In the elevator at Mazano del Sol, the retirement apartments where Mom and Dad live. Lady gets in with a fabulous cane – wooden, lightly carved and lovely bright paint job.
Me: That’s a great cane? Does it have a story?
Her: Got it in Old Town. Twelve bucks. It works.
And she spryly strode out onto the third floor.
Ezra Klein’s nominally talking to economists, but you guys sitting in the back might get something out of this as well:
Listen to political scientists, sociologists, etc. They have perspectives, evidence and training worthy of consideration.
So I’m not sure how this happened, but apparently I’m all over the Internet this week as the token science journalist trying to defend my entire profession. Good luck with that, me.
There’s already six threads going with enough comments for a lifetime, so I’d prefer you don’t say the sames thing here that you’ve already said everywhere else. Unless it involves praise for my wisdom. Then please do come in and set a spell.
update: Clearly one way in which journalists suck is that we really badly need editors 🙂
In a coda to my old Elephant Diaries series on the economics of news, a brief note from Dallas as the Morning News goes paywall:
“Local newspaper websites are never going to scale to page view levels that make the math work,” he said. “The volume of traffic to these sites is inherently limited by the geographic nature of the content they published.”
The March forecast out today (pdf) for this year’s operations on the Colorado River is looking very good for the chances of extra water to be shipped downstream to help top off the dwindling supplies in Lake Mead. The magic word here is “equalization”, which means that under the river’s operating rules, there is sufficient extra water upstream in Lake Powell to allow some extra water to be released to raise Mead’s levels in the direction of “equalizing” the amount stored in each reservoir:
Reclamation estimates that an April adjustment to the Equalization Tier is very likely to occur in 2011. For this adjustment to not occur, the April-July inflow forecast volume would have to decrease from the current level (9.2 maf) to approximately 7.1 maf which would be a decrease of about 2.1 maf. In the past 32 years, only once has the forecast decreased by at least this volume from one month to the next. For this reason, Reclamation estimates the probability of an April adjustment to the Equalization Tier in 2011 to be approximately 97 percent.
Mead, Powell Storage, data courtesy USBR
Equalization, importantly, allows the Lower Basin states to get extra water above and beyond the Colorado River Compact’s requirement.
As you can see from the graph (click to biggen), which I’ve updated to include estimated storage volumes for the end of the current water year, Powell is now forecast to end the year ever so slightly below last year’s level, while Mead will see the largest increase in storage volume since the 1990s. In elevation terms, the surface of Lake Mead is now forecast, thanks to the extra water, to end the water year (Sept. 30) at 1105 feet above sea level, 21 feet above last year’s level.
The runoff is the result of a snow season that has left much of the southern Colorado Basin terribly dry, made up for by a decent snow pack in the north.
Colorado Basin Map, courtesy CBRFC
As Shaun McKinnon reported today, Arizona is sucking a very dry dusty wind right now:
The numbers — especially the runoff forecasts — spell bad news for Arizona’s streams and rivers. With so little snow in the mountains, the streams and smaller rivers will dry up sooner, leaving less moisture for riparian systems. Rivers like the San Pedro, which is dry for long stretches in good years, and the Little Colorado could have particularly bad summers.
I had much the same to say about New Mexico in a story yesterday morning (sub/ad req):
The outlook for New Mexico’s water supplies this spring is grim, federal forecasters say, after a dry February sapped what little snow the state received earlier in the winter.
“It’s not looking real great at this point,” said Wayne Sleep of the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
Tallying up the snow at a network of measurement sites around the state, Sleep and his colleagues last week forecast just half the normal flow this year on the Rio Grande into Elephant Butte Reservoir.
But the farther north you get, the better things look, and all that snow melts and flows downstream in our direction. Yay nature.
From this morning’s paper, a visit to Work Case 82B (sub/ad req) at the University of New Mexico’s Museum of Southwestern Biology, where they keep that which has gone extinct:
The Carolina parakeet on the top shelf of Work Case 82B, green with a dingy red head, looks little different from the other 30,000 stuffed birds in the research collection at the Museum of Southwestern Biology.
The most noticeable difference — the case is locked.
The special care needed in curating and caring for the Carolina parakeet and the other residents of Work Case 82B is, from a museum management perspective, entirely practical.
“You can’t get new ones,” said Andy Johnson, collections manager of the bird collection at the University of New Mexico research museum.
In a thread last month, Francis offered this as one explanation for the prominence of lawyers in western US water policy discussions:
The states are co-equal sovereigns, and the feds have not invoked federal supremacy.
It applies elsewhere. In Georgia, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports, the state will go to court next week to argue for nothing less than Atlanta’s water supply:
On Wednesday, the state of Georgia will ask the federal appeals court in Atlanta to overturn a judge’s ruling that found it illegal for the Army Corps of Engineers to draw water from Lake Lanier to meet most of the metro area’s needs.
In that shock-and-awe ruling in 2009, Senior U.S. District Judge Paul Magnuson set a doomsday clock ticking. If Georgia, Alabama and Florida cannot arrive at a water-sharing agreement that is approved by Congress by July 17, 2012, metro Atlanta can only take the same amount of water it received in the mid-1970s.
That this may come down to lawyers arguing in court is an interesting outcome. The other potential solution is an agreement among states, which as I’ve discussed before in a post on former Reclamation commissioner Bob Johnson’s comments on the issue, seems to this westerner a perfectly reasonable approach given how wet it is out there:
The ACT and ACF basins have far more unallocated water to play with in sorting out the conflicts. “They’ve got 60 million acre feet of excess water,” he said. “On the Colorado River, we’ve got zero.”
But as a direct result of that lack of water on the Colorado, we’ve got a rich legal framework – the Law of the River – and accompanying personal and institutional relationships to go with it. “We have 80 years of fighting and working together,” Johnson said to the audience of Colorado River Basin water officials.
By comparison, in the wet climate of the southeast, water officials had few relationships with their colleagues in other states, and few institutional structures through which they could deal with problems when they arose, Johnson argued. In other words, they have plenty of water, but lack the tools they need to approach the problem of sharing. Because they’ve never had to think of it that way.
So while it may be true that we’ve got a lot of lawyers involved out west, the lawyering has so far avoided a major city going dry. But here we are, watching a federal court in Atlanta next week looking for a solution to what could be the nation’s biggest water problem: Atlanta (average rainfall 50 inches/125cm a year) going dry.
Links:
Among the countries for which I have data, the most robust correlates of fearfulness relate to countries’ religious traditions. Fear tends to be higher in countries where more people believe in Hell and where fewer believe in Heaven.
Chris Corbin argues that flood irrigation isn’t the bogeyman it’s frequently made out to be.
Some footnotes Chris and I came up in a twitter conversation:
This is all related to a post I’ve been cooking up, not yet completed, on the water policy version of the Jevons paradox. Its common formulation involves energy, and the assertion that efficiency measures don’t save as much energy as you think. Given groundwater recharge and return flows, the principle also applies to water.
I just finished and very much enjoyed Tyler’s Cowen’s The Great Stagnation
Cowen’s argument, for those not familiar with it, is that the stagnation of the U.S. economy is not the result of anything we’ve done wrong, but rather the fact that we managed the impressive rate of growth over the course of the 20th century by doing all the easy things, educating people who didn’t used to be educated, expanding public infrastructure like interstate highways, etc. Those things are all done now, and we’ve benefitted enormously in terms of GDP. But he argues we shouldn’t expect to see similar continued rates of GDP growth because there’s no obvious similar low-hanging fruit.
He concludes with a sort of kumbaya that sounds almost hokey as I excerpt it, but it is a sentiment I share:
Be tolerant, and realize there are some pretty deep-seated reasons for all the political strife and all the hard feelings and all the polarization. Government revenue, and private sector revenue, simply isn’t rising at the rate of our demands and expectations. No matter what your particular political commitments, be part of the solution to the current rancor, not part of the problem. Don’t demonize those you disagree with.