HP 15C
I got a sad note today from a friend who recently lost his beloved HP 15C calculator:
It had worked flawlessly for 28 years. One set of batteries lasts 7 years or more. One key was getting a bit worn. Dropped a few times, of course.
A relic of what the U.S. could once do.
In which I spend my morning observing the construction of a tumbleweed snowman:
Tumbleweed Snowman
(We also made a video. Story coming in tomorrow’s newspaper, too. We take this shit seriously, and did I mention I have the best job? Ever?)
Via Patricia McBroom, a fascinating look at a group studying tree rings in the redwoods along the Northern California coast for clues about climate:
The plan is to chart the health of the trees over time and use laboratory analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes to figure out how the trees have reacted in the past to climate and weather conditions.
“Embedded in this tree ring is a remarkable record of climate,” said Todd Dawson, the director of the Center for Stable Isotope Biogeochemistry at UC Berkeley, as he held up a core sample from a Montgomery Woods redwood. “Based on what has happened in the past, we can really project what will happen in the future.”
More on what tree rings can tell us, for that youngster on your holiday shopping list: The Tree Rings’ Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate
As we enter a new era of U.S. fiscal austerity, in which some members of Congress push to foreswear the dreaded “earmark” (pork barrel funding), Kitty Felde points out the importance of the practice in western water development:
In Congress, seniority is power. Senate historian Donald Ritchie says small states re-elect incumbents more often than big states. That means long-serving lawmakers from smaller states end up with plum committee chairmanships — and more power to tack on earmarks.
Ritchie cites the example of Republican Carl Hayden. He was Arizona’s first congressman when the state entered the union in 1912.
Fifteen years later, Hayden moved up to the Senate where he served for more than four decades. Ritchie says Hayden was powerful enough to make sure that when they divvied up Colorado River water, bone-dry Arizona got a good drenching.
“When Hayden came to Congress,” he says, “it was a very small state that didn’t have the resources, didn’t have the water, didn’t have the roads. He made sure that the dams were built, that the roads were built, that the aqueducts were built. And now there are millions of people living in Arizona who couldn’t have lived there before the federal government put that much money, spent that much money in the state.”
For grins, I took a cruise through the Senate Fiscal Year 2011 Energy and Water Appropriations bill. Our Congress is so dysfunctional that the bill hasn’t been approved yet (despite the fact that we’re two months into the fiscal year). So none of this stuff is actually funded – it’s merely the wish list of the Senators if Congress ever were to get its shit together and actually approve a federal budget.
But it gives a flavor. There are 45 earmarks in the Bureau of Reclamation budget, including $11 million in Feinstein-Boxer earmarks for California’s Central Valley. Byron Dorgan and Kent Conrad, North Dakota’s two Democratic senators, tried to score $13 million for their state. My homeboys, Jeff Bingaman and Tom Udall, pencilled in $2 million for a big water storage project out in eastern New Mexico.
That’s a fundamental truth about water development in the Western United States, and the societal development that followed. It took federal money to make it happen. There was a whole lot of political logrolling involved. The feds paid for flood control protection in the east, too, through the Army Corps of Engineers. So we asked for our share.
But we are not self-reliant, our mythology notwithstanding.
Storage in Lake Mead, Powell
When I was in Nevada last month, I heard from a number of lay people that the answer to a shrinking Lake Mead was simple: stop hoarding water upstream in Lake Powell.
Henry Brean did a nice job today of explaining why it ain’t that simple – that the current lake levels (as of today Powell is 61 percent full and Mead is 38 percent full, a record low) is the result of joint operations approved by all the players back in 2007 aimed at refilling Powell after it dropped to just 32.7 percent full in 2005:
Southern Nevada Water Authority chief Pat Mulroy said river users are “just buying time,” trying to outlast what already ranks as the worst drought of the last century.
The coordinated operation of Mead and Powell is just another stall tactic, she said.
“We are living on our savings account,” Mulroy said, and that account has been significantly drained over the past decade.
Related to my post the other day about the Drop 2 reservoir in southeastern California, and the increasing use of marginal (and frequently more expensive) water, Mike Hightower at Sandia Labs shared this graphic showing the expansion of wastewater reuse and desalination in the United States, current and projected:
Wastewater and Desalination on the Rise
So I appear to have jumped the gun last week in pronouncing the end of Lake Mead’s seasonal decline for 2010. As I write this morning, the lake surface is at 1081.92 feet above sea level, having fluttered below the 1082 mark during the past week for the first time since 1937. It’s now more than a foot below its level when I was out in October watching it set its record. Rather than rising nearly a foot in November, as had been expected, it’s dropped slightly (with three days yet to go in the month).
The precip map is showing a classic La Niña pattern – dry south, wetter north, though California seems to be doing better than they might have hoped:
Percent normal precip since Oct. 1, courtesy WRCC
In terms of the coming season, the snotel map is showing some promise:
Snotel, Nov. 26 2010, courtesy WRCC
Shaun McKinnon this morning has the good news that the new Drop 2 reservoir out along the All-American Canal in far southeast California doesn’t leak. Well, actually, the “doesn’t leak” part is not a big surprise, but provides a nice news peg for an update on why this tiny project matters:
The $172 million project is an attempt to seal decades-old leaks in the Colorado River’s water-delivery system by capturing the dribbles lost downstream to Mexico when farmers in Arizona and California don’t take water they ordered, usually because rain filled the need.
That water can now be shunted into the reservoir and held until the farmers ask for it again. The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation estimates the project could save as much as 70,000 acre-feet of water a year, water that can remain in Lake Mead as a hedge against drought.
Drop 2 Reservoir Inlet, courtesy USBR
I say “tiny” because 70,000 af is on the order of one half of one percent of the Colorado River’s flow. That illustrates one of two key points illustrated by the Drop 2 project – that the agencies that manage and use the Colorado’s water are operating right now at the tiniest of margins as they squeeze the river dry.
The second key point is that, in the desert, there’s never really any water “wasted”. To the water consuming community along the Lower Colorado River, water order from Hoover Dam but then left unused because it rained was “wasted.” But as Shaun points out, it ended up somewhere, and it did something:
Conservation groups say the water that escaped the Colorado’s system of canals was never wasted because it helped sustain the river’s few remaining riparian areas on the river’s delta in Mexico. Those areas still need a source of water to survive, the groups say.
Two different California water writers have offered what works by way of an answer to my question about the meaning of Westlands’ departure from the Bay Delta Conservation Plan discussions. Not so much a collapse, as a perfectly reasonable shrinkage?
The first voice is Patricia McBroom, who does a writerly job of taking us in person to the north delta to better understand what’s going on:
The work of state water officials and contractors was thrown into a blender Monday when the powerful Westlands Water District withdrew from their joint plans to build a giant tunnel/pipeline for diverting water around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. Loss of Westlands money and participation may mean a slower, more thoughtful process for building a new water diversion system – which is a good thing. Good for the fish, good for the ecosystem, good for Delta agriculture and good for the 23 million of us who drink from this heart of water.
Add some snark and “a whole cartload of schadenfreude” and On The Public Record seems to be making a very similar point:
I think it is perfectly appropriate for Westlands to withdraw from BDCP. They shouldn’t pay for a Peripheral Canal that can’t reliably deliver water to them. Without the west side arguing for a large Peripheral Canal (for ag deliveries), the conversation about a small Peripheral Canal (to assure that L.A.’s water supply isn’t dependent on Delta levees) can go forward. We’re watching the future happen, in jerky steps like this. I hope the politicians don’t yield to Westland’s temper tantrum on this. It’ll only drag the process out.
I claim no direct journalistic expertise in the California Bay-Delta water policy discussions currently underway. But in looking at it with my “institutional framework” hammer in hand (everything looks like a nail to me), it sure looks like a process doomed to failure. Take Mark Grossi’s latest in the Fresno Bee on Westlands’ decision to pull out of talks over the Bay Delta Conservation Plan. First Westland:
The draft of the Bay Delta Conservation Plan offers hope of restoring slumping water deliveries to west Valley farmers, Westlands officials said this week. But the Department of Interior advocates more limits on deliveries, they said.
Meanwhile the folks across the table seem to think the current planning parameters offer to much water to farmers, not too little:
Environmentalists and fishing groups are involved, too. Last week they criticized the draft conservation plan as a water grab for water users such as Westlands and Metropolitan Water District of Southern California.
This seems to have one of the necessary preconditions for effectively addressing a conflict over a common-pool resource – a process in which all the players with skin in the game engage in a serious discussion with the potential to be linked to real outcomes. That process sure looks from the outside like it’s collapsing.
But I have no idea whether the problem is as intractable as it sounds. Comments, California water tweeps?
update: From the Twitter
Tim Rote: “Westlands WD like North Korea. Create crisis in order to extort concessions.”
