Endangered species grow pals – the climate change connection

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Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition

Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition

While shopping recently at the Dollar Store, Nora and I came across the new frontier in climate change communication – inexpensive toys.

The Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition, is apparently collectible, and was a bargain at just $1. (It’s the Dollar Store.) Its package includes this helpful background:

Penguin populations have decreased by nearly 80 percent in some areas, and the majority of scientists agree that rising temperature due to climate change is the primary culprit.

It does not cite a source, but I find the information entirely credible. What incentive would the maker of an inexpensive children’s toy have to be other than fully authoritative in its packaging?

As an added bonus, when one places the grow toy in a medium container full of room temperature water, it apparently will grow to several times its original size, but it can be shrunk again simply by removing it from the water and allowing it to dry. This will apparently provide hours of fun, though I’m hesitant to remove the penguin from its packaging, as it might reduce its collectability.

One note of caution, however. It is a choking hazard, with small parts, and is not for children under three years of age.

On the implications of pumping California dry

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So what if we pump California’s Central Valley aquifers to empty? On The Public Record twiddles on the back of an envelope:

Before this report, my rough feel was that about one million acres of irrigated lands in CA are supported by unsustainable groundwater withdrawals. If overdraft is 10 MAF/year in the Central Valley, it makes me think my prediction of a loss of 3 million acres of irrigated ag is conservative, rather than the wild-eyed provocation one finds on blogs these days.

I’ve no idea if the number is right, but the order of magnitude seems reasonable, and it’s clearly Big Number of acres that are unsustainable, however off the calculation is and in whichever direction the error is to be found.

River Beat: Updated Forecast

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Forecast flow on the Colorado River as a whole and major tributaries is down. I was otherwise occupied yesterday and missed the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s monthly briefing, but Kevin Werner has posted his slides.

January Precip

Some high points:

  • January, as you can see from the accompanying image, was remarkably dry across the basin, a big switch from a wet December
  • The February-March-April forecast, driven by La Niña, calls for odds of drier than average conditions over much of the basin, especially the south (just what we’ve been seeing to date)
  • For New Mexico, a drop in the forecast flow on the San Juan
  • A drop in the forecast Lake Powell inflow, but still above average (USBR (pdf) is saying 105 percent for the water year, we’re still waiting on this month’s update on the effect that’ll have on Mead and Powell levels for the year)

Nuke Plant Developer Makes Water Economics Pitch

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It’s interesting to see Aaron Tilton’s approach to selling Utah officials on his proposed Green River nuclear power plant proposal’s economic use of water:

“Water use in a nuclear power plant is very economic,” Tilton said, calculating the power’s dollar output at $127,569 per million gallons, to agriculture’s $5,080. “The benefits are real in terms of jobs, tax base and labor income.”

The envisioned plant would employ 825, compared with 22,500 farmworkers, while agriculture taps 82 percent of the state’s diverted water. Per million gallons, he said, that’s 50 nuclear-energy jobs to 13 farm jobs.

If approved by state and federal regulators and built by Blue Castle Energy, the plant would use river water rights leased from San Juan and Kane counties.

Pumping California’s Central Valley Dry

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New analysis of the tricky problem of quantifying California’s groundwater depletion uses data from NASA’s GRACE satellite to come up with some startling numbers:

Here we use 78 months (October, 2003–March, 2010) of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to estimate water storage changes in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin River Basins. We find that the basins are losing water at a rate of 31.0 ± 2.7 mm yr?1 equivalent water height, equal to a volume of 30.9 km3 for the study period, or nearly the capacity of Lake Mead, the largest reservoir in the United States.

Can you say “unsustainable”?

  • Citation: Famiglietti, J. S., M. Lo, S. L. Ho, J. Bethune, K. J. Anderson, T. H. Syed, S. C. Swenson, C. R. de Linage, and M. Rodell(2011), Satellites measure recent rates of groundwater depletion in California’s Central Valley, Geophys. Res. Lett., 38, L03403, doi:10.1029/2010GL046442.
  • More in the press: Groundwater Vanishing in the Central Valley, Pat Brennan, Orange County Register, Feb. 8, 2011

Listening to the Forecast

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Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored:

So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at least four days out – in plenty of time to get people in northern Pakistan’s valleys out of the way. The problem was not with the meteorological and hydrologic science either internationally or in Pakistan. Instead,disaster was ensured when flood warnings were not taken sufficiently seriously by regional authorities, media, and residents.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brutal Cold, Brutal Choices

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From the morning paper, a look back at how New Mexico’s natural gas outages happened (sub/ad req):

Eventually, as the cold gained the upper hand and gas lines emptied, crews closed valves, cutting one community after another off of the gas grid — first Tularosa, then down to La Luz and Alamogordo on the gas company’s southern system. To the north, Red River went first, followed by Questa, Taos and Española in a trail of fallen dominoes that did not end until company officials made the decision to cut service to Placitas and Bernalillo.

Ken Oostman, the gas company’s vice president for technical services, said, “We were very fearful that we could lose the entire system.”

Energy and water, Utah edition

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With a nuclear power plant proposal taking shape in Green River, folks in Utah are trying to get out in front of the energy-water nexus. From the Salt Lake Tribune:

In parts of the country with dependable water supplies, nuclear power naturally fits with plans to boost the nation’s investment in clean energy sources. While nuclear power plants pose unique safety challenges, they produce energy without adding to the carbon emissions that are dangerously warming the planet, just as solar panels and wind farms do.

But here in the second-driest state, nuclear power’s water requirements should be cause for delaying construction of any such plant until the ramifications are clearly understood.

I’ve honestly not been sure whether to take the Blue Castle project seriously. But others clearly are.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Explaining the Cold

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From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req):

[I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees above normal.

“We’re getting what they’re supposed to be getting, and they’re getting what we’re supposed to be getting,” said National Weather Service meteorologist Brian Guyer.

Social Media and the Journalist’s Toolkit

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Three interesting case studies this week in the use of social media in my journalism (or in one case just my life), which I hope might be of some interest to others (especially colleagues who have been skeptical of its utility – you know who you are).

twitter screen grabNew Mexico had a historic storm this week, a freeway-clogging, school-closing, pipe-freezing, gas-service-interrupting mess. One of my jobs at the newspaper is to pay attention to the weather and explain/warn as needed. I could not have done that, or done it as well, without Twitter.

Every newsroom I’ve worked in over the decades has had, as its soundtrack, the chatter of a police scanner. We know how to use that – quick bursts of information, often unconfirmed, that are worth paying attention to in a low level, background way.

My Twitter feed is like that, but on a broad range of topics. It includes, for example, a number of people working at the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office, who do a great job of sending out links to their latest forecast information, interesting data, and a heads up when the weather is about to get interesting. (That’s Kerry Jones and Daniel Porter you see in the accompanying picture, passing along a link to Daniel’s latest storm update.) My feed also includes other journalists, emergency services folks (both agency and individual feeds) and a lot of regular people who live around New Mexico. When an event like our epic cold happens, the chatter picks up, creating an ambient awareness of the developing situation – tidbits to check out, alerts from government officials, journalists linking to their latest info, people asking questions, other people giving answers.

There is, for example, Melwell Romancito up in Taos, where the gas has been off for more than 48 hours. I have no idea who she is, but people started Retweeting her stuff, I followed her, and she’s become a great source of information. (She just pointed out a problem with some info that’s currently making the rounds from an earlier gas company release. Turns out we still have that info on the newspaper’s web site. Must get it fixed.) Or TaosJohn, who shared a link to the Taos Police Department Facebook page. There also are official channels, like the New Mexico public safety folks.

This is the sort of ongoing, rapid fire communication that has always gone on in a story like this – trying to reach out and communicate as quickly as possible with a range of people who might have relevant information. Twitter is simply a huge force multiplier.

The second case study is far simpler and less freighted, but has a lot of similarities.

I don’t write much directly about economics, but it is an important boundary condition for a lot of what I cover – water policy, energy, environmental issues. So I try to have a sort of ongoing ambient awareness about what’s going on in the economy, to help me understand when I need to dive into in more detail. My Twitter feed includes a list of economists and economics journalists (and probably some people who are both) that acts as a sort of police scanner for the economy. When Friday’s confusing set of jobs/unemployment numbers came out, I didn’t have the time or the expertise to sort it out myself. But that was OK, because the people I follow on Twitter did it for me in a 24-hour burst of shared links – first alerting me to the data release, then taking me through the sorting out they were all doing.

Again, this is the sort of thing I could have done (and often still do) in other ways – hunting through the econ blogs and work of various journalists or diving into the data myself. Twitter made it far easier and more serendipitous.

There are a lot of other subject areas like these – New Mexico politics and the state legislature, climate science and politics, energy policy, western water – where a carefully assembled Twitter feed of smart people chatting about what they know is an incredibly useful way of tracking what’s going on. Having the equivalent of a police scanner for the water policy beat is awesome.

In the previous cases, I am my own “curator”, picking which feeds to follow, getting a feel for who to listen to and how. The previous cases also relate directly to my job. The final case study is Egypt, where I’ve joined 39,414 other twitter users (as of 8:27 p.m. MST Saturday) and outsourced the curation to Andy Carvin. Amy Gahran at Knight Digital Media explains a bit about who Carvin is (NPR “senior strategist”, whatever that means) and how he’s doing it. The bottom line is that he’s find and sharing information at an amazingly rapid fire and amazingly useful rate.

Plus, there’s ro_bot_dylan.