.”

Ten dollar bill

Ten dollar bill

I love it because there’s a really interesting dynamic in it (beyond mocking economists) that seems increasingly relevant to me.

At the risk of getting pedantic, here’s what I think is so interesting about what’s going on in that joke. The second economist’s point is that if there was something easy and potentially lucrative out there, someone would have already done it. But the flip side is that someone is always the first person to spot the ten dollar bill.

I’ve been thinking about this issue a lot as I triage my journalistic life. People are always coming to me, trying to get me to pursue a story on what seems to them a vital and important truth. “If only they would do X,” the person argues…. “They” is typically the idiots in charge, and “X” is the obvious ten dollar bill on the sidewalk that my intrepid reader thinks he or she has spotted that will fix some societal problem.

If it’s on a beat that I cover with any depth, I usually know right away that it’s not really a ten dollar bill. Sometimes at this point I try to explain why it’s not really a ten dollar bill. This often does not go well.

If it’s not obvious to me right away that it’s not a ten dollar bill, I then face the triage decision – do I spend the resources necessary to bend over and try to pick it up and see if it’s real? The metaphor weakens here – ten dollar bill scrutiny usually takes a lot of work. In a lifetime of journalistic experience, I’ve learned that most things that look like ten dollar bills are not – that there is a perfectly reasonable explanation for why the idiots in charge haven’t done X. But on occasion, it’s really a ten dollar bill, which can turn into a useful journalistic contribution.

This comes to mind because I recently embarked on a long walk with a guy who seems to see ten dollar bills everywhere. I’m thinking I might need to cut the walk short.