You probably don’t know who Eloise Kendy is, but you should. She’s a hydro consultant up in Helena, Montana, now with the Nature Conservancy, who writes nifty little papers exploring the collision of hydrologic realities with political and policy dream worlds (if you can get it, see pages 14-20 of Issue #19 of The Water Report). I covered one of her papers last summer in this post.

For a while Eloise has been writing about how the state of Montana doesn’t think that groundwater and surface water are connected. Well, everybody knows that the two are usually so connected that they are inseparable, but the state of water policy in Montana deems them connected only if a groundwater withdrawal directly removes water from a stream. Your withdrawal creates a cone of depression that allows for less recharge of groundwater into surface water, but as long as the cone of depression doesn’t intersect with the stream and thus directly draw from the stream you aren’t considered to be depleting the surface water. (If you want the science on this, try here, especially this circular.)

This legal alternate reality arose when the state legislature defined groundwater in 1993 as water that “is not immediately or directly connected to surface water.” Immediate or directly connected is not a hydrologic term, which left it open to interpretation by the Montana Department of Natural Resources and Conservation (DNRC). According to Kendy et al. in the Water Report paper I linked above:

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. . . to bring you a link to an article titled “The Convenient Truth” by Jonathan Rauch in the National Journal on climate policy. Now back to the blogging break . . .

Fresh out of the National Academies, commissioned by the CCSP, is a fabulous new climate-related assessment: Analysis of Global Change Assessments: Lessons Learned. The report

identifies for the U.S. Climate Change Science Program the essential elements of effective global change assessments, including strategic framing, engagement of stakeholders, credible treatment of uncertainties, and a transparent interface between policymakers and scientists. The report reviews lessons learned from past assessments, which are intended to inform policymakers about the scientific underpinnings of critical environmental issues such as climate change, loss of biodiversity, and ozone depletion.

Which would be great, but. But for two things we can identify right off the bat:

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Or just virtually arm wrestle over? Anyway, the American Meteorological Society has just created a new climate policy blog. Judging from the witness list (Oppenheimer, MacCracken, Kammen, and others), it shouldn’t be too long of a rise into the Technorati charts. It will be fun to see what this excellent list of cats, herded together by Paul Higgins, has to say over the next few months and years. (Good work, Paul.)

Of course, y’all can already see some places where we’re going to differ. From climatepolicy’s about page:

Policy choices will likely serve the interests of society most effectively if they are grounded in the best available knowledge and understanding. Therefore, we will promote objective understanding of climate change related issues rather than specific policy options.

For us around here, that statement is particularly timely. Lisa Dilling was talking about that very issue this past week. Lisa, is this what you meant by the “loading dock” approach?

Out any day now:

I’ll be taking a spring blogging break . . . back in April! But stay tuned, Kevin is in charge while I’m offline.