Seventh inning stretch
Clearly the gulls are drawn by Take Me Out To The Ballgame. Or do they play YMCA? It is San Francisco, after all:
Some gulls have an uncanny way of showing up at AT&T Park during the eighth or ninth inning of a ballgame.
Day game or night game, the gulls bizarrely seem to know when the game is close to ending, pouncing on leftover hot dogs and garlic fries. As Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow said, “if you were a gull, where would you be?”
My current water policy hammer is the “not fer fightin’ over” meme – the idea that the apocryphal Mark Twain quote is wrong, not because he didn’t say it, but because much of what is most interesting about western water policy involves the places where people find solve water problems with negotiated compromise rather than affray.
The latest nail for my current hammer is this story from the Imperial Valley Press, about efforts to come up with a compromise in an argument about how to account for water the Imperial Irrigation District. The Bureau of Reclamation is playing the adult in the room, telling the municipal and ag water agencies to find a compromise solution to their problem or the Bureau will find one for them:
The letter to the IID and other water agencies basically says that the bureau is aware that it needs to account for the water released into the Salton Sea, but it’s going to defer making that accounting decision while talks continue, said IID General Manager Kevin Kelley. The bureau could come back if the talks break down and require IID to make up for that water released.
Over at the work blog today, I shared some comments from Julio Betancourt, a USGS ecologist who knows his way around arid climate, about our recent fires and their connection to climate change. It’s something he wrote a month ago, before Las Conchas, but seems relevant, and I share here with his permission:
I think what some reporters and a good part of the public don’t understand is that ultimate causes for individual fires are extremely difficult to disentangle. A single fire or even a single fire season in a given region (Arizona) or even across the whole West is difficult to attribute to any single cause. Over the past few days, I’ve had reporters ask me to list and rank the causes of the Wallow Fire, including climate change, and I’ve declined comment. I’m comfortable talking about possible causes of long-term trends in regional fires, and even complex interactions between these causes. However, it would be really tricky to justify and rank in order of importance the eventual causes for individual burns like Arizona’s Wallow Fire. As of today (June 15), the Wallow fire has burned nearly half a million acre and is still barely contained.
In the Southwest, long-term trends in wildfires, specifically in ponderosa pine forests, could have multiple causes. Since Europeans got here, livestock grazing reduced the grass cover necessary for light and episodic surface fires that cleared the understory and spared the older trees. Aggressive suppression of wildfires also added to this unnatural accumulation of fuel. Open forests became cluttered with different-aged trees capable of laddering surface fires into the forest canopy or crown.
There are probably other human factors, but here we can only speculate. Maybe human ignitions have increased in ways that heighten the probabilities for large wildfires. Maybe in the past, conducive weather and fuel conditions would lead to big wildfires only once in a while, but now it happens all the time. Or maybe it has to do with the changing flammability of vegetation, something as subtle (and unstudied) as long-term trends in the terpene concentrations of leaf litter or live vegetation.
Climate (and weather) have a lot to do with fire occurrence, and is likely involved in variations and trends. In the Southwest, for example, a good fire year alternates with a bad year depending on whether El Nino or La Nina made for a wet or dry winter. This affects fuel moisture conditions in the subsequent fire season, which here generally runs from April to July. But weather, including the temperature, relative humidity and wind speed at the time of the fire, also matters a lot. Yes, the last few months have been pretty dry, but the Wallow Fire has been fanned by unusually high winds since it started May 29.
Since the late 70?s and 80?s, there has been a sharp trend in springtime (and summertime) temperatures across the West. Averaged across the West, spring now comes nearly 2 weeks earlier than before, and the warming has yielded reduced snowpack, earlier snowmelt, and earlier plant growth to boot. As plants begin growing earlier, there is less and less water left in the soil as summer approaches and the live fuels go dry. Year to year and over the long term, the number of large fires across the West seem to be in lockstep with springtime temperatures.
But all of this gets complicated when we try attribute the cause of a single fire. This La Nina winter has been unusually dry in Arizona. But like most La Ninas, spring was unusually cool and late across the West, including Arizona. We can talk about central tendencies in wildfire activity year to year and over the past century, but when it comes to individual fires, the jury is still out.
In watching New Mexico’s fires the past few weeks and talking to my forest ecosystem brain trust, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the set of questions Emma Marris raises in her new book Rambunctious Garden
In particular, I’ve been talking to USGS ecologist Craig Allen and some of the other folks he has worked with over the years on fire history of the Jemez Mountains, where the Las Conchas fire burned so hot and fast. (More on that in some coming newspaper work.)
This comes up a lot in discussions of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, as well, a system about as badly out of whack as out of whack can be. While in California last month, I heard about some work being done by folks at the San Francisco Estuary Institute on historical and paleo ecology of the Delta. The new Delta Stewardship Council Science News has an interesting account of what they’re doing, and why:
The goal of the project is not to create a literal template from which to recreate the historical Delta since the Delta has undergone extensive changes over the years. Rather, the objective is to better understand ecosystem function and how it varied throughout the system in response to identifiable physical gradients (e.g. salinity, tidal range). This can inform large-scale restoration strategies currently being considered for the Delta.
The Institute’s work raises a lot of the same questions I’ve been thinking about in regard to forest systems here, especially one of scale:
In considering how to restore important ecological functions that have been lost, scientists and managers have recognized the importance of thinking at larger scales. “For instance,” Whipple said, “a restored tidal marsh might provide really different ecological functions depending on whether it is five acres or one hundred, whether it is adjacent to riparian forest, or whether it receives winter flood flows. We need to think about more than just habitats as single units, but how habitats are arranged into mosaics (complexes of different communities of species), and how those mosaics fit together in the landscape.”
You could say the same thing about the patches of forest around Los Alamos that we’ll be talking about a lot in the next few years. Given that there’s no going back to the pre-grazing, pre-fire suppression, pre-homes in the woods, pre-global warming world (or the pre-Delta farming and water export world), how do we decide what sort of “nature” we’re trying to preserve/create?
The waters? What waters?
A piece in the Las Vegas Review-Journal makes this odd point about its namesake city:
Water is the reason most cities are where they are, and Las Vegas is no exception.
I’ve been to Las Vegas. And while it might once have been true that the nucleus of that desert town once formed around a creek, the image seems a bit odd today. The wording reminded a friend of mine of that famous exchange in Casablanca between Rick and Captain Renault:
Captain Renault: What in heaven’s name brought you to Casablanca?
Rick: My health. I came to Casablanca for the waters.
Captain Renault: The waters? What waters? We’re in the desert.
Rick: I was misinformed.
From the Sunday paper (sub/ad req.*), my attempt to make sense of the issues I was fumbling around about yesterday:
The factors that set up trouble in the Southwest’s forests are complex – a warming climate and forest management practices over the 20th century that allowed a terrifying buildup of fuel. There was simply too much wood and plant material for the ecosystem to support, said Allen, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey who has been studying the relationship between forest, fire and climate in the Jemez Mountains for 25 years. Something had to give.
That set the stage. Epic drought lit the match.
* Drive-by’s don’t have to subscribe to read this story. Click the “Trial access pass” to read the story.
Up early this morning to watch the team time trial at Le Tour, I flipped on the computer to check what was going on with the Los Alamos fire. (I was hoping to take a few minutes during a commercial break to post an updated fire map.)
It was a little before 8 a.m., and the #nmfire hashtag column on Tweetdeck was hopping with people saying the evacuation order for the community of Los Alamos was about to be lifted. I quickly checked my work email, saw the official announcement from Los Alamos County in my inbox, and within five minutes had the news up on the Journal web site. Hadn’t even finished my first cup of coffee.
The lines between being a news producer and a news consumer blur at a time like this. It’s all one big mashup. But there’s no going back, and I can’t imagine doing my job on a story like this – widely distributed, with lots of people sharing little chunks of what they know in real time – without a Tweetdeck window open on my desktop.
My friend Trip Jennings, a reporter at the Santa Fe New Mexican, gets this, both as a social media consumer and as a skilled news producer. (he must be skilled – he interviewed me! 🙂 )
John Fleck, a veteran reporter at the Albuquerque Journal, has used Twitter from its inception and has noticed a change in how it is used during big news events.
“We saw Twitter as a news tool really come into its own with the big freeze and gas outage,” Fleck said of the snowstorm that blew through New Mexico with an arctic blast in the first week of February, leaving an estimated 32,000 homes and businesses without natural gas for several days. “In a newsroom, you are always trying to hear from as many people as you can. You try to filter out the bad information.”
With the big freeze, “you had all these people tweeting from their front porches, sharing photos,” Fleck said. “You dramatically expanded your pool of information.”
That up-to-the-minute stream of information in multiple formats — photo, audio, video, text — isn’t a gimmick, but a revolutionary tool that lowers the barrier for everyday Americans to participate in a broader conversation, one university professor said.
“It used to be the person who had the power was the person who had a printing press,” said Robert Hernandez, an assistant professor at the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California, during a telephone interview. “These days when you buy a computer, you get the book and you get the printing press for free. You get to participate in and shape the conversation.”
Of course, in the event of a major news event, many of the tweets and Facebook status updates will contain links to news stories from newspapers and other media. And, yes, sometimes faulty information mixes in with your Facebook and Twitter feeds, but the positives of social networking sites vastly outweigh the negatives, Hernandez said.
In some sense, from a journalistic perspective there is nothing special about Twitter. There are myriad ways reporters get information, finding and sorting information flow from anyone who has it. That’s what we’ve always done. Twitter’s just one more tool, but a particularly handy one at a time like this.
It rained this afternoon at my house.
raindrops on my front walk, July 2, 2011
The physics of raindrops, I once learned, means that the largest raindrops falling out the bottom of a thunderhead hit first, and I was sitting in my office at the back of the house writing when I heard them banging onto the metal roof. I went out to the living room to make sure Lissa heard it, then walked out shirtless and barefoot and stood beneath it, flashing fingers to her in the front window as I counted off the raindrops hitting me. One. Two. ThreeFour. FiveSixSeven (two hands now).
I sat for a long time on the front porch watching and smelling – not enough for the cars going by to turn on their windshield wipers, but enough to wet the street so their tires sizzled.
I’ve been zigging and zagging this week, trying to get my head around things without precedent, either in personal experience or in the data we substitute when personal experience misleads, or is not enough.
To say it has been dry this year in New Mexico falls so short of the mark that I don’t know where to turn next. As a journalist I’m a bit of a technocrat, a collector of numbers and measurements. It’s usually a strength, but feels right now like a weakness. A week ago, I’d been planning a newspaper piece that tried to capture the Big Dry in numbers, using the completion of 2011’s first half-year as one of those calendrical milestones that give us an opportunity to take stock.
Then shit started burning, and the numbers used to measure this sort of thing veered off in weird directions – acres burned instead of acre feet of water, percentage forest fuel moisture instead of percentage precipitation. And lingering beneath it was this uncomfortable sense that, as a writer, I’ve got nuthin’ in the face of this truly remarkable phenomenon laid out before me.
precip at my house so far in 2011
I’ve got a shit ton of numbers, everywhere I turn. For grins, for example, the daily precip at my house since Jan. 1: Six days total, just two of them above 0.04 inches (0.1 cm), today the first measurable since May 20. Click to biggen it, look at the y axis. A measure of our pain.
Working the fire story, I heard some remarkable stories from folks I’ve known for years, forest ecosystem types who work in the Jemez, who measure it but also live in it. And it’s the living in it, in this big dry, that’s so remarkable, and for which words so completely fail me.
I can imagine someone has done science about this, made up one of those “just so stories” that evolutionary types so love about how humans evolved with an exquisite sensitivity to rain because our lives so depend on it. I can understand how we’d be wired by our ancestry to get tense at times like this.
It is frankly one of those “It is impossible to say just what I mean” moments. Suffice to say it’s been really, really dry here, and the joy I felt at the 0.01 inch of rain I measured in the backyard gauge is both genuine but also sadly telling.
Hey smart water tweeps, here’s a lazyweb question the Google has been unable to assist me with.
Somewhere, sometime, I heart a great truism from some smart water person whose name is lost to the mists:
Ditches (canals, etc.) move water in space. Dams move water in time.
Have you heard this before? Source?
