Major H2O Utilities Want Fed Research Help

Now we're talking. But will the Feds respond, at least before Bush is gone?

Quoting from Climate Science Watch:

An alliance of eight major water utilities that provide drinking water to 36 million people is calling on the US Climate Change Science Program and the science community to aid in assessing and managing risks to water infrastructure and supply from impacts of warming, diminishing snowpack, bigger storms, drought, rising sea level, and potential abrupt climate change.

This is about the US Global Change Research Program, which the Bush Administration has done its best to disempower. The alliance calls itself, logically enough, the Water Utility Climate Alliance, and they need "access to the best possible climate change research as they prepare to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in infrastructure over the next 15 years."

OK, water comes first, especially for the regions most threatened by water shortages. (Interestingly, neither Georgia's nor Alabama's water utilities are among them.) But wouldn't just be right for the federal program to fund research to provide the best risk assessment for all potential climate impacts across the U.S.?

Complexities of drought planning

Most of North Carolina is still dealing with extreme drought conditions, and a plan proposed by the governor - which would impose water use restrictions uniformly on counties based on what "level" of drought they are in - is getting plenty of pushback from local resource managers.

"There is no one size fits all [answer]. Every community and the situation of every water system is different," said Ellis Hankins, director of the League of Municipalities.

Hankins is recommending his own plan to the governor, that will take into consideration other factors in assigning restrictions. Some counties, for example, are at an "extreme level" of drought, but still have water in their reservoirs, while others at that same level have empty reservoirs.

When it's dry everywhere, a little bit of available water makes a difference.

Desalination - Backup for the Long Dry

The first large-scale desalination plant in the U.S. recently began operating in Tampa, Florida. With a production capacity of 25 million gallons per day, it's much bigger than the plant currently going through public comment and EIR for my home county of Marin in California, with its initial capacity to produce 5 million gallons per day.

The price comparison: Tampa's plant, $150 million; Marin's, and estimated $115 million. One main difference is that Tampa's plant gets its water from the cooling system of a nearby power plant.

Both locations have gone through extreme water shortages and rationing in the not-too-distant past, and neither has access to backup water supplies. Marin has not yet made the decision to proceed, but has no other alternatives except conservation. Both locations have steadily increased their per capita water usage.

Lakes Powell and Mead dry by 2021 - Odds: 50/50

It's way beyond a slim possibility. Fifty percent odds make for an appreciable risk. This was the finding of a study by Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. To reduce those odds, cities, farmers and industry that rely on water from the Colorado River had better change their water use habits immediately. Not to mention the loss of electricity generated by the lost water.

The results underscore the importance of water-conservation measures that many communities throughout the region are putting into place. Other studies, some dating back nearly 20 years, have projected that Lake Mead could fall to virtually useless levels as climate warmed, but they lacked a sense of the timing. The new results, the Scripps scientists say, represent a first attempt to answer when lakes Mead and Powell would run dry, squeezing water supplies in Arizona, California, Nevada, and New Mexico.

"We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it is coming at us," notes Tim Barnett, a research physicist at Scripps who led the effort. By "dry," the team means that water levels fall so low behind the Hoover and Glenn Canyon Dams that the water fails to reach the gravity-fed intakes that guide it through turbines or out through spillways. In addition, the report estimates that the lakes stand a 50 percent chance of falling to the lowest levels required to generate electricity by 2017.

Drought in the Southwest - "There are no knowns right now"

My wife, visiting family in Scottsdale, Arizona, called me this morning to tell me about a front page article in the Arizona Republic titled Climate-change realities could ruin water planning. The article was inspired by a new study reported in Science magazine - Stationarity Is Dead: Whither Water Management?

The killer quote (I thought) that wraps the AZ Repub article was this one, by Larry Dozier, deputy general manager of the Central Arizona Project, which delivers Colorado River water to Phoenix and Tucson:

"There are no knowns right now," Dozier said. "We have no more certainty."

Adaptation will be more an exercise of living with uncertainty that one of changing the way we live for a new steady-state environment. It won't be like traveling to another country and bringing the right clothes to fit a different climate. It will be more like being taken without any control to one new location after another, with surprise weather greeting you in each destination. You'd better bring everything from your swimming trunks to your down parka.

The article does a good job of explaining why the warm and heavy rains that have fallen on Arizona so far this winter are not the answer to its water shortage problems. The entire strategy of water management in the largely desert region of the American Southwest is based on snowpack. The real water storage should be held in the form of snow in the mountains of Arizona, Colorado and Utah, then released gradually to replenish reservoirs during the dry and hot summer months. If the winter precipitation falls as rain, it rapidly fills reservoirs to capacity, forcing releases of overflow into river channels - effectively wasting water that would have been available later in the year had it been in frozen state.

Authors of the Science article were interviewed for the newspaper article.

In the Science magazine article, researchers say that human-caused changes in the climate will play havoc on the averages and extremes used to plan for floods, droughts and water storage. Those measurements help determine how much water needs to be stored or how cities allocate resources.

"Climate change magnifies the possibility that the future will bring droughts or floods you never saw in your old measurements," said Christopher Milly, the study's lead author and a research hydrologist for the U.S. Geological Survey.

"For agencies like the Army Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, this would mean fundamental changes in the way they do business," Milly said.

Scientists can't offer a solution yet, beyond urging water managers to consider a wider range of possibilities as they plan for the future.

"We need to have enough flexibility to change course in case the system goes in a way it hasn't before," said Kelly Redmond, deputy director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, one of six climate-study centers overseen by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"We have to plan for possibly being in a new regime," Redmond said.

Whether the current drought represents a new regime is still unknown, Redmond said, but that question looms large in front of researchers.

"We know from the tree-ring records that the Southwest does experience long droughts on its own," he said. "Is it one of those droughts, or is it a new type of drought? That's what we don't know."

Scraping the bottom of the reservoir

I'm learning new things all the time about reservoir jargon. Today I was exposed for the first time to the "sediment layer" of a reservoir's water supply. Of course I've known that sediments settle and collect behind dams, sometimes to the extent that the volume of water in the reservoir shrinks over time. But more often, much of that sediment remains in suspension in the water, sinking to occupy the bottom level as what we'd recognize as watery mud.

The drought in Raleigh, North Carolina, has just about driven the region to begin providing water to residents from this sediment layer, according to the NewsObserver.

A federal study in the 1990s found that Falls Lake's bottom is filling more slowly than expected, leaving more room for water than first planned. In theory, the lake's bottom layer holds enough water to supply Raleigh and the seven other Wake County towns it serves for two to three months.

Under the proposal, the Army Corps of Engineers would sell up to about 6 1/2 billion gallons of the bottom water in four increments as needed. That's up to 87 days' worth at the lake's current draw-down rate, assuming no rain. That would come after Raleigh exhausts its regular supply, which by the most recent estimate on Tuesday stood at 113 days left.

Raleigh's City Council voted this week to ask the corps to let the city tap permanently into the surplus at the bottom. A permanent reallocation of half the lake's bottom layer would boost the city's supply by more than one-fourth -- until inevitable sediment accumulations erased it.

But once the muddy water has been tapped, there's other local source to draw from. Future planning relies on the return of the rains to refill reservoirs, after which the local and state governments will resolve to maintain higher standing levels to guard against future drought.

In a sense, the best-case scenarios are that drought periods in the future are no longer than a couple years at a time, an assumption that can no longer be considered reliable.

A visit to Arizona

I just returned from four days visiting family in Scottsdale, the sprawling suburb of Phoenix. They'd recently been blessed with 5 inches of rain, coming down in unusually strong torrents, according to my relatives. This provided some reassuring relief from the growing apprehension in the Valley of the Sun that there was a major problem with their water supply. Some reservoirs had been replenished from this single storm. And adding to the sense of relief was the news that a "landmark agreement" had been signed by the seven states in the American Southwest that share water from the Colorado River.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada put it into perspective:

""I want to applaud the negotiators from the seven Colorado River Basin states and the Secretary of the Interior for successfully completing this important agreement which will govern how the states share water shortages. Unfortunately, it appears that this nine year drought may be the new norm and this agreement will ensure future cooperation among the states that rely upon the river to meet all our water needs."

"Share water shortages," indeed. I wouldn't describe the mood in Scottsdale - after rain and resolution - as euphoric. After 8 years of below average rainfall and a record-setting summer of temperatures over 110 degrees, Arizonans have gotten the warning. And yet, you'd hardly know that any limits had been recognized if you judge just by the amount of construction still going on, the amount of water shooting out of decorative fountains, and the number of gas guzzlers crowding the roads.

Central Arizona still appears to be a classic case of human denial and hubris. The agreement among the seven states does not provide Arizona with a guarantee of more water; it's more an update of an old agreement that became obsolete in light of the current drought in the Colorado River basin and the extensive development that has taken place in Arizona, Las Vegas and Southern California. It removed some uncertainty, but did not create new water.

There are some signs of sanity in Tucson, where the local government declared that it would no longer extend its municipal water lines into new housing developments outside of city limits.

City Manager Mike Hein revealed at Tuesday's City Council meeting that he had ordered a stop to expansion of Tucson Water's delivery system beyond city limits to instead focus on areas where it is legally obligated to deliver water.

The potentially risky move already is bringing other local government officials to the table for what Hein called a pressing need for joint discussions of growth and water.

"It just seems to me that we have to be able to set the table and have some rational dialogues that aren't built on turf, aren't built on egos and aren't built on political control," he said Wednesday. "When I talk about regional growth, we should as a region understand each other's intentions. I find more typically than not (that) all of our goals are aligned. They're just not communicated real well."

No salt, please. Desalinating the Bay for Marin

My home county does not, like most of California, depend on snow melt from the Sierras for its water supply. Nor does it, like most of the remaining regions, rely on water from a river. Marin - specifically southern and middle Marin - gets its water from seven reservoirs in the hills covering the central region of the county. These catch run-off from Mt. Tamalpais and its greater water shed. But the rising population and the needs of more large houses with expensive landscaping have combined with the acknowledgement of a greater chance of drought to create a need for another source of water.

I've mentioned the option of a desalination plant, sucking water from the San Francisco Bay and filtering it by reverse osmosis. Now, the talk has escalated to a public environmental impact hearing at the Marin Municipal Water District HQ, where the $115 million first stage plant will be described. No, there are no funds available for the plant; new taxes and/or higher water bills would raise the money. And no, there is no firm plan for mitigating damage from the return of concentrated brine to the bay after the pure water is extracted. Nor is there a plan for generating the electricity required to run the plant, especially in the case of drought, when the plant would need to produce up to twice as much drinking water as during more normal times.

So, lots of unanswered questions. But at least it's a sign that my county is thinking adaptively. Hopefully, this proposal will be accompanied by more public education about conserving the water we have now, when we're only in a mildly drier than normal period.

Brazil Acknowledging Impact

A New York Times story describes how scientists and political leaders in Brazil are having their "AHA!" moment regarding the impact of climate change on their nation.

The factors behind the re-evaluation range from a drought here in the Amazon rain forest, the world’s largest, and the impact that it could have on agriculture if it recurs, to new phenomena like a hurricane in the south of Brazil. As a result, environmental advocates, scientists and some politicians say, Brazilian policy makers and the public they serve are increasingly seeing climate change not as a distant problem, but as one that could affect them too.

There has long been pressure on Brazil to better manage the Amazon Basin - the largest CO2 sink and oxygen producing region in the world. Until now, Brazil has stood fast in its independent approach to dealing with the destruction of the forest in favor of agricultural and timber interests that fed into its growing economy. Now, it's beginning to reconsider some of the issues that have caused international friction in the past.

As rainfall patterns change, Brazil now realizes that its recent agricultural prosperity may be at risk. Dependable water flow is also essential to its plans for damming tributaries of the Amazon to produce electricity. As with may countries (see U.S., India and China, for example) Brazil stands to cook the very goose that has been laying its golden eggs.

Glacial Melting - China

Climate Frog reported on the retreating glaciers on the south side of the Himalayas, a process that threatens the water supply to over a billion people. Now comes this report from the San Francisco Chronicle concerning glacial melting on the north side of the same mountainous region, this time affecting the water supply to a good part of China, home to another billion-plus citizens.

China has recognized the impact of this dwindling water supply as it has affected the high plateau grasslands, which had long supported the raising of livestock. With the shrinking of the pasture, many primitive ranchers have lost their livelihoods. Relocation - now common in China due to the damming of rivers and desertification - has become the solution for water-starved ranchers, too.

The Qinghai-Tibetan plateau is warming up faster than anywhere else in the world, Chinese scientists said last week. The region's average annual temperature is rising at a speed of 0.7 degrees Fahrenheit every 10 years, threatening to melt glaciers, dry up the 3,395-mile Yellow River and cause more droughts, sandstorms and desertification.

The plateau once contained 36,000 glaciers covering an area of 18,000 square miles, but in recent decades, the area of these glaciers has shrunk by 30 percent, say scientists from the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The government has forcibly moved thousands of nomads into local towns, giving them free housing and 8,000 yuan (about $1,060) per year.

China, with its huge population and currently booming economy, will be as important as the U.S. in future calculations of global warming progress. Like the U.S., it must balance current economic prosperity and trends in that direction with the increasingly obvious impacts of its industrial development.

The nationwide economic boom has propelled China into overtaking the United States as the world's No. 1 source of greenhouse gas emissions, according to new data released in May. China's output of emissions is rising by an annual amount that far outstrips the cutbacks that wealthy nations are committed to make under the Kyoto Protocol.

"The Chinese government is gradually realizing that global warming is something that will deeply affect the Chinese people and their economic security," said Yang Ailun, climate program coordinator for Greenpeace in China.

In international climate negotiations, China's leaders have refused to consider binding limits on the country's emissions, arguing that limits should be imposed only on wealthy nations. Instead, China has adopted a goal of reducing the amount of energy expended per unit of wealth - a weaker yardstick that many environmentalists have criticized as insufficient.

India's Shrinking Glaciers

This quote from the New York Times science article (free subscription required) makes the case for reporting it in Climate Frog:

The thousands of glaciers studded across 1,500 miles of the Himalayas make up the savings account of South Asia’s water supply, feeding more than a dozen major rivers and sustaining a billion people downstream. Their apparent retreat threatens to bear heavily on everything from the region’s drinking water supply to agricultural production to disease and floods.

The glaciers of the Himalaya, which feed the rivers that flow through India, are among the least studied glaciers in the world. There is little history of their growth and shrinkage to refer to in evaluating trends, but since all glaciers in all parts of the world have been in major retreat for the past 20 years, it's safe to assume that the same is true in the Himalaya. The difference here is that a huge population- over a billion people - is dependent on the water that has historically been released through the dry season by the gradual melting of these accumulations of ice.

As the article says, the IPCC addresses the shrinking glacier problem in its recently released report.

In its report, the international panel predicted that as these glaciers melt, they would increase the likelihood of flooding over the next three decades and then, as they recede, dry up the rivers that they feed. “In the course of the century,” it warned darkly, “water supply stored in glaciers and snow cover are projected to decline, reducing water availability in regions supplied by meltwater from major mountain ranges, where more than one-sixth of the world population currently lives.”

California Streaming - Water Policy Changes

Drought and flooding, as the potential extremes of climate change, have long been threats to California - a state whose very financial existence depends on moving water from its natural locations to the dry valley farmlands and concentrated population centers that otherwise would be semi-arid deserts. How are the needs of farmers, environmentalists, municipal utility districts and fishing industries served from natural water supplies that may become even more limited? People fight in the courts, congress and state legislatures over water rights and it's a rare occasion when opponents reach agreement over how limited water will be distributed.

Now environmentalists and local politicians have reached what amounts to a treaty over water distribution in the Sacramento Delta and it may serve as a useful model as climate change forces water crises elsewhere in the US.

The SF Chronicle article is headlined Big, New Water Project Under Way: Diversion to Supply Sacramento Area and the East Bay and its lede is

Government officials and environmentalists broke ground Monday on a new Sacramento River water diversion system, deeming it a historic project that sets a precedent for state water distribution in an era of global warming and drought.

As with most of these tugs of war, it's a complex issue, not easily explained in the space of one article, but the important part for environmental concerns in future similar situations is this:

...the project accomplishes two main goals of the environmental community: protection of the lower American River and the promotion of water conservation and wastewater recycling.

U.S. Military getting on board?

The WaPo today reports, in Military Sharpens Focus on Climate Change, that 11 senior generals are releasing a report admitting that

global warming "presents significant national security challenges to the United States," which it must address or face serious consequences.

It seems that, based on their study, the military should be highly motivated to support any preventative or mitigating activities related to climate change because they recognize that threats to stability are likely to resolve into threats to the U.S. Drought in poor countries could be expected to "drive a flood of migrants to richer countries."

"Many developing nations do not have the government and social infrastructures in place to cope with the type of stressors that could be brought about by global climate change," the report states. "When a government can no longer deliver services to its people, ensure domestic order, and protect the nation's borders from invasion, conditions are ripe for turmoil, extremism and terrorism to fill the vacuum."

CNN's account of the report includes this quote by General Anthony Zinni:

"We will pay for this one way or another," writes Zinni, former commander of U.S. Central Command. "We will pay to reduce greenhouse gas emissions today, and we'll have to take an economic hit of some kind. Or we will pay the price later in military terms. And that will involve human lives. There will be a human toll."

Stanford scientist Terry Root, a co-author of the report agreed, in this somewhat awkward statement, that the water-based instability was sure to come eventually.

"We're going to have a war over water," Root said. "There's just not going to be enough water around for us to have for us to need to live with and to provide for the natural environment."

Scrambling for Agua

The American West has been reading the drought tea leaves for long enough. Its residents can no longer dismiss this trend as a normal cyclical fluctuation in precip. The reservoirs and water tables are not being replenished to make up for the dry years and the upper Colorado River basin pictured here is being asked to provide for more needs than it can keep up with. From now on, every year may just be a "drier than normal" year, and with millions of residents having been added to the region in recent years, it's time to get creative.

In the article An Arid West No Longer Waits for Rain (registration required), NY Times reporters Randal C. Archibald and Kirk Johnson describe some of the projects either newly under way or revived from previous abandonment - some $2.5 billion dollars worth of pipelines, reservoirs and desalination plants.

According to some long-term projections, the mountain snows that feed the Colorado River will melt faster and evaporate in greater amounts with rising global temperatures, providing stress to the waterway even without drought. This year, the spring runoff is expected to be about half its long-term average. In only one year of the last seven, 2005, has the runoff been above average.

Everywhere in the West, along the Colorado and other rivers, as officials search for water to fill current and future needs, tempers are flaring among competing water users, old rivalries are hardening and some states are waging legal fights.

The tug of war over Colorado River water is intensifying as more experts project that it my rarely - if ever - return to the reliable source it once was. Seven states have historically depended on some portion of that water, and as it provides less, each of these states require more for growing needs and environmental purposes.

The source of the satellite photo above - the National Climatic Data Center - noted that, as of a May 2006 study, "The Lees Ferry reconstruction suggests a higher long-term mean than previous reconstructions but strongly supports earlier findings that Colorado River allocations were based on one of the wettest periods in the past 5 centuries and that droughts more severe than any 20th to 21st century event occurred in the past." The implication being that drought may prove to be more normal than the water supplies used as the baseline for distributing the Colorado's water. Oops!

So even under the best of supply scenarios, the exploding population belt in the mountain and sun belts of the West is putting stress on water resources. Utah and Nevada are in the courts, challenging each other's water rights. Water rights lawyers can look forward to full employment.

Ultimately - with climate change and population growth forcing the issues - compromise will end up being the only course to take. California set an example recently for how cities and farmers may have to deal with limitations.

An agreement reached a few years ago between farmers and the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, the chief supplier of water to that region, is one model. Under the terms of the agreement, farmers would let their fields lie fallow and send water to urban areas in exchange for money to cover the crop losses.

Ski Bummers

The vanguard victims of climate change - the most vulnerable to current conditions - include mountain populations that depend on cold and snowy winters. In the Sierra Nevada, Cascades and Rocky Mountains, winters have been getting less cold with less snow. The ski and snowboard industries are not optimistic. As these aerial shots of a dry winter (top) and a normal winter (bottom) show, the writing is plainly on the wall. But it's not just the winter recreation that will suffer. The reduction in snowfall and rainfall and the shrinking of glaciers will affect water-based recreation during the warmer months, too. And that's not to mention the overall reduction in water supply for a fast-growing population.

The US Global Change Research Program (yes, such a program does exist, supported by our tax dollars) is conducting a US National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change (whew!), and its Regional Paper: Rocky Mountain/Great Basin Region describes the likely impacts on a climatic region that has been developing steadily for the past century.

Warming conditions ... hold the potential to trigger avalanche conditions that are a risk to skiers, boarders, and hikers and would hasten the retreat of glaciers, a process that has already begun. For example, the area covered by glaciers in Glacier National Park has declined by 70% from the area occupied at Park establishment in the early 1900s. At present warming and recession rates, all glaciers in the Park are expected to disappear over the next 30 years.

But it's really the threat to the winter sports businesses that looms most darkly over the Rockies. There's the hope that shorter winters and longer warm seasons will open up more business opportunities for mountain biking and backpacking, but no one can believe that these activities will replace the revenue that comes from winter lodging, eating, shopping and lift passes.

Also impacted by the effects of climate change on the ski industry would be the many support industries that derive revenue from skiing. Ski equipment and clothing manufacturers and retailers, travel agencies, resort hotels, and local restaurants could all face economic challenges should the RMGB ski industry be compromised. Impacts on property values would also be in this same category. Many of the ski areas that are associated with significant amounts of private land (many areas are built only on national forests) are the locations of major, up-scale, real estate development. Vail and Aspen in Colorado, Deer Valley and Park City in Utah, Sun Valley, Idaho and Jackson, Wyoming are prime examples. Lots and homes are routinely valued in millions of dollars. Ski-area officials are in wide agreement that these property values would plummet if skiing were to disappear, even with allowances for continued use for summer recreational activities.

In its report, the Global Change Research Program does recommend some actions to mitigate damage from climate change, but it's meager recompense.

• Inform anyone thinking of opening new facilities that it's a bad bet.
  
• Develop other activities for visitors to enjoy during warmer winters.
  
• And support and facilitate water conservation, because if the water supply disappears, nothing else will work to support existing mountain communities

After a few more warm winters, we'll see how much difference these ideas will make in the lives of Rocky mountain residents.