Texas drought resiliency update

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As the national media descends on the tiny Texas community of Spicewood Beach to capture the spectacle of water trucked to a thirsty town, I thought it might be worthwhile to revisit the question of what we have learned so far from the impact of the Texas drought.

I tried to make a pie chart of the TCEQ data on water-short communities, but it proved unhelpful:

Texas population at various stages of drought risk

Texas population at various stages of drought risk

The difficulty here is that the software I’m using is incapable of making pie chart slices tiny enough to delineate the at-high-risk population from everyone else.

The folks in Spicewood Beach (population 1,296) and the other communities standing at the edge of the water supply cliff (2,871 who could be out of water in 45 days, another 3,162 if you extend that to 90 days, and another 7,441 if you extend that to 180 days) are in a heap of hurt, but most people in Texas (population 25,674,681) are not.

There’s no doubt that everyone else is in some level of hurt, but I’m struggling to think through how to conceptualize the effect of drought, if it is not running out of water. To be sure, there have been significant economic impacts, especially on the Texas agricultural economy. So I turned to the Philadelphia Fed’s state coincident economic index, which provides a nice single-number snapshot of the overall health of a state’s economy:

Texas state coincident economic index

Texas state coincident economic index, graph courtesy St. Louis Fed

Whatever effect the drought has had in these terms seems to be lost in far larger economic forces.

For people like me who spend our time running around with our hair on fire trying to warn the public of America’s looming water shortages, Texas seems to me like an incredibly important case study about what happens when shortage finally arrives. So what’s it telling us?

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: transparency and accountability in federal nuclear contracting

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Over at the day job, a piece on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s policy of refusing to make public the performance evaluations of the contractors that do the agency’s work:

Because it seems unlikely a glowing performance report could be used against a contractor, the agency seems to have decided that protecting the contractors from public evidence of poor performance is more important than the public’s right to know about that poor performance.

Rate hikes and public infrastructure

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One of democracy’s great shortcomings, on display these days especially in California, is that we want the government to provide the stuff that we want, but we’d just as soon not pay for it:

Local officials say they need the money to upgrade outdated water-treatment facilities, sewer lines and water mains. In some cases, improvements are required just to comply with the law.

No matter how justified they say the rate hikes are, however, some elected officials have found it hard to follow through in the face of public protests.

 

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: wastewater reuse

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My search for folks working the solution space alights on the growing enthusiasm in New Mexico for wastewater reuse:

In other states, especially water-short Arizona and Southern California, cleaning up sewage and reusing it in new and creative ways is becoming common. And in less obvious ways, by returning sewage effluent to New Mexico’s rivers, or using it to water our golf courses, for example, reuse has long been common in New Mexico.

But Rio Rancho’s experiment, about to get under way beneath a nondescript cinder-block building above the city’s Loma Colorado neighborhood, is a step toward what could be a New Mexico first.

 

 

Colorado River models: wrong but useful

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Lake Mead, December 2011

Lake Mead, December 2011, by John Fleck

Climate scientist Tamsin Edwards triggered a fascinating discussion when she chose the famous George Box quote – “all models are wrong, but some are useful” – as the name for her new blog. In a delightful exchange on Twitter (which I followed in real time and which Edwards quotes extensively in the blog post linked above), Peter Gleick chastised Edwards for choosing “All Models are Wrong” for the title of her blog, arguing that it “buys into ‘everything is uncertain’ meme.” Edwards pushed back, and I tend to agree with her argument – that acknowledging and thinking well about uncertainties is incredibly important for the climate discussion to move forward.

I’m reminded of the problem exemplified by the news coverage (mine included) of the US Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Study:

A new federal study released in conjunction with the conference forecast that the Colorado could have 9 percent less water on average by 2050 as a result of climate change, with persistent drought growing more common.

That 9 percent figure has become the study’s frequently repeated headline number. It’s significant in part because the Bureau of Reclamation, which in the past has been criticized for not including climate change risk in its long term water management modeling, ponied up this time. But is it the right way to think about this?

A new paper* by B.L. Harding and colleagues (researchers working on the Basin Study) makes a more subtle argument (and takes a dig at my profession for the way this question has been treated):

By the middle of the century, the impacts on streamflow range, over the entire ensemble, from a decrease of approximately 30% to an increase of approximately the same magnitude. Although prior studies and associated media coverage have focused heavily on the likelihood of a drier future for the Colorado River Basin, approximately one-third of the ensemble of runs result in little change or increases in streamflow.

If the models come up with such a broad range of answers, then by definition most of them are “wrong” in some sense. But they still seem to be quite useful here, just in offering something other than a prediction.

Suraje Dessai and colleagues wrote a really interesting book chapter back in 2009 (pdf)** on “the claim – explicit or implicit – that decision-makers need accurate, and increasingly precise, assessments of the future impacts of climate change in order to adapt successfully.” This is exactly the sort of thing we have seen here in the western United States – a push to refine the modeling to give us a better handle on the effect of climate change on the Colorado River. There’s nothing wrong with that other than the notion that we’re trying to settle on a number.

The point of Harding et al. is that we shouldn’t expect to know something meaningful by simply averaging across all the model runs and offering up a single numbers. If you dig into the bowels of the Basin Study report (pdf, see especially figure B-44), you can see the models spitting out not a single number, but a range of possible futures. (The majority of them are drier futures.)

These models are useful precisely because they help us think about the range of uncertainties that the region’s water managers face. From Dessai et al.:

We suggest that decision-makers systematically examine the performance of their adaptation strategies/policies/activities over a wide range of plausible futures driven by uncertainty about the future state of climate and many other economic, political and cultural factors. They should choose a strategy that they find sufficiently robust across these alternative futures. Such an approach can identify successful adaptation strategies without accurate and precise predictions of future climate.

To the extent that we communicate this with anything other than a genuine respect for the uncertainty, we do the public and the policymakers who have to figure out how to manage the Colorado River a disservice.

* The implications of climate change scenario selection for future streamflow projection in the Upper Colorado River Basin; B. L. Harding, A. W. Wood, and J. R. Prairie, Hydrol. Earth Syst. Sci. Discuss., 9, 847-894, 2012w, doi:10.5194/hessd-9-847-2012

** Climate prediction: a limit to adaptation? Suraje Dessai , Mike Hulme , Robert Lempert and Roger Pielke, Jr., in Adapting to Climate Change: Thresholds, Values, Governance, eds. W. Neil Adger, Irene Lorenzoni and Karen L. O’Brien. Published by Cambridge University Press, 2009

Water: we’re good at building stuff

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Beginning with the 1808 Gallatin Report and extending through the twentieth century, it seems that whenever water policy commissions recommended water developments, such as canals, dams, irrigation projects, and other infrastructure, the recommendations were usually heeded, though sometimes many years after the fact. In contrast, the recommendations that did not involve concrete and cash—such as proposing to change the terms of development, modify economic incentives, and alter the institutions of governance—have not fared as well, even though such recommendations have been piling up for nearly as long….

Janet Neuman: “Are We There Yet? Weary Travelers on the Long Road to Water Policy Reform“

Tree rings as history tool

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In my my tree ring book, I focused nearly entirely on their use in studying climates. But tree rings are good for so much more, as in this example:

Earlier this week, Royal Commission staff visited the Conwy valley, to work with Margaret Dunn, the director of the Dating Old Welsh Houses project in evaluating the final batch of houses, which will now be tree-ring dated by Dr Dan Miles and Dr Martin Bridge from the Oxford Dendrochronology Laboratory. Working in partnership with the Royal Commission, Dating Old Welsh Houses is a community-based history project focused on dating historic houses in the counties of North-west Wales and then compiling their house histories. In the last three years over sixty houses have been successfully dated by the partnership project and revealed some remarkable results. Contrary to the traditional view that North Wales was an architectural backwater in terms of houses, the results of the project show that the characteristic Snowdonian house took shape in the early sixteenth-century much earlier than previously believed.

 

How much water is there in the Colorado, and who needs what?

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As we await the release of the next release from the Bureau of Reclamation’s Colorado River Basin Water Supply and Demand Study, a story by Chris Woodka nicely captures the tension as basin states try to influence the process by telling the Bureau what their long terms needs are:

“I think the question is: ‘What is the result of overdevelopment of Colorado River water, and who suffers the consequences?’ ” said John McClow, an attorney who represents the Gunnison River basin on the Colorado Water Conservation Board.

McClow said the task is difficult because sharing the information with other states could hurt Colorado’s position in ongoing negotiations with other states.

It’s a classic game theory problem. States that acknowledge the river’s limitations and therefore limit their own water use risk losing supply to states that don’t.