Here’s an interview with Douglas Kenney from Matt Weiser writing for Water Deeply. Click through and read the whole thing. Here’s an excerpt:
A team of scientists declares in a new report explaining the effects of climate change on the Colorado River that there won’t be any “breakthroughs” to save us from water scarcity.
How low can the Colorado go? When will we get back to “normal” winters? Can we blame it all on climate change?
To address some of these questions, the Colorado River Research Group recently released a concise four-page paper explaining how climate change is affecting the river. It is a remarkably accessible summation of lots of complicated science. The conclusion is that we simply need to adapt to a future in which water scarcity is the norm.
To help illuminate this conclusion, Water Deeply recently spoke with Douglas Kenney, director of the Western Water Program at the University of Colorado. Kenney is also chairman of the Colorado River Research Group, an independent team of scholars from six public universities that explain the river’s challenges in an ongoing series of plain-language policy reports.
Water Deeply: One of the really important statements you make in this paper is that “climate change is water change.” Tell me more about that.
Kenney: We’re certainly not the first people to make that observation or even use that phrasing. Every element of the hydrologic cycle, to some degree, is temperature dependent: when it snows versus when it rains; when it melts, how much evaporates; how much water the plants use; the length of the growing seasons. It’s all temperature-dependent.
Water Deeply: You also write that the effect of temperature “overwhelms precipitation changes.” What do you mean by that?
Kenney: It gets to this point that virtually every element of the hydrologic cycle is very much influenced by temperature. You can get conditions that are maybe a little wetter or drier. But you start running those scenarios through the climate models and what you realize very quickly when you look at the output is that those modest changes in precipitation really pale in significance compared to the impact of temperature. It’s in part because temperature so much drives the natural uses of water, the natural movement of water.
There’s a great observation that two of our members – Brad Udall and Jonathan Overpeck – have made in recent research: Just a very slight reduction in precipitation, largely because it’s so warm, can lead to a significant 15 percent or more reduction in actual streamflow.