A NFIP reauthorization has been moving through Congress and yesterday the Senate passed its version. Predictably they moved the current $18+ billion NFIP deficit to general revenues (i.e. the U.S. taxpayer), a move that has a long history in Congress. But some good was included in the bill and the House’s version does not have the $18+ billion shift. The Senate was able to pass an annual premium increase cap from 10% to 15%, which is more significant than it probably sounds. They also authorized $2B for updated floodplain mapping, which is also much more significant than it probably sounds, as currently premiums are not always based on physical reality. (We’ll see how much actually gets appropriated out of that $2B.)

(And hey all, sorry for the non-controversial post.)

The figure above shows the snowpack in the state of Colorado for the past few years. The current level is higher than its been for a while. This is great news for just about everyone in Colorado — except seasonal climate forecasters, who had predicted a dry, warm winter, and were sticking to that forecast as recently as a month ago.

In today’s Denver Post our excellent local science reporter Katy Human takes a look at the forecasts and why forecasters have given in to the reality of massive snowfall totals here in Colorado:

Dry-winter forecasts were flat wrong this year for much of Colorado and the Southwest, and weather experts say they’re struggling to understand why the snow just keeps falling.

Some forecasters blame climate change, and others point to the simple vicissitudes of weather. Regardless, almost everyone called for a dry-to-normal winter in Colorado and the Southwest — but today, the state’s mountains are piled so thick with snow that state reservoirs could fill and floods could be widespread this spring.

“The polar jet stream has been on steroids. We don’t understand this. It’s pushing our limits, and it’s humbling,” said Klaus Wolter, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Wolter and NOAA both forecast a drier-than-average winter in most of Colorado. AccuWeather Inc. did the same, citing similar reasons: A La Niña weather system of cool, equatorial Pacific water had set up in the tropics last fall.

I have a lot of respect for Klaus, who is brave enough to put out forecasts in the public on time scales that will allow verification, and hence newspaper articles on his performance. Forecasting is not for the thin-skinned. But forecasts have other effects as well:

La Niña winters have almost always brought droughtlike conditions to the Southwest, as the jet stream ferries storms farther north.

But Arizona has been hit with record snowfall this winter, said Mark Hubble, a senior hydrologist with the Salt River Project in Arizona, the largest provider of water and power in Phoenix.

Dry forecasts last fall convinced Salt River Project managers to purchase about 20,000 acre-feet of water from the Central Arizona Project as a backup, Hubble said. An acre- foot of water is about enough for a family of four for one year.

“As it turns out, we didn’t need it — at all,” Hubble said. He could not estimate the financial losses to Salt River, because some payments are made in-kind, with water trades and offsets in the future.

So why did the forecasts bust this year? No one really knows.

Wolter said he’s troubled that his and other long-range forecasts have been off two years in a row now.

Last year, experts predicted a wet year from Southern California across to Arizona and southern Colorado, because of an El Niño weather system of warmer Pacific water.

Instead, drought worsened in the Southwest, capped by a huge fire season in Southern California.

“So we have two years in a row here where the atmosphere does not behave as we expect,” Wolter said. “Maybe global changes are pulling the rug out from underneath us. We may not know the answer for 10 years, . . . but one pet answer is that you should get more variability with global change.”

So I suppose we should add busted seasonal forecasts to our growing lists of things consistent with predictions of climate change. Making long term, unverifiable forecasts is sure a lot safer territory than predicting seasonal snowpack!

For further reading:

Pielke, Jr., R. A., 2000: Policy Responses to the 1997/1998 El Niño: Implications for Forecast Value and the Future of Climate Services. Chapter 7 in S. Changnon (ed.), The 1997/1998 El Niño in the United States. Oxford University Press: New York. 172-196. (PDF)

One thing (among many) hinted at in the article that deserves highlight: Western agriculture is done. Not tomorrow, not even in the next decade or two, but eventually. Without a check on urban expansion and with every drop of water spoken for, the economics are obvious: people in urban areas need water and have the cash to buy it from the agricultural senior rights holders.

Over on the Post-Normal Times, Sylvia adds the variable to the west’s water equation that the Sunday Mag article left out: the ecosystems and endangered species angle (here and here).

First read the article. Then realize the most important lesson not discussed in the article: this is not just a western issue. I and colleagues at Eastern Kentucky University and Columbia University are conducting research which I’ll describe here over the next few months on New York City and drought (part of our project is developing the paleoclimatology of Hudson River precip, the other is the policy implications). NYC has declared drought emergency after emergency over the past twenty years in what has been a relatively wet two decades compared to the previous five centuries. This has happened not amid increasing use, but decreasing use. New York City isn’t the only example of a perhumid region experiencing drought or water availability crises, as areas of the southeast and Pacific Northwest battle over water.

Second, perhaps inadvertently the article perfectly illustrates the shortsighted response to water supply issues under future climate. Many communities over the past decades have put strong focus on consumption reductions (see that NYC water page again, which shows a steady decline in total consumption and per capita consumption). But when water supply issues come out and politicians start getting asked about the response, one keyword is thrown like a ninja star at the reporter: concrete. More steel, more infrastructure, more technology. In other words, more serial engineering.

If you’ve flown into Los Angeles or Las Vegas with a window seat you know the real problem. Every backyard in LA has a large turquoise rectangle and the number of golf courses in Las Vegas seems to equal the number of slot machines. But these are just small manifestations of the real problem: mentality. It would be hard to dispute the west’s unlimited consumption mentality, starting from the grass roots of lawn watering at single family homes and spreading all the way up to the top:

In California, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has sounded alarm bells by pushing for a ballot measure in 2008 that would allocate $4.5 billion in bonds for new water storage in the state. The water content in the Sierra Nevada snowpack has reached the lowest level in about two decades, state hydrologists have reported, putting additional pressure on the nation’s most populous state to find and store more water.

That paragraph neatly sums up the engineering response mentality for western water. The keywords are alarm bells, pressure, and store. Alarm bells are appropriate and it’s good to see water/climate change risk translated into political concern. Pressure is also appropriate, but only if responded to intelligently. But store should be replaced with leadership, creativity and management. Four point five billion dollars in concrete will create a lot of jobs, but will not solve California’s water issues.

The curious left-right fight on these issues always seems to slide back to growth, with clear anti- and pro-growth lines. In this context water supply issues are taken as a proxy on growth; if you’re for limiting water consumption you must be anti-development (and thus a dirty Communist?). But beyond the rhetoric are two clear realities: we will continue to grow, sometimes even where there appears to be too little water; we’re running toward a brick wall of water supply and continuing to live a no-questions-asked consumptive lifestyle that is at best shortsighted. In the future political leadership must raise and address the consumptive issues first as the primary challenge to tackle, and then see extra concrete only as a consequence of policy failure.

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:

As documented by a series of departmental memos, DNRC determined that groundwater is “immediately or directly” connected to surface water only if groundwater pumping pulls surface water into the aquifer, or “induces surface water infiltration.” According to this nterpretation, even if a well captures groundwater that would otherwise discharge into a stream, such groundwater is not “immediately or directly” connected to surface water, and the permit application may be processed as a groundwater exception to the basin-closure.

In other words, when you pump groundwater you aren’t depleting surface water, even when your groundwater pumping is in reality indirectly drawing down streamflows. What this means is that Johnny-come-latelies who put in new groundwater wells can seriously impact people who hold senior rights on surface water without being subject to the time honored legal tradition of first-in-time, first-in-right. This is a serious problem in watersheds that are not fully appropriated, but is legally catastrophic in watersheds (like most important Montana rivers) that are.

The problem finally worked itself up to the Montana Supreme Court last
year and they made the shocking decision that, hey, surface water and groundwater really are connected. Go figure. The losers of that decision were actually ranchers with plans to install new wells, but the ruling has deep implications for housing developers, especially on the Gallatin River out of Bozeman.

Arising from the court decision, last month two bills were discussed in the MT state legislature to deal with the connectivity issue, covered amply in this article. One bill, promoted by Trout Unlimited and the DNRC

would require that anyone in a closed basin seeking a groundwater permit do a hydrologic study first, a step not currently necessary. If the study shows a new well would take water from senior surface-water rights holders, then the applicant must explain how that water would be replaced – a process known as augmentation.

The other bill, promoted by the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau

would require that new groundwater users replace the water they use only when it has an immediate and harmful impact on senior water rights.

which gets us squarely back to the problem created by DNRC’s weird mid-1990’s interpretation of connectivity, and essentially tries to write into law the unreality that if groundwater withdrawals don’t lead immediately to surface water impacts, then there must be no impact at all.

Of course, hearing both bills simultaneously was a bit problematic:

The committee heard testimony for both bills simultaneously, as opponents for one were generally in favor of the other. But that procedure made for hours of confusion with landowners, scientists and attorneys sometimes forgetting to make clear which bill they favored, or if they opposed both.

And so it’s no wonder that in the depth of that kind of confusion these disputes can flare up:

The Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau bill, Frantz said, “maintains the legal fiction that groundwater withdrawals only affect surface water if water is induced directly from the stream.”

“I’m not really sure what we accomplish by maintaining that legal fiction,” she added.

But one of the next speakers, David Schmidt, a scientist with the consulting firm Water Rights Solutions Inc., said the Stockgrowers and Farm Bureau bill is more inline with accepted science.

All parties are arguing on the science, projecting that the science better supports one bill or the other. But curiously, which bill you “believe in” seems to square pretty well with whether you hold senior water rights or junior rights, which is a pretty damn good indication where the science lies.

Many landowners and farmers from the Gallatin Valley spoke in support of the DNRC bill.

Meanwhile upstart stakeholders (developers, for instance) aren’t so happy with the Trout Unlimited/DNRC bill.

The interesting question here is whether there is an excess of objectivity problem or not. The quote by David Schmidt (“more inline with accepted science”) seems to indicate that there is, even if Schmidt is far off-base. For even if Schmidt is flat-out wrong, he has access to the forum and thus access to talk about the science, which has suddenly become his science in this context. Fun stuff.

After being asked to define “framing,” Sierra asks Lakoff “How about “protecting the environment”? Is there a frame embedded there too?”  Lakoff’s reply includes the following:

“Environmentalists have adopted a set of frames that doesn’t reflect the vital importance of the environment to everything on Earth. The term “the environment” suggests that this is an area of life separate from other areas of life like the economy and jobs, or health, or foreign policy. By not linking it to everyday issues, it sounds like a separate category, and a luxury in difficult times.”

Then Sierra asks “What’s the alternative?”  Lakoff replies:

“When environmental issues are cast in terms of health and security, which people already accept as vital and necessary, then the environment becomes important. It’s a health issue–clean air and clean water have to do with childhood asthma and with dysentery. Energy that is renewable and sustainable and doesn’t pollute–that is a crucial environmental issue, but it’s not just environmentalism. A crash program to develop alternative energy is a health issue. It’s a foreign policy issue. It’s a Third World development issue.

If we developed the technology for alternative energy, we wouldn’t be dependent on Middle East oil. We could then sell or give the technology to countries around the world, and no country would have to borrow money from the International Monetary Fund to buy oil and then owe interest. This would turn Third World countries into energy producers instead of consumers. And it’s a jobs issue because it would create millions of good jobs in this country. So thinking and talking about environmentalism in limited terms like preservation of wilderness is shooting yourself in the foot.

That’s why the frame is so important. Most environmentalists believe that the truth will make you free. So they tell people the raw facts. But frames trump the facts. Raw facts won’t help, except to further persuade the people who already agree with you.”

This seems right on to me (as my students will attest!).  Four years ago, here is how Dan Sarewitz and I characterized the global warming debate in an article titled “Breaking the Global Warming Gridlock” which appeared in The Atlantic Monthly:

“In politics everything depends on how an issue is framed: the terms of debate, the allocation of power and resources, the potential courses of action. The issue of global warming has been framed by a single question: Does the carbon dioxide emitted by industrialized societies threaten the earth’s climate? On one side are the doomsayers, who foretell environmental disaster unless carbon-dioxide emissions are immediately reduced. On the other side are the cornucopians, who blindly insist that society can continue to pump billions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with no ill effect, and that any effort to reduce emissions will stall the engines of industrialism that protect us from a Hobbesian wilderness. From our perspective, each group is operating within a frame that has little to do with the practical problem of how to protect the global environment in a world of six billion people (and counting). To understand why global-warming policy is a comprehensive and dangerous failure, therefore, we must begin with a look at how the issue came to be framed in this way. Two converging trends are implicated: the evolution of scientific research on the earth’s climate, and the maturation of the modern environmental movement.”

Here are links to the Sierra interview with Lakoff and to our 2000 paper on climate change.  (And for a more recent and wonky analysis of framing and climate change policy see this paper of mine, just out in Issues in Science and Technology.)

“The law of the river is hopelessly, irretrievably obsolete, designed on a hydrological fallacy, around an agrarian West that no longer exists. After six years of drought, somebody will have to say the emperor has no clothes.”

But if the following statement from the New York Times is true …

“Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke.”

… then the period we are currently in is not so much “drought” as “normal”. In other words, get used to it.

You can find a graph of snowpack in the Colorado part of the Colorado River basin here. (It shows a slightly more favorable snowpack than reported in the Times, but not by much.)

And, “about getting used to it” my colleagues Doug Kenney, Bobbie Klein, and Martyn Clark have a very interesting paper (in PDF) on the effectiveness of mandatory and voluntary lawn watering restrictions implemented in 2002 in the Front
Range communities of Colorado.

For more information on water in the west see our project, Western Water Assessment.

Reference

Kenney, D.,R. Klein, and M. Clark, Use and Effectiveness of Municipal Water Restrictions During Drought in Colorado. Journal of the American Water Resources Association, February 2004, 77-87.