One climate adaptation in process for local water demand

So I'm going to get at least one of the climate change goals I've had for my Water District - recalibrate anticipated future water demand based on anticipated future temperatures.

I know that anticipating our future local water supply (about 35% is local, 55% from the Sierras, and 10% is from conservation) is really difficult.  Most likely it will be worse - longer droughts and larger percent of precip coming in large storms where the water mostly flushes to the ocean instead of percolating to groundwater or caught in reservoirs.  Also less snow - and we do get snow in the Bay Area hills, even if it doesn't last.  But none of this translates into numbers that we can plug into our 25-year projections.

Demand, or at least aspects of it, can be modeled in a climate-changed world.  Thanks to weather, we've got past unseasonably-warm years that will be just typically-warm years of the future, and the increased demands from crops and landscapes due to warmth should be easy to see.

While this analysis didn't go into a water supply master plan that we approved last week, it will go into the next iteration.  I brought up the issue below, and got support from our board chair and (after discussion of other issues by staff) from the conservative Republican director on our board:



If the video above goes away, click here, click on the October 9 2012 video, and go to Minute 43.

Wish it was this easy all the time.  Adaptation to climate change still seems like the easiest way to bring about acceptance of climate reality, despite North Carolina's legislature.


(Updated to replace "next week" with "last week".)

Doing their best to prove me wrong

I've argued at times that climate adaptation will be easier to push through denialist resistance than climate mitigation, because:

1. It's not asking denialists to give up the bad things they do.
2. It doesn't blame the denialists for bad things that are happening, except in an indirect way.  At least it doesn't focus primarily on whether their/our lifestyle is causing problems for other people.
3. It's saving their own bacon (or maybe their community's bacon) rather than helping/not harming other people far away.  Folks that would confidently deny climate change might be much less confident in arguing against preparing for climate change.

I've also argued that preparing for the possibility of climate change will encourage people to accept its reality, a kind of backwards way of reasoning but one that still gets to the best policy outcome.  Hopefully people will then realize that mitigation reduces the need for adaptation.  None of this works though unless climate adaptation is an easier sell than climate reality overall.

North Carolina and Virginia legislatures are testing my hope that adaptation is an easier sell.  People in both states have noticed that coastlines sure seem flooded a lot, and both states have lots of low-elevation land.  Legislatures want to plan how to respond to this but have come down with hives at the mention of, or express adaptation for, climate change.

Still, North Carolina has backed away somewhat from its widely-mocked effort to limit projecting sea level rise to no more than the historical record.  Now they say accelerated sea level rise could be considered if derived from good science, kind of.  It has problems but it doesn't stop planning for some level of climate adaptation.

Virginia also has problems, with the city of Norfolk spending $6m annually to keep roads and homes clear of coastal flooding.  Their bill dances around the issue of climate change, dropping the words entirely in favor of "recurrent flooding".

On one level this is equal parts laughable and sad.  It reminds me of the controversy over BBC America's Frozen Planet series and the initial effort to drop the discussion of climate change that was shown in the original British version (they did show it in the end).  No surprise that Americans are in climate denial when their leaders and media hide the truth from them.

But even if they're not using the "CC" words in Virginia and North Carolina, it's not that hard to read between the lines.  Someday people will ask why taxpayers should be paying for this out of income and sales taxes, instead of polluters paying for it along with the emissions that cause the problem.

UPDATE:  Anonymous has a great art project idea in the comments.  I'd put it at 7 meters above sea level though instead of 20 - we still have time to save the Antarctic ice sheets.

Tidal wetland sediment accretion might keep up with sea level rise in one location. Maybe.

I attended our annual Santa Clara County Creeks Conference last Saturday, with an even better than usual program that included a panel on tidal wetlands restoration in South San Francisco Bay, where we're bringing back 16,000 acres of tidal wetlands from former saltponds (will post a video link when it's online).

The restoration has barely begun, but the land that sank after being separated from tidal flows has gained sediment rapidly, something that's necessary to create a complex environment of open water, partially submerged, and emergent tidal environments. While it's slowed more after the first few years that individual ponds have been opened to the the tides, they're still adding sediment, two inches annually, far more than the worst projections for sea level rise.

So, good for us. Except that California is a geologically young area with lots of gradients, erosion, and sediment flow. Our particular part of San Francisco Bay might also disproportionately benefit from the "backwash" of sediment from the rest of the Bay.

Our tidal wetlands can keep up where they are, for now, but whether that will work in other places is less clear.  Still, it's one small piece of good news that demonstrates the value of restoring tidal wetlands, which have been lost to a far greater extent in the US than even freshwater wetlands have.

My weeklong life as a Washington water lobbyist

I'm not sure how interested the bunnies are in my spectacularly exotic work at a local water district, but I guess I'll find out. I spent this week as one of two elected directors visiting Washington DC to talk about our local flood control and water supply projects, and to try and scare up some money for more. Some notes:

• I can confirm the obvious statement that the budget process is broken. I respect the antipathy to earmarks and am open to replacing them with another process, but what we have instead is virtually no process to provide local input into federal decision-making about local projects. We had multiple meetings with Congressional offices where they often said they could do little to help, and just one with the Office of Management and Budget, which now has all the power.

• There is real interest in the Obama Administration in the environment. We talked about environmental benefits to one relatively high-level official in the Department of Agriculture who'd been hired from an environmental organization. She raised Obama's Great Outdoorsinitiative that tries to reconnect Americans to our natural environment, including urban areas. So I pointed to a map that we brought. Here in south San Jose, wild elk will sometimes roam within city limits. In north San Jose where San Francisco Bay ends,leopard sharks swim. Connecting them is Coyote Creek, a major intact riparian system running through central San Jose with migrating, endangered steelhead, a bike/pedestrian pathway, great views of hawk nests. Our flood control project is a major tributary where we want to rip out concrete, replace it with vegetated-earth banks, and add riparian habitat next to an elementary school. She liked it.

• We can at least take some actions to adapt to climate change. We're trying to restore 15,000 acres of abandoned salt-making ponds to tidal wetlands, but the pond levees form part of the antiquated levee system protecting urban land in the South Bay. We want to rebuild and strengthen the landward side of the multi-ring levee system, and only then can we breach the bayside of the salt pond levees and restore them to tidal flow and vegetation. This was our one meeting with OMB, and there I emphasized that we're sizing the levees to accommodate 50 years of sea level rise (based on Cal. Academy of Sciences 2006 report, using the high end of three scenarios), and sized so they can be built up higher if needed. The OMB people seemed interested, so we'll see.

I sure wish I knew politically-viable ways to make GHG emissions pay for our climate adaptation projects, either on a local, state, or national level, but it's not jumping out at me (don't forget that "politically-viable" requirement). Our riverine flood protection projects also have to be sized for sea level rise because they empty into the Bay, so the costs add up.

My one other observation is that a lot of people we met with sure are young. Our nation is in the hands of twenty-somethings, presumably because we can get away with paying them nothing and working them constantly. Let's hope it works out.

Nisbet/Romm/Mooney/Prop 23

So, Matt Nisbet, kind of contrarian/kind of gets a lot of people riled up at him as he tells people how to be persuasive, has some paper claiming that the climate hawks failed at passing a climate bill last year despite having a financial edge on rejectionists and a reasonably accurate media portrayal of the science.

Joe Romm, given advance warning by a third party, breaks the news embargo to blister the work. Joe broke the embargo partly because he thought someone else had, but more interestingly because he felt Nisbet was deceptive and wanted his critique available when people read Nisbet's stuff. I'm still mulling that one over, but I think it's okay (he shouldn't have posted Nisbet's full document though).

Joe says Nisbet's deceptive in that Nisbet compares total lobbying across all sectors between business allies of cap and trade and business opponents (and each side's nonprofit allies). Nominally pro-cap-and-trade businesses are unlikely to have spent much of their lobbying budget on this issue. Joe could've strengthened his point by noting that the same issue applies to business opponents of caps, but not as strongly since the fossil fuel corps are highly motivated to throw money at this issue. He also backs this up with a second post showing fossil fuel industry far outspent alternative energy industry in political donations.

Nisbet could've had a decent point that it's not as much as enviros versus monolithic corporate world as it was in the past, given the large portion of the business world that's willing to live with the climate hawk position. But we already knew that.

Joe's other major critique was that Nisbet omits television when he says the media is now accurate about climate change, when Fox News' internal messaging has been to dispute reality. Seems like another legitimate point.

Chris Mooney also jumped in with a pointed defense of his own work showing the Bush Republicans were at war with science and arguing that Nisbet displayed inappropriate false bias about the level of Bushian interference with science. Interesting in that Mooney used to work closely with Nisbet. Nisbet also appears in the comments for a little while, also kind of interesting.

The failed denialist attempt to use Prop 23 to kill California's work on climate also came up, because reality outspent denial on that issue. I think Nisbet might miss three points: 1. good guys won, so are they really as incompetent as he thinks? 2. the big money won, so who has the big money is also important, and 3. most ignored is that the bad guys knew they were going to lose more than a month before the election, and without having seen the campaign expenditures, I'll bet they cut their losses. The bad guys also had a decent backup strategy in the form of the simultaneous Prop 26, keeping polluters from having to pay for the environmental effect of their nonsense. Prop 26 won, and polluters outspent good guys by 3 to 1. We need to watch that strategy harder, and use it ourselves.

Bottom line is that the bad guys are fighting defense in the Senate, and they only need two fifths of the Senate to stop action. Nisbet apparently thinks we can't do a frontal assault at all, and falls back to the research-and-adaptation-only-nonsense. I don't think he's made his point.

Modding what Gavin Schmidt said about the science-policy interface, slightly (UPDATED)

Eli's post refers to the non-scientific controversies over climate change. Gavin Schmidt (no relation) doesn't want to participate in a "science" discussion with denialists that ignores the politics that the denialists are using. Gavin says:

The fundamental conflict is of what (if anything) we should do about greenhouse gas emissions (and other assorted pollutants), not what the weather was like 1000 years ago. Your proposed restriction against policy discussion removes the whole point. None of the seemingly important ‘conflicts’ that are *perceived* in the science are ‘conflicts’ in any real sense within the scientific community, rather they are proxy arguments for political positions. No ‘conflict resolution’ is possible between the science community who are focussed on increasing understanding, and people who are picking through the scientific evidence for cherries they can pick to support a pre-defined policy position.

I agree with all of that except the bolded section. Leaving the denialists behind us, there are important real-world scientific disagreements with policy implications. For example, in my position at the Santa Clara Valley Water District, we build flood control projects and levees that are supposed to last for 50 years, built to contain San Francisco Bay and many low elevation, potentially-flooding creeks. The height of what I'd guess to be over 100 miles of rebuilt levees should be designed to be sufficient to compensate for sea level rise for the next 50 years. It would sure help if we knew what that rise would be under realistic emission scenarios, and might even save us money by not having to overbuild. With budget cuts, we're also thinking of postponing these rebuilds - we need to know how long we can postpone. Getting the science nailed down on this is important.

Getting regional and smaller levels of climate change predictions would also help on policy. That's not exactly a scientific disagreement - the science is barely touching on this level yet - but it's a crucial component for planning water supply and flood control. It's not enough to know that there will be less water when we need it, more water when we want it to not flood, and more water demand created by a warmer climate. We need quantitative predictions where the science will ultimately help us a lot in determining policy, so the sooner we can get those scientific results, the better.

UPDATE: to rephrase a little, the denialist perception of a conflict in the science over whether sea levels are rising is not a real conflict in the scientific community, and I agree with Gavin there. The conflict over how much sea levels will rise in 50 years is a truly open question, and one with immediate policy ramifications.