The rainy weather has helped, but the state’s still in deficit for the year
Heavy rain flooded the parking lot at San Francisco's Ocean Beach over the weekend.
California’s water supply is in better shape after this weekend’s storms and the wet weather earlier in the month (though the parking lot at San Francisco’s Ocean Beach is in worse shape). The water content of California’s snowpack is hovering around fifty percent of what’s considered “normal” for this time of year — not quite cause for celebration but much better than it had been; on February 28, the date of the most recent manual snow survey, water content was only 30% of normal.
So this winter isn’t going to be the driest on record, or even the second-driest, but it’s bound to be on the dry side, regardless of what happens now. It’s just too late in the year to catch up, even with more storms heading our way this week.
Q & A With Brian Fagan, archaeologist and author of Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind
The Sacramento-San Joaqiun Delta provides water for tens of millions of Californians.
While many work to understand the world’s current water problems with a laser focus on the present, a few, such as University of California at Santa Barbara emeritus professor of archaeology, Brian Fagan, have chosen to look back, at the water engineering efforts of past civilizations. In his recent book, Elixir: A History of Water and Humankind, Fagan finds striking historical parallels to California’s myriad challenges.
He agreed to answer some questions for Climate Watch.
JEREMY MILLER: In previous books such as The Long Summer and The Great Warming you have written about the influence of climate on ancient civilizations. How did you decide to make water the focus of your latest book, Elixir? Did living in California play any part in your decision?
BRIAN FAGAN: I got into the history of water as a result of giving a talk to the California Water Policy Conference on medieval drought, where some participants strongly encouraged me to undertake such a history.
Two experiences have shaped my perspective on water. The first was living in East and Central Africa for six years when I lived among subsistence farmers and saw the problems of drought first hand. The second is, of course, California, which has a classically erratic rainfall pattern that varies greatly one year to the next. In both cases, I learned just how precious water is to us.
San Francisco Bay, the Delta and Southern California are most susceptible in the state
Sea level rise compounded with storm surges and high tides could raise the water level by four feet.
Tens of thousands of Californians will be placed at risk in the years to come as sea levels continue rising along the California coast. The official planning parameter for the San Francisco Bay Area acknowledges a potential 16-inch rise by 2050. But with help from high tides and storm surges, it’s not likely to stop there. A new tool from Climate Central maps out which cities, neighborhoods, and even streets, will be most affected.
The state’s Cal-Adapt site offers a similar tool but the East Coast-based science education group, Climate Central has added a new layer: population. According to Climate Central, which is a content partner with Climate Watch, there’s a one-in-six chance that under the right conditions — sea level rise, plus storm surge, plus high tides — the sea could rise four feet by 2030 in the Bay Area. That effects not just the coast, but also cities around the Bay and farther inland, in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. The cities with the most people at risk are San Mateo, with 35,000 people living in areas that would be flooded under that scenario, and Stockton, with more than 72,000.
In Southern California, the threat is farther off, but by 2060, there’s a one-in-six chance of sea levels topping a four-foot increase with help from a storm surge. If that happens, more than 44,000 people in Huntington Beach would be in harm’s way, and 11,000 in LA.
La Niña is weakening, but don’t hold your breath for a “March miracle”
This image shows La Niña conditions from last month, collected by NASA's Jason-2 satellite.
This has been a historically dry winter, dry enough that it’s likely to land a spot as one of the top ten driest since the Gold Rush. And even though La Niña is waning, that probably won’t make much of a difference, because there’s a delay between when ocean surface temperatures change, and when that change actually has an effect on our weather.
“March 20 is just around the corner, and that’s the first day of spring. Our winter — our snowpack and our rain — is essentially over,” NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist Bill Patzert told me. Though Patzert’s observation comes as three Pacific storms are poised to potentially bring a week of rain to Northern California, he said, “a weakening La Niña won’t necessarily give us a March miracle in terms of snowpack and rainfall.”
La Niña is caused by colder-than-average ocean surface temperatures in the equatorial Pacific. It typically makes for warm, dry winters in California. But not always. Last year was also affected by La Niña, and it was historically wet.
University of Southern California and 17 others surveyed 300 million years of ocean life
Increasing ocean acidity can also affect nutrients like nitrogen.
The breadth of this study – 18 research institutions and 21 scientists worldwide — and the examination of hundreds of studies stretching so far back into the geologic record makes this conclusion a singularly solid statement about the present trend.
“From everything we know today, it looks like the current rate of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions” may spell the loss of “organisms we care about — coral reefs, oysters, salmon,” says Bärbel Hönisch, the study’s lead author, who I reached by phone in New York. She’s a paleo-oceanographer at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. The paper’s being published today in the journal Science.
The danger comes from what happens when CO2 is absorbed by the oceans: CO2 and water create carbonic acid, the stuff that makes soft drinks bubbly. It also makes the oceans more acidic. That acid can dissolve the shells of “keystone” species that are the building blocks for marine life. The world’s oceans are already twice as acidic – a pH drop from 8.2 to 8.1 — as they were at the start of the Industrial Revolution. That’s an acidification rate 10 times faster than anything found in the record over the past 300 million years, according to this new survey.
For her part in the study, USC doctoral candidate Rowan Martindale was looking at the juncture between the Triassic and Jurassic eras, 200 million years ago. It was a cataclysmic time when the earth’s continents were splitting apart, huge strings of volcanoes were erupting, atmospheric CO2 was at one of the highest levels ever and — you guessed it — hardly any evidence of limestone or coral, two things that dissolve in acidic water. It marked one of the five biggest extinction events in the planet’s history. Atmospheric carbon was increasing at the rate of one gigaton – about 2.2 trillion pounds — per year.
[module align=”left” width=”half” type=”pull-quote”]“The modern ocean chemistry is changing, and nobody really knows exactly what’s going happen.”[/module]
Today, atmospheric carbon is increasing at the rate of eight gigatonnes per year — about 17.6 trillion pounds. ‘Something weird was going on in the ocean back then,” Martindale says. “The modern ocean chemistry is changing, and nobody really knows exactly what’s going happen.”
Hönisch says the team cited hundreds of studies — the journal had to put a limit on their end list of 218 items — and looked at many more over the past year-and-a-half. “The strength is that when we compare these different events [in the geologic record], we can see the similarities. We can also see where we need more information.”
Both Honisch and Martindale will tell you the paleo record has its gaps and intriguing questions for further study — exactly how atmospheric warming interacts with ocean acidity, and key ocean sediments they’d love to sample that have disappeared back below the sea floor, for example — but their conclusion is clear: the world’s oceans are acidifying at a rate that has never been seen before.
“Maybe things are not as bad as we think, but we don’t know, says Hönisch. “[And] by the time we do, it may be too late to turn around.”
Proposed law would stop salmon restoration, deliver more water to Central Valley farms
The San Joaquin River flows from the Sierra Nevada to the Central Valley, where much of its water is diverted to aqueducts.
UPDATE: The House has passed the bill, with a vote of 246-175. It now goes to the Senate.
Meandering through the halls of Capitol Hill is a bill that would dramatically change California’s water picture. Sponsored by Tulare County Congressman Devin Nunes, the sweeping proposal would pipe more water to farms, and challenge the largest river restoration project in U.S. history.
Environmentalists and farmers tangoed for 18 years in federal court over the fate of the San Joaquin River, finally agreeing to restore water to some 60 miles of dry riverbed, and bring back the salmon that died off when the river was dammed just above Fresno.
“Most people associate the San Joaquin as a dry toxic river,” says Chris Acree, director of Revive the River, a Fresno-based non-profit. “Now that this water is back in that river, it allows us to identify ourselves with this river as a living river. This restoration program really is the broadest collaboration between agencies, landowners, stakeholders, and water users, where everybody has a voice.”
But Congressmen Devin Nunes says many Central Valley farmers have been left out of water decisions that put fish before farmers. His bill would not only reverse plans to restore salmon to this river, it would relax pumping restrictions in the Delta designed to protect other endangered fish.
While some resorts are struggling, Vail group is expanding and insulating itself
On a recent winter weekend, Kirkwood's slopes had bare patches.
What a difference a season makes at one laid-back California ski area known for deep powder, sweeping bowls and short lift lines.
Kirkwood Mountain Resort, located 35 miles southwest of the glittering mega resorts of Lake Tahoe, is well off its average of 500 inches of snow per year (and a far cry from last year’s record-setting 748 inches). This weekend’s North Face Masters big mountain snowboard competition has been postponed because of lack of snow on the area’s high cirques. And last Wednesday, the resort was bought for $18 million by Colorado-based Vail Resorts.
Kirkwood’s purchase by Vail, a company whose aggressive expansion and intensive development at its other ski areas (including Tahoe resorts Heavenly and Northstar) may portend multi-million dollar ski chalets, luxury boutiques and high-speed gondolas — all things the remote Kirkwood has eschewed in its 40 years of operation.
But according to some industry watchers, Vail’s business model may offer economic insulation from a changing climate, as California’s mountain snowpack is projected to decline by as much as 25% by mid-century.
Farmers, used to water shortages, prepare for bad news
Pistachio trees on a drip irrigation system. Drip systems can dramatically reduce water loss from evaporation.
UPDATE: Despite snow closing Interstate 5 over the Grapevine Pass on Monday, state snow surveyors returned from the Sierra today with more forlorn figures. The third snowpack measurement of the season showed water content in the accumulated snow at just 30% of the average for this date and 26% of the average for April 1, typically when the snowpack reaches its peak for the season.
Even though more snow is on the way, as I explain in my radio story for The California Report, Central Valley farmers are getting ready to face a fourth dry year in the last five.
The Pacific Institute and the Heartland Institute: Both sides are digging in
Peter Gleick is taking a temporary leave of absence from the Pacific Institute.
The Pacific Institute has posted a new statement to its website, saying the board is hiring an independent firm to investigate the actions and allegations surrounding its founder, Peter Gleick, who admitted last week to using deception in order to obtain documents from the Heartland Institute.
Gleick requested a temporary leave of absence over the weekend and the board has nominated Elena Schmid, an independent consultant, to head the organization on an interim basis. According to a bio from the Pacific Institute, Schmid has worked at California Independent System Operator, “focusing on policy, communications, and human resources for this corporation that manages the high voltage transmission lines for California,” and at the California Public Utilities Commission, “developing policies, programs, projects, and budgets that resulted in active representation of long-term consumer interests in telecommunications, gas, water, and electric industries.” Continue reading New Boss at the Pacific Institute, New Salvo from Heartland→
UPDATE: Founder asks for leave of absence in the wake of impersonation scandal
Founded in 1987, the Pacific Institute is housed in this Oakland Victorian.
ANALYSIS
The old blue-and-gray Victorian in Oakland’s preservation district is familiar turf for me and other journalists on the resources beat. It’s long been a place we could rely on for solid information and interviews.
The analysts who inhabit the rabbit warren of offices at the Pacific Institute are doing honest work on issues that are critical to the future of California and the West, notably where our water will come from. There are few issues more deserving of study than that one.
