Blanca Wetlands, Colorado BLM-managed ACEC Blanca Wetlands is a network of lakes, ponds, marshes and wet meadows designated for its recreation and wetland values. The BLM Colorado and its partners have made strides in preserving, restoring and managing the area to provide rich and diverse habitats for wildlife and the public. To visit or get more information, see: http://www.blm.gov/co/st/en/fo/slvfo/blanca_wetlands.html. By Bureau of Land Management – Blanca Wetlands Area of Critical Environmental Concern, Colorado, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=42089248
Dozens of environmentalists, homebuilders, farmers and road builders, along with Colorado water quality regulators, will buckle down next week to begin work on a complex new set of rules designed to protect thousands of acres of wetlands for years to come.
And, yes, they want your help.
Colorado’s Water Quality Control Commission plans a series of public meetings in the coming months, with a kickoff meeting Sept. 4, followed by workshops Sept. 13 and Oct. 4. Meetings will be held virtually and workshops will be held virtually and in person, according to state health officials.
Colorado is the first state to address a major gap created last year when the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Sackett v. EPA decision, wiped out a critical set of environmental safeguards contained in the Clean Water Act.
Healthy mountain meadows and wetlands are characteristic of healthy headwater systems and provide a variety of ecosystem services, or benefits that humans, wildlife, rivers and surrounding ecosystems rely on. The complex of wetlands and connected floodplains found in intact headwater systems can slow runoff and attenuate flood flows, creating better downstream conditions, trapping sediment to improve downstream water quality, and allowing groundwater recharge. These systems can also serve as a fire break and refuge during wildfire, can sequester carbon in the floodplain, and provide essential habitat for wildlife. Graphic by Restoration Design Group, courtesy of American Rivers
House Bill 1379, approved by Colorado lawmakers in May, identifies which streams and wetlands must be protected, and where exceptions and exclusions for such things as homebuilding, farming and road building will apply. During the next 16 months, the rules spelling out how the law will be enforced must be crafted and approved by the Colorado Water Quality Control Commission.
Lawmakers have given the regulators and participants until December 2025 to finish the rules and launch the oversight program.
“For 50 years we all depended on the Clean Water Act to protect our watersheds,” said Stu Gillespie, an attorney with EarthJustice who helped negotiate House Bill 1379. “But that was taken away by the Supreme Court. Now we all need to be involved because we all rely on these watersheds. I hope people will keep tabs and engage from the outset so we don’t lose any more wetlands and streams.”
Ephemeral streams are streams that do not always flow. They are above the groundwater reservoir and appear after precipitation in the area. Via Socratic.org
The Sackett case had major impacts in Colorado and the West, where vast numbers of streams are temporary, or ephemeral, flowing only after major rainstorms and during spring runoff season, when the mountain snow melts. The Sackett decision said, in part, that only streams that flow year-round are subject to oversight. It also said that only wetlands that had a surface connection to continually flowing water bodies qualified for protection. Many wetlands in Colorado have a subsurface connection to streams, rather than one that can be observed above ground.
House Bill 1379 corrected those problems.
But lawmakers and others remain worried that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s Water Quality Control Division, already facing a major backlog on issuing permits for one of its programs, will have difficulty keeping up with the permitting demands of the new wetlands program.
Sen. Barbara Kirkmeyer, a Republican from Brighton, said she is hopeful that new requirements calling for frequent reporting to the state’s Joint Budget Committee, or JBC, and lawmakers will keep the program on track and help fill the funding gaps that have plagued the health department in recent years.
Lawmakers have provided nearly $750,000 this year for the initial work and OK’d four new full-time positions for the program as well as part-time legal support, according to the final fiscal note on House Bill 1379.
“We’ve always understood that we needed a permitting process in place,” Kirkmeyer said Aug. 20 at a meeting of the Colorado Water Congress. “But we also need safeguards to ensure there is oversight at the JBC so we can ensure permits are being processed in a timely manner.”
High and increasing costs are barriers to establishing operations for new or young farmers and ranchers. As a result, there are fewer agricultural producers nationwide, and the average age of those producers is rising. The problem is worse in Colorado, where land especially has become extraordinarily expensive, and water access incredibly valuable. But data from the U.S. Department of Agriculture shows growth in Southwest Colorado, especially La Plata County. Farms and ranches are opening and expanding, and the average age of local agricultural producers is dropping…
Education is huge nonfinancial barrier for new agricultural producers. Without knowledge of agricultural science and market conditions, becoming a farmer or rancher turns from fiscally difficult to nearly impossible. The former site of Fort Lewis College, the Old Fort, hosts hands-on agricultural education, including Farmers in Training, Farm Incubator and Ranching Apprenticeship programs. The Old Fort also offers programs for high school students. Around 2008, Beth LaShell, director of the Old Fort, noticed an influx of new farmers and ranchers in the county. Most of those operations disappeared after a few years of trial and error because of high costs and lack of experience…So the Incubator Program was born. It is designed to share the Old Fort’s land, water, infrastructure and training with prospective farmers and ranchers. It gives new farmers the opportunity to gain experience in the industry and take classes without taking on serious debt in an uncertain endeavor.
Oak Creek officials are moving quickly to address needed rehabilitation work at the Sheriff Reservoir Dam while also working to identify and undertake improvements to the town’s drinking water and wastewater treatment systems. Town Council members on Thursday approved $10,000 in funding to hire W.W. Wheeler & Associates in its effort to secure funding for the dam rehabilitation project. In a separate decision, council approved $50,000 for an agreement with AquaWorks DBO Inc. to support wastewater and drinking water improvements needed for the town to comply with state and federal regulations…
Built in 1954 and located 12 miles southwest of Oak Creek within the Medicine Bow-Routt National Forest in Rio Blanco County, the Sheriff Reservoir Dam is owned and operated by the town of Oak Creek. The dam is currently subject to storage restrictions and is considered a “high-hazard embankment dam,” according to the state’s Division of Water Resources. Conditions leading to that designation include inadequate spillway capacity and operational issues linked to an aging low-level outlet works gate. Other issues include a sinkhole discovered in the dam’s foundation and outlet issues linked to a stem casing that is not watertight and a gate that does not close properly. W.W. Wheeler & Associates estimates total cost of the rehabilitation work to be $5.5 million…
An Apology: Our service that sends these posts hs malfunctioned; this one sat in limbo for the past two weeks. I hope we have things back to where we can again get it to you every 3-4 weeks. – George
In the last post here, with the Colorado River’s Upper and Lower Basins in stalemate over how to distribute the suffering after the 2026 expiration of the Interim Guidelines, I suggested we use the time to do what we’ve all been saying we need to do, but find it hard to do: ‘think outside the box.’ The ‘box’ in this case being the Colorado River Compact. We can go back to Monday-morning-quarterbacking the rivermeisters as they try to figure out how to drag the Compact, its misbegotten two-basin division and its Marley’s-chain Law of the River into the 21st century. But for the moment – let’s just indulge in imagining river scenarios that might actually reflect Colorado River realities in the 21st century.
In the last post (click if you need a review) I sketched out the nature of the ‘desert river,’ which is what the Colorado River is. Rivers flowing through deserts only exist at all because of mountains or other highlands that force air moving through (as in ‘prevailing westerlies’) to rise, cool, and condense whatever water vapor it is carrying into precipitation, rain or snow, that falls on the mountains and eventually flows downhill because that’s what liquid water does, eventually coalescing into a river. In this case, it flows out into deserts which by definition are arid regions with a paucity of precipitation and a powerful propensity for turning liquid water back into vapor. Once the desert river is in its desert, it begins to disappear because it gets so little recharge from precipitation beyond its mountain origins, and gives up its water to riparian life, to evaporation, to groundwater. We can say with some accuracy that it is the nature of a desert river to gradually disappear into its deserts – as liquid water, anyway.
The Colorado River is a true desert river; the mountains and highland plateaus surrounding the natural basin produce 85-90 percent of the river’s total water supply, according to the Western Water Assessment study of the ‘state of the river science.’ Now it almost entirely disappears in the deserts of the Southwest – the high ‘cold deserts’ of the Colorado Plateau and Southern Rockies piedmont, and the subtropical Sonora and Mojave Deserts below the plateau canyons. This is mostly due to human uses now; we remember with nostalgia that the Colorado River flowed naturally into the Gulf of California, but that was mostly during its snowmelt flood season; by late fall and through the winter there were probably many years when it did not make it through the delta jungle to the Gulf at all.
The Compact experience should make us all leery of dividing a river into basins. But the way a desert river works suggests a natural division into two parts – as opposed to a two-basin political division, using state boundaries that have no relevance to down-on-the-ground geography. The natural division is a water-production region, in the highlands where the majority of the precipitation falls and the river forms its tributaries; and a water-consumption region, in the deserts where that produced water gradually disappears – especially now that humans are spreading it much farther than nature ever intended.
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Today, we’ll go to the headwaters, to explore the river’s ‘water-production’ region. The major water-production region for the Colorado River lies almost entirely above the 8,000-foot elevation, mostly on the west slopes of the Southern Rockies in Colorado and Wyoming, but also water from the Wind Rivers in Wyoming, and the east slopes of the Wasatch Range in Utah, and the high plateaus and mountains of eastern Arizona and western New Mexico that give Arizona the Gila River.
The Western Water Assessment graphic below basically shows the water-production region for the Colorado River (whose natural basin is the black line). ‘April 1 SWE’ is the ‘snow water equivalent on April 1,’ the amount of water in the snowpack that constitutes the majority of the river’s water. Late March to early April is generally presumed to be the time of the highest snowpack in the mountains and other highlands surrounding the upper reaches of the River, so a map of the ‘April 1 SWE’ is a passable map of the river’s water-production area. The blue areas (inside the black line) are less than 15 percent of the 245,000 square-mile River Basin, and as you can see, it is not a contiguous area – just the places that rise high enough to make the moving air give up to the highlands its moisture as rain or snow. Water management decisions throughout the Basin begin to be made on the basis of the April 1 SWE. (The gray lines, by the way, are watershed boundaries for different tributaries and divisions of the river, not the waterways themselves.)
You’ll note that the adjacent averaged annual ‘Runoff’ map indicates that considerably less water flows out of the water-production region than the ‘April 1 SWE’ map shows. Scientists have found that the amount of water that actually makes it into the Colorado River is only a fraction of the water that falls in the river’s water-production region. The Western Water Assessment’s study of the ‘State of the Science’ on Colorado River climate and hydrology claims that on average around 170 million acre-feetof water falls on the Colorado River Basin annually, with the largest portion of that falling on the highlands of the water-production area – yet the river carries on average less than a tenth of that precipitation. What happens to the rest of it?
The short answer there is, the sun is what happens to it: the sun gives, and the sun takes away. The sun distills pure water vapor from the oceans, and the winds (also created by the sun) carry that vapor over the land areas, where begins the ‘dance’ I described in the last post, as water vapor gets pushed up against mountain slopes and condensed to precipitation which falls on the mountains as rain or snow – where the sun and winds quickly go to work on trying to transform it back to vapor.
This begins even in the depths of winter, in sub-freezing weather: the sun beating down on a ‘solid’ snowpack releases enough heat energy to turn the snow crystals directly to water vapor, without going through the liquid state – a process called sublimation. Sublimation happens when a snowpack is directly exposed to the sun; it also happens when the wind blows the snow around breaking down the ice crystals; and it happens when coniferous tree branches intercept and hold the falling snow or rain, which is vaporized off the branches by the sun. On a day of brilliant sun, fairly common in the water-production region, you can actually see ‘steam’ – water vapor – rising where snow sits on an exposed darker surface – rocks or branches. And all of this in temperatures below freezing.
The East River Valley, northwest of the historic town of Gothic, home to the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory. The mountain with the pointed peak in the distance is Mount Crested Butte. Photo credit: Mark Stone/University of Washington
A major study of the water-production area is underway in the Upper East River valley near Crested Butte, as part of a U.S. Energy Department ‘bedrock to upper atmosphere’ study of water and energy; it includes what is probably the most intensive study of sublimation ever assembled. The science team is mainly working on sun and wind sublimation in open areas; early results suggest that around 10 percent of a winter snowpack disappears through that form of sublimation. Losses from branch interception might be as large as that or larger. Guesstimates over the years suggest that as much as a third of the precipitation that falls might disappear through sublimation of ‘solid’ snow to water vapor through the course of a winter.
The snowpack is only ‘safe’ from sublimation where it gets some protection from the sun and wind. Snow that makes it down to the ground in forested areas – not intercepted by branches – is sheltered somewhat from the sun and wind. ‘Aspect’ (location on the mountain) is also important: snow on the north and east slopes of mountains may never see the direct sun all winter, although it will feel the wind.
Eventually winter turns to not-winter, and the accumulated snowpack begins to melt as the air generally warms (with sublimation also ratcheting up with heat). One of three things will happen to the resulting ‘snow water.’ Where slopes are steep or rocky or both, a lot of the water melting out will become runoff – water running off under the affluence of gravity: trickles run together and find their way into the stream flowing out of the watershed, streams meeting other streams in ever larger watersheds until rivers flow out of the mountains into the water-consumption region where they are quickly put to work by farmers and ranchers.
Back up to the melting edge, however – if it can, the water melting out of snow will not run off but will sink into the ground, the preferred alternative for the ‘life project’ on the planet (but not always for the human users). How much water runs off, and how much sinks in, depends on how fast the snow melts and how steep or rocky the slope.
The water that sinks in – groundwater – passes first into a soil area laced and spaced by the roots of all the plant life living on the surface, from little tundra miniatures to great trees. This is variously called the ‘vadose zone,’ the interflow, or most plainly, the unsaturated zone. The roots in the unsaturated zone will take up a lot of that water for their plants to use: some of it will go into the plant’s structure and systems, but most of it – as much as 95 percent of it – will be transpired by the plant: emitted into the atmosphere as water vapor, a kind of air-conditioning system that increases with higher temperatures.
For big old spruces in the subalpine forest, transpiration might be around 80 gallons a day on average (more on a warmer day); for lodgepole pine, maybe 40 gallons a day. That might not sound like lot, a mere 0.0002 of an acre-foot. But next time in the mountains, look at a forested slope across a valley, and try to estimate the number of trees there to the nearest thousand….
In addition, any time the flowing or standing water is exposed to the sun, the sun takes a cut through straight evaporation. Evaporation also increases with temperature. One of the East River project researchers, Dr. Rosemary Carroll, claims in a research paper that, in a typically dense montane forest, the total evapotranspiration (evaporation plus transpiration) can add up to equal the precipitation that fell on the forest.
So it becomes clear that the water produced in its mountains for the Colorado River is a ‘net’ figure – precipitation minus natural depletion from a) a winter of sublimation every day the sun shines, b) evaporation of water melted from snow when exposed to the sun, and c) transpiration by the forests of the water making its way underground.
But we have to then add back in the groundwater that makes its way down through the unsaturated zone to a saturated zone below most of the thirsty roots. The top of the saturated zone is called the water table, which rises and falls with the amount of water saoking into the ground. Water in both the unsaturated and saturated zones filters its way downslope pulled by gravity and pushed by more water coming in above.
Eventually it will makes its way to the bottom of the watershed where the stream flows; there, if the water table is higher than the stream level, the groundwater will feed into the stream. Scientists have figured out how to tell from a sample of stream water how much of it is runoff, and how much has come through the groundwater route; over a good water year with healthy water tables, the ratio of groundwater to runoff will be about 50-50, with runoff being greater during the spring flood season and groundwater dominating the fall and winter flows.
Carroll notes in the same paper that the journey of groundwater to the stream might be very leisurely; while some of it might make its way through the cobble found in many mountain valleys in a matter of days, water that sinks into cracks and interstices in more solid rock might not show up in the stream for a century – or never, unless someone drills into the rock and installs a pump.
In the final tally, about one-fifth of the precipitation that falls in the high headwaters emerges as water for the river. Another portion of it is in ‘longterm storage’ as groundwater in aquifers. But the rest, probably more than half of it, has gone back to the vaporous state of water. The sun giveth, and the sun taketh away.
The ‘Headwaters Challenge’ ought to be obvious. We can’t do a lot about what happens up in the alpine tundra – but are there management strategies for the forests we could employ that might cut down on the amount of water we lose to the sun there, increasing the net water production even a little to compensate for what we are losing to the warming climate? That’s the romantic exploration I’m on these days, reading a lot of scientific papers I only partially understand. I may or may not be ready to say anything about this in the next post – but I wanted to get the challenge in front of those who read this, to ask if any of you have any ideas….
Meanwhile – the apparent preference of the sun for water in the vaporous state should probably make us a little nervous. Obviously, the warmer it gets, the more water gets sublimated, evaporated and transpired – and we seem to be doing all we can to make the world warmer. Not a good survival strategy for species dependent on liquid water, even though we are convinced we cannot survive without the things whose byproducts make the world warmer…. That’s a bigger challenge facing us all.
43% of the Lower 48 is short/very short, 6% more than last week. Soils dried out throughout the US, except on the West Coast and in the Northeast. Greatest drying was in the Eastern U.S. All of WV is short/very short.
Researchers investigating the historic stresses of the American West’s water supply have identified a simple solution that could put parts of the Colorado River Basin on a more sustainable path.
In a new paper published today, a consortium of scientists and water experts including University of Virginia Darden School of Business Professor Peter Debaere recommend that closing Colorado’s “free river conditions” loophole would serve as a key initial step to reducing water stress in the region.
“Closing this loophole in Colorado’s water rights system could save millions of cubic meters of water and be the state’s modest contribution to solving water stress in the Colorado River Basin,” said Debaere, an expert in the economics of water and water markets.
In Colorado, when the river carries enough water to meet everyone’s needs, the “free river condition” allows anyone — regardless of whether they own water rights — to take as much water as they want from the river.
The new paper, “Closing Loopholes in Water Rights Systems to Save Water: The Colorado River Basin,” appears in the journal “Water Resources Research,” published by AGU, a global organization dedicated to Earth and space sciences. Debaere is part of a consortium that includes researchers from the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science and other scientific and academic partners.
The 1,450-mile Colorado River is a lifeline for the American West. It quenches the thirst of 40 million people across seven states, more than 25 Native American tribes and parts of Mexico. It also irrigates some of the country’s most productive farmland and generates hydropower used across the region. The seven states using Colorado River water are divided into two groups: Upper Basin (Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico) and Lower Basin (Arizona, Nevada, California).
But this vital resource is under threat: the amount of water flowing into the Colorado has been shrinking as rising temperatures have increased evaporation and reduced the snowpack that feeds the river. At the same time, demand from farms and cities has been rising.
That increasing stress on limited resources further highlights the problems associated with Colorado’s free river loophole.
Describing free river conditions as “an antiquated relic from when water was relatively abundant,” the paper suggests that the approach perpetuates the imbalanced supply and demand. That raises the likelihood that Lower Basin water users exercise a “compact call,” essentially charging that the Upper Basin is not ensuring the legally required amount of water. Such a maneuver could result in additional caps or restrictions on water use in the Upper Basin.
“Colorado can help avert this by closing its free river loophole,” the paper states.
The current challenges came to a head in mid-2022, when water levels in Lake Powell and Lake Mead, the two major reservoirs on the Colorado River, dropped so low that they threatened the intake of water for hydropower. The situation was dire enough for the Biden administration to step in.
Further progress proved difficult, however. California, Arizona and Nevada only agreed to major water cuts in exchange for federal funding. Fortunately, an unusually wet winter in 2022-2023 plus conservation efforts have eased the immediate crisis.
Government officials said Lake Powell and Lake Mead were still only at 37% capacity as of Aug. 15. In 2000, they were nearly full.
Within each state in the Upper and Lower Basins, water users like farms or cities have their own rights to a fixed amount of water, with earlier users having stronger claims.
During shortages, users with older water rights have priority. They receive their allocation first and can claim water from users with newer rights, who consequently receive reduced amounts or no water at all.
This long-standing system is increasingly under strain due to climate change. The strain is exacerbated by two factors: first, the river has been overallocated since the first Colorado River Compact was signed; and second, there is no explicit agreed-upon cap on water usage, Moreover, the system lacks a cap that could adjust to changing water availability.
The seven states are currently negotiating how to share the shrinking supply, as some current guidelines for how the basin will share water expire at the end of 2025.
“Finding a compromise among the seven states will be difficult but closing the free river condition could be a way in which Colorado might contribute to the process,” Debaere said.
Figure 1. (a) Colorado River Basin Map with largest dams and Division 5. (b) Active diversion structures in Division 5;circles indicate the diverted water volume at the structure in 2017.Water Resources Research 10.1029/2023WR036667DEBAER ET AL. 2 of 9
During free river conditions in 2017 —and in spite of downstream water challenges and lowering reservoir levels, for example — water users diverted an estimated 108 million cubic meters more than their water rights allowed, according to the new paper. That’s water that could have been stored in Lake Powell.
Debaere said that while the annual excess water taken during free river conditions is significant but not exorbitant, closing this loophole is crucial for other reasons.
It would better define water rights and prevent withdrawals beyond legal limits. This is important for future reforms, such as capping overall water use or introducing programs to leave fields fallow. These efforts won’t work if unlimited water access is occasionally allowed.
Closing this loophole could also be Colorado’s contribution to easing water stress in the Colorado River Basin, especially as the seven basin states struggle to agree on reducing overall water use.
“Abolishing the free river condition will not only reduce water use but also prepare the water rights system for future reforms,” Debaere said.
In addition to Debaere, co-authors of the new paper represent organizations including: International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, Suzhou, China; B3 Insight, Denver; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Department of Civil, Construction and Environmental Engineering, University of Alabama; Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and Department of Systems and Information Engineering, University of Virginia; Sustainable Waters, Crozet, Va.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
Great Sand Dunes National Park San Luis Valley. Prairie sunflowers and dunes in warm early morning light, August 27, 2024. With a continued wet summer, flowers are abundant in the park and preserve! Credit: NPS, Patrick Myers
While the rest of the state is melting in heat, Alamosa and the San Luis Valley have been soaking in rain. But that’s not unusual for August when you look back at this century.
What is unusual is four consecutive months of measurable precipitation, which the Valley has felt this spring and summer going back to the 1.7 inches of rain in May. In fact, 2024 is going down as one of the wettest summers on record since the year 2000.
Between May and August there has been a total of 6.14 inches of rain on the Upper Rio Grande this year. Two wetter four-month periods were in 2001 when 7.13 inches of rain accumulated between May and August, and 2022 when 7.08 inches of precipitation was measured.
This much rain, particularly in August, can be both a blessing and hindrance to the Valley landscape and way of life. A benefit to the flows of the Upper Rio Grande and overall desert environment; a detriment to the farmer looking to sell hay or barley crops.
This wet hay isn’t so good for the dairy farmer looking to purchase, and barley grown in this much rain can cause the buying brewery to turn away.
September through November looks like a drying-out period overall with above-seasonal high temperatures. If that’s the case, a snowy Christmas and New Year will be in order to keep the gains in the Upper Rio Grande from the steady summer rains.
WET YEARS (May through August)
2001: 7.13 total 4 month total
2022: 7.08 inches 4 month total
2024: 6.14 total 4 month total
2017: 5.68 inches 4 month total
July and August are typically the rainiest months of the year. Here’s how the two months compare
A strong ridge of high pressure maintained its grip across the central part of the contiguous U.S. (CONUS) during this U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week (August 21-27). It was responsible for warmer-than-normal temperatures that stretched across the Plains and into the Upper Midwest. Upper-level troughs of low pressure dominated the West and East coasts, keeping weekly temperatures cooler than normal on both ends of the country. Pacific weather systems spread above-normal precipitation over northern California to the Pacific Northwest as they moved through the western trough, then triggered bands of thunderstorms over the Rockies and central to northern Plains as they bumped up against the ridge. In between the West Coast and Rockies rain areas, the West was dry from southern California to northern Montana. Rain developed along a stationary front that was draped across Florida. But for most of the CONUS east of the Rockies, the week was drier than normal with little to no rain falling from western Texas to the Mid-Atlantic Coast. The ridge migrated eastward as the week ended, so warmer-than-normal temperatures spread into the Midwest and Southeast. Abnormal dryness and drought expanded and intensified across the southern Plains and Tennessee and Lower Mississippi Valleys in a rapidly developing flash drought situation, as well as parts of the Southeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, northern Plains, and Far West. Exceptional drought (D4) developed in parts of Ohio and West Virginia for the first time in the 25-year USDM history. Hurricane Hone’s rains brought improvement to most of the main Hawaiian Islands…
Weekly temperatures were warmer than normal across most of the High Plains region, ranging from near to 2 degrees below normal in western Colorado to 6 to 10 degrees above normal in parts of Nebraska and the Dakotas. Thunderstorm complexes moved across parts of the region, dropping locally 2 to 3 inches of rain. In many cases, the storms were localized with one part of a county receiving rain and another part getting nothing – this was the case in other parts of the country as well. Drought or abnormal dryness contracted in a few areas of Colorado, Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota, but expanded or intensified in parts of all of the High Plains states. USDA statistics indicate half or more of the topsoil is short or very short in Wyoming (73%), Colorado (52%), and Kansas (52%), and half or more of the subsoil is short or very short in Wyoming (81%) and Kansas (57%)…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 27, 2024.
Most of the West region was cooler than normal, with temperatures more than 10 degrees below normal across interior portions, especially in Nevada; eastern areas were warmer than normal, up to 6 or more degrees above normal in eastern Montana and eastern New Mexico. More than 2 inches of rain fell over coastal parts of northern California, southern Oregon, and northern Washington, with 0.5 to 2 inches over large parts of the Four Corners states. The rain that fell was not enough to make up for deficits that have accumulated over several months to more than a year, so no improvement to the depiction was made. Abnormal dryness expanded in Nevada and southern California, where little to no rain fell this week, and moderate to extreme drought expanded in Montana. According to USDA statistics, half or more of the topsoil moisture was short or very short in Montana (82%), Oregon (77%), Idaho (68%), Washington (64%), New Mexico (62%), and Nevada (55%), and half or more of the subsoil moisture was short or very short in Montana (82%), Oregon (72%), Nevada (70%), Idaho (64%), Washington (63%), and New Mexico (63%). Half or more of the pasture and rangeland was rated in poor or very poor condition in Oregon (64%), Washington (60%), and Arizona (52%)…
Hot and dry conditions continued for the South region this week. Western parts of Texas and Oklahoma were the epicenter of the heat, with weekly temperatures averaging 6 to 10 degrees above average, with local areas even warmer. In the east, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Tennessee averaged 2 to 4 degrees cooler than normal. Parts of coastal Texas to the state’s interior received half of an inch to locally 2 inches of rain, but this mostly fell on drought-free areas. Most of the South region had no rain this week. Abnormal dryness and moderate to severe drought expanded in all of the states, while extreme drought expanded in Texas and developed in Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Tennessee. The heat and dryness of this August have resulted in flash drought conditions. Summer last year was a period of record and near-record heat and dryness. These extreme conditions of these two periods have combined to overwhelm the wet conditions that happened during the intervening months. More than half of the topsoil and subsoil moisture was short or very short across all states, with Texas leading at 72% of the subsoil and 81% of the topsoil so rated. More than 70% of the topsoil was short or very short in Louisiana (77%) and Mississippi (72%), and more than 60% so rated in Arkansas (63%) and Tennessee (64%). In Texas, 41% of the cotton crop and 58% of the pasture and rangeland was in poor to very poor condition. Drought impact reports in Oklahoma included desiccated fields, dry ponds, and a high risk of wildfires, as well as low reservoir levels in the southwestern part of the state. In Tennessee, drought impacts include pastures providing little to no feed, drying or dried up ponds, creek levels very low, complete or near crop failure. In Mississippi, 4 counties have burn bans, pastures in the northern half of the state are no longer producing grass for cattle, and soils are so dry they no longer can support vegetation…
Looking Ahead
In the two days since the Tuesday valid time of this USDM, scattered showers and thunderstorms brought areas of rain to a few parts of the Southwest, northern Rockies, northern and southern Plains, Midwest, and Florida, but the rest of the CONUS was mostly dry. For August 29-September 3, an upper-level ridge will build over the West, bringing warmer- and drier-than-normal weather, while a weather system moves across the eastern CONUS and a weather disturbance lingers over the western Gulf of Mexico Coast. An inch or more of rain, with locally over 2 inches, is forecast for the southern Plains to Lower Mississippi Valley, Upper Mississippi Valley, and Carolinas to New York. Four or more inches could fall over parts of the southern Plains, New Mexico, and western Gulf Coast. The rain will help to improve drought conditions in the Deep South and central Appalachians, but won’t be enough to end the drought. The Rockies to West Coast, and western High Plains, are forecast to receive no precipitation during this period.
For much of the next 2 weeks, a ridge will remain anchored over the West with a trough along the East Coast, while a couple weather systems try to move through this upper-level blockade. The Climate Prediction Center’s (CPC) 6-10 Day Outlook (valid September 3-7) and 8-14 Day Outlook (valid September 5-11) favor warmer-than-normal temperatures across the West, central and northern Plains, along the Gulf of Mexico Coast, and over the eastern half of Alaska, with near to cooler-than-normal temperatures expected over parts of the southern Plains and from the Ohio Valley to East Coast. Odds favor below-normal precipitation across most of the West, the northern tier states, the Midwest, the northern and central Plains, and Hawaii. Odds favor above-normal precipitation across the Gulf of Mexico Coast to the Carolinas, and over eastern Alaska.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 27, 2024.
A pilot wastewater treatment project in the Wet Mountain Valley west of Pueblo just got a boost from a state grant. The project is designed to address challenges some small communities are having in meeting increasing federal environmental standards combined with the demands created by a growing population. The system calls for upgraded wastewater lagoons stocked with specialized microbes, as well as a technology known as electrocoagulation to help clean sewage from water. Dave Schneider manages the Round Mountain Water and Sanitation District in Westcliffe and Silver Cliff. He said they’ve run small scale tests that show their concept works. The next step is to run a larger scale test on the upgraded lagoon system. They’ll also do separate assessments of the electrocoagulation component to determine whether it is necessary.
“What are the challenges we have (on a) big scale?” he said. “We might have to do one or two different tweaks that we might not have initially planned, but we’re going to find a methodology in this that will work.”
The state Department of Local Affairs awarded a $546,750 grant to the district to help fund the $800,000 pilot project…Schneider said they hope to submit the plans for the demonstration project to the state health department for approval this fall and get the upgrades started next spring.
Creating a balance of water that’s taken from aquifers and water that replenishes aquifers is an important aspect of making sure water will be available when it’s needed. Image from “Getting down to facts: A Visual Guide to Water in the Pinal Active Management Area,” courtesy of Ashley Hullinger and the University of Arizona Water Resources Research Center
As Californians pump increasing amounts of water from the ground, sometimes siphoning flows from the rivers above and hurting fish, wildlife and other water users, an old state law is proving to be a new and successful means of reining in excessive pumping. A Superior Court judge ruled last week that Sonoma County must do more to ensure responsible groundwater pumping under the state’s Public Trust Doctrine. The historical doctrine holds that rivers, creeks and other waterways must be protected for the public. Groundwater has only recently been considered part of the Public Trust Doctrine, as the hydrological connection between waterways and below-ground water supplies has become clear. The new court decision is likely the first to enforce this. The ruling will not only require Sonoma County to revisit and perhaps rewrite its ordinance for permitting groundwater wells, but it could set the stage for other counties to similarly step up regulation for groundwater pumping. With aquifers being overdrawn across the state as above-ground supplies get squeezed, environmentalists are optimistic that this will be the case.
“This ruling is particularly welcome given steadily growing groundwater pumping, declining natural resources and a changing climate that is making droughts deeper and longer,” said Barry Nelson, founder of the consulting company Western Water Strategies. “We hope this decision will be followed by counties statewide so that they start considering impacts on surface flows more seriously when permitting groundwater pumping.”
High-level policy discussions have built momentum for “food system transformation” that would help farmers address the climate crisis.
As much of the world heads into the fall harvest season and agriculture once again enters international policy conversations, humanitarian groups are calling for fundamental changes to the global food system—not only to feed the world’s hungry but also to enlist more farmers in solving the climate crisis.
At the United Nations annual climate conference, being held this November in Azerbaijan, a working “hub” organized by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and conference leaders will focus on agriculture and food systems. Agriculture will also get the spotlight at an upcoming UN conference on desertification and at Climate Week in New York, during the UN General Assembly next month.
This intensified attention on food systems, which generate between one quarter and one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, adds to momentum building for the past couple of years as advocacy and policy groups have moved agriculture toward the forefront of climate policy discussions. In 2022 and 2023 at the UN’s annual climate conferences, referred to as COPs for conference of the parties, food systems and agriculture got increasingly higher billing.
“Food and agriculture is, indeed, a big part of the agenda again, heading into COP29. I think what we’ve seen in the past few years is a major change in that agriculture and food systems and food security are no longer confined to one small part of the conversation,” said Kaveh Zahedi, director of the office of climate change, biodiversity and environment at FAO. “It took about 20 COPs for food to be even mentioned at a COP. It was invisible.”
The attention, hunger and food advocacy groups say, can’t come soon enough: As agriculture’s role in the climate crisis has become more prominent, so have the inequities in the global food system, prompting more urgent calls for a major agricultural overhaul.
Within 25 years, the world’s farmers will have to produce 50 percent more food than they do now, and already one in 11 people on the planet doesn’t have enough to eat. As climate change continues to fuel more disruptive weather events, from drought to floods, the UN estimates that 1.8 billion more people could be pushed into hunger by mid-century.
Credit: Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
For the past three years, the number of hungry people around the world has stayed at frustratingly high levels, foiling aid and humanitarian groups that celebrated a decline in hunger through the previous decade. In its annual flagship report on global hunger published in July, FAO and the other major UN food agencies said that roughly 773 million people on the planet are facing acute hunger.
“We saw a big jump during COVID, but the numbers aren’t going down,” Zahedi said. “There are, of course, regional differences, but the number I find quite shocking—in Africa, one in five people face hunger.” In South America, where countries spend more on social programs, the numbers are heading in a positive direction, with 5 million fewer people going hungry on that continent in 2023 over the previous year, the FAO report found.
Wars, conflict and economic conditions are primary drivers of hunger. In Sudan, an ongoing civil war has pushed millions of people to the brink of starvation, as opposing sides have choked off supplies and weaponized the lack of food against their own people. The ongoing war in the Ukraine, a major wheat grower, has roiled global grain markets, raising prices. The Israel-Hamas war drove nearly 580,000 people into famine, the most severe level of food insecurity and the most severe crisis since the UN assessments began. By the latter part of 2023, the entire 2.2 million population of Gaza was facing crisis-level hunger, the FAO report said.
But climate change is, increasingly, becoming the primary driver in many parts of the world.
“We have 18 countries where 71.9 million people face high-acute food insecurity because of weather extremes,” said Gernot Laganda, who leads climate and disaster risk reduction programs at the UN’s World Food Program (WFP). “So a larger number of countries with a larger number of people.”
Most of these countries were in Africa and Latin America. In 2020, that number was 15.7 million in 15 countries, mostly in Africa, Latin American and South Asia.
The WFP, the world’s largest humanitarian aid organization, has only 50 percent of the funding it needs to reach the world’s hungriest people. It provides the bulk of the food aid distributed by relief agencies but is chronically stretched, bouncing from crisis to crisis. Laganda and others have called for years for the UN food agencies to change the way they respond to hunger by providing financing to potential victims ahead of a crisis.
“We didn’t see the Russian invasion or COVID coming,” Laganda said. But with improved technology for better predictive forecasting, experts can position resources in potential crisis areas before they happen, he explained. “We need to invest in these capabilities for countries that are getting hit the hardest. That’s not happening at the scale and speed that’s required.”
Laganda said that of all the funding in the international aid system, only 2 percent is in place ahead of time. The rest is raised and distributed on the fly.
“We’re not moving from a system that’s waiting for things to happen and then using very costly resources to absorb the shocks—we’re not moving from that age-old model into a model that pre-positions financing and makes that financing available before these shocks happen, which would gives us the time, and the communities [time], to brace for impact,” Laganda said.
The July FAO report not only notes the stubbornly high number of acutely food insecure people across the world, but also emphasizes a need for better global financing to help lower- and middle-income countries adapt to weather extremes driven by climate change. In June, the Rome-based UN food agencies—WFP, FAO and the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD)—met with COP organizers to plan for the Azerbaijan conference and called for an urgent scaling up in climate action and financing to help farmers, especially in politically fragile counties.
“All three Rome-based agencies are working closely with the incoming [COP] presidency to take this forward,” said Juan Carlos Mendoza, who directs climate efforts at IFAD. “There’s going to be an increased focus on financing.”
More of the funding needs to go toward helping farmers make their operations more resilient to climate shocks, by, for example, planting crops better suited for the conditions, taking steps to develop their soils to withstand drought or flood conditions, or growing crops and raising livestock in ways that don’t lead them to cut down trees. Deforestation is the largest source, globally, of greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture.
“By managing landscapes in a more integrated manner and improving farming methods to make farms more regenerative, we can make food systems more resilient,” Laganda said.
Graphic credit: Yellow Barn Farm
While “regenerative agriculture” is a somewhat fuzzy concept, conversations about it will be prominent at Climate Week in New York next month.
“There’s a definition issue with regenerative agriculture, but we really define it in terms of outcomes,” said Roy Steiner, who leads food initiatives at the Rockefeller Foundation and will be a panelist at upcoming events during Climate Week. “Regenerative agriculture moves you toward better soil health, better biodiversity, better water quality and better farmer well-being. Ninety percent of agriculture in the world doesn’t meet that definition.”
The foundation’s research suggests that it will take $400 to 500 million over the next decade to transition more agricultural systems in that direction.
Roughly $600 million a year in government subsidies goes toward agriculture, 80 percent of which flows to larger agricultural operations that grow or produce major commodities and tend to be more greenhouse gas intensive. The World Bank has even called for those subsidies to be redirected toward lower greenhouse gas-emitting farms and food production.
“That 80 percent is not going to regenerative agriculture,” Steiner said.
This type of farming improves soils, making them better able to sequester planet-warming carbon dioxide, and produces livestock in less greenhouse-gas polluting ways. But it has benefits beyond greenhouse gas reductions.
“Globally we depend on just a handful of crops,” Laganda said. “The diversification of food systems is an important part of the conversation. Diversified farms are more resilient.”
Greater resilience, Laganda said, will mean the world’s small-scale farmers can weather climate extremes better and feed their communities when a crisis strikes.
Pennsylvania state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta talks about Project 2025 during the Democratic National Convention at the United Center on August 20, 2024 in Chicago. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
Speaker after speaker at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last week hauled out an oversized prop copy of Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s guide to creating a more perfect conservative presidential administration.
Former president Donald Trump and his presidential campaign have disavowed the plan, saying it doesn’t represent his views. But the document was prepared by former members of his administration and overlaps with much of what the candidate has advocated (270 proposals and counting, according to CBS News). If you want to know what a second Trump administration would bring, there’s no better guide.
And Kansans have gotten the message.
I was part of a panel digging into the specifics Tuesday in Lenexa, brought together by the nonprofit Mainstream Coalition. We spoke to a capacity crowd of more than 200 everyday folks who wanted to know all the gory details. What became clear over the hour and a half was how these plans could upend institutions and plans right here in Kansas.
Kansas Reflector opinion editor Clay Wirestone joins a panel discussion on Project 2025 on Aug. 20 at Shawnee Mission Unitarian Universalist Church.
Amii Castle, a professor at the University of Kansas, summarized the myriad ways the document attacks abortion rights. Yes, an overwhelming majority of Kansans turned out to reject an anti-choice state constitutional amendment. But that wouldn’t matter if Project 2025 were implemented. It foresees a de facto national ban on the procedure through enforcement of the long-dormant Comstock law and restructuring of the Department of Health and Human Services into the Department of Life.
“You have to really read the document to go through and see all of the different things that they want to do with respect to abortion,” Castle told the crowd. “But really what it amounts to is absolutely no abortions in the United States and no contraception.”
Kansas public education advocates have struggled for decades to ensure the state adequately funds schools. The Heritage Foundation’s plan takes a different approach, to put it mildly.
Project 2025 calls for eliminating the Department of Education, ending Head Start and cutting off Title I funding for schools serving low-income students. As you might expect, it also calls for universal “school choice,” weakening the system that has educated generations of Kansans.
“Basically the federal government steps out of education entirely and leaves all of this to state and local governments,” said Andrea Vieux, an associate professor of political science at Johnson County Community College, at the Mainstream event. “Now, if you’re in a state that values public education, great. If you’re not in a state that values public education, that’s going to be a problem.”
At nearly 1,000 pages, Project 2025 goes on and on.
Underlying the bewildering assortment of proposals (which include restructuring the executive branch, overhauling the immigration system, targeting climate spending and banning pornography) lurks something far darker. Heritage has embraced Christian Nationalism, envisioning an America in which the federal government has merged with the most repressive and retrograde form of evangelical Christianity. State Rep. Susan Ruiz, D-Shawnee, emphasized this connection to the crowd.
“It’s the thread that goes through the entire document,” she said. “And for me, it is the foundation with which they have built everything up.”
Money, power and local control
The evening event in Lenexa could have run far longer. The audience submitted dozens of questions for moderator Laurel Burchfield, Mainstream’s advocacy director. Those of us on the panel did our level best to provide context.
The discussion focused my thinking on the fringe conservative movement that has wormed itself into the brains of formerly sensible people. Project 2025 has become a flashpoint in the presidential race because it condenses this extremism. Trump can distance himself all he wants — and fact checkers can offer him cover — but everyone sees the overlap. Everyone understands the subsequent lies for political advantage.
It also highlights the blatant hypocrisy of those who bankroll hard-right campaigns and think tanks like Heritage. They don’t care about the damage done to reproductive rights or the education system or religious freedom. They care about the taxes they pay, the regulations their companies face, and the lives of privilege they enjoy.
The billionaire members of this plutocratic elite don’t need a government to protect their rights. Their dollars do that.
If their wives or daughters or girlfriends need abortion care, they will receive that abortion, no matter where they are or what the law says. Their children and grandchildren and friends can receive astonishing educational opportunities no matter the quality of public schools. They may be evangelical Christians or not, but their freedom won’t be abridged by federal law. They can always head to another country.
Those wealthy beyond the dreams of Midas don’t have to worry about losing health insurance because they can always pay for whatever treatment they need. They can flee the worst effects of climate change. They can rest easy at night, knowing they won’t ever lose their job or require unemployment assistance or food stamps.
That leaves them free to bankroll would-be authoritarians. It leaves them free to support the spread of Christian nationalism without the slightest concern for themselves or their families.
It leaves them free to threaten everyday Kansans.
So what can be done? Kansas voters will likely have little to contribute to the national presidential contest. As a largely red state, albeit less conservative than its reputation suggests, Kansas’ six electoral votes will likely go to Trump.
However, we do have power, and that power can be grasped and employed by engaging with politics at a local level. That means school boards, city councils, county commissions, and state government. That means understanding the roles of advisory boards, volunteer organizations and community institutions. Those funding Project 2025 and sympathetic candidates would like nothing more than seeing our nation degraded into tiny radicalized fortresses, mainlining Fox News and bristling with weaponry.
What they don’t want to see is a nation where residents actually care for one another and step up to help when the need arises. For all their chatter about honoring family, hard-right extremists attack and demonize young people rather than including them in our nation’s future. They want power and profit now, damn the consequences.
Turning the avaricious tide won’t be easy. But last week, I witnessed an audience eager to toss Project 2025 onto the ash heap of history.
Clay Wirestone is Kansas Reflector opinion editor. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.
WATCH: Take a look at these 3 videos of Havasupai, taken less than an hour apart, in northern Arizona. Catastrophic flooding turned one of the state's most beautiful spots into a danger zone. 104 hikers and tribe members have been airlifted since Friday.@FOX10Phoenixpic.twitter.com/Ee571w6GVU
The humpback chub is one of four endangered fish species on the Colorado River. Photo credit: Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
Click the link to read the article on the AZCentral.com website (Brandon Loomis). Here’s an excerpt:
August 25, 2024
A shot of cold water from Glen Canyon Dam appears to have stalled a smallmouth bass invasion of the Grand Canyon and protected rare Colorado River fish there, federal officials say. In early July, two years after first finding the predatory bass spawning below the dam and in threatened humpback chub territory, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation began releasing cold water from deep in Lake Powell in an effort to chill the river past the temperature at which bass are known to reproduce. So far this summer, numerous netting, snorkeling and electrofishing trips on the river have turned up no newly hatched bass, biologists reported to an advisory committee meeting on Grand Canyon’s South Rim on Thursday.
“That’s huge,” said Kelly Burke, executive director at Wild Arizona and its Grand Canyon Wildlands Council, which had pushed for flow alterations from the dam to disrupt the bass invasion.
Cooler water was a must for preventing possible biological disaster this summer in particular, she said. “It couldn’t be better timed. We’re having an extraordinarily hot summer.”
The initial success also means the National Park Service will not dump a fish-killing chemical into spawning grounds a few miles downstream of the dam this year as it did last summer. Last year’s effort drew a rebuke from some tribal officials associated with Grand Canyon, who prefer nonlethal controls. Federal officials considered the bass invasion an emergency requiring quick action to prevent a population explosion that could devastate humpback chubs, 90% or more of which live in the Canyon. Cooling the river below 60 degrees Fahrenheit has at least stalled that explosion.
A Rio Grande sign at Isleta Blvd. and Interstate 25 on Sept. 7, 2023. The U.S. Supreme Court appointed a new special master to oversee the case, after their June ruling blocking a proposed deal. (Photo by Anna Padilla for Source New Mexico)
Click the link to read the article on the Source NM website (Danielle Prokop):
August 26, 2024
The U.S. Supreme Court appointed a new judge to oversee the Rio Grande water dispute between Texas and New Mexico.
The case will continue on after the high court’s June ruling dismissed a deal between New Mexico, Colorado and Texas, as five justices sided with objections from the federal government to the deal.
Justices appointed Judge D. Brooks Smith, U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit from Duncansville, Pennsylvania, to replace federal appeals Judge Michael Melloy as the special master in the case in July.
A special master acts as a trial judge, decides on issues in the case and prepares reports to inform the U.S. Supreme Court’s ultimate opinions in the case.
Smith, 72, has a long career in law, first starting in private practice and as a prosecutor. He donned the robes in 1984 as both a Court of Common Pleas judge in Blair County, Pennsylvania, and an administrative law judge.
In 1988, he was appointed by President Ronald Regan and confirmed to a federal position for the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania.
In 2002, the Senate confirmed his appointment by the Bush administration to the federal appeals court, where he’s served since.
This is the third special master for the case, called Original No. 141 Texas v. New Mexico and Colorado.
In a complaint filed in 2013, Texas alleged that pumping in New Mexico below Elephant Butte Reservoir was taking Rio Grande water owed to Texas under a compact from 1939.
That 85-year old document governs the Rio Grande’s use between Colorado, New Mexico and Texas, and also includes provisions for sending water to Mexico under 1906 treaty obligations and acknowledges regional irrigation districts.
In 2018, the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled to allow the federal government to join the case, accepting the arguments that New Mexico’s groundwater pumping threatened federal obligations to deliver water to Mexico and two irrigation districts.
After months of negotiations and a partial trial, Colorado, Texas and New Mexico proposed a deal to end the yearslong litigation. The federal government and regional irrigation districts objected to the deal, saying that it imposed unfair obligations and was negotiated without their agreement.
Melloy recommended the court ignore the federal government’s objections and approve the state’s proposed deal.
In June, the high court released a narrow 5-4 ruling siding with the federal government’s objections and blocking the state’s deal.
It’s unclear what comes next in the case under the new special master, but the parties could return to the negotiation table to hammer out another deal or return to the courtroom.
Rio Grande and Pecos River basins. Map credit: By Kmusser – Own work, Elevation data from SRTM, drainage basin from GTOPO [1], U.S. stream from the National Atlas [2], all other features from Vector Map., CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11218868
Click the link to read the article on the Land Desk website (Jonathan P. Thompson):
August 23, 2024
🤯 Annals of Inanity 🤡
This week, the state of Utah filed a lawsuit looking to seize control of some 18.5 million acres of federal land in the state, culminating decades of effort by movements such as the Sagebrush Rebellion and Wise Use to wrest America’s public lands from the public’s hands. The suit only targets “unappropriated” lands, meaning those managed by the BLM that are not designated as national monuments, parks or conservation areas or wilderness areas. It’s not clear how this would apply to national monuments the state is looking to shrink or revoke, such as Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante.
Utah says it launched the legal action to “answer the constitutional question of whether or not the Federal Government can retain unappropriated lands in a state indefinitely.” And on the state’s website — standforourland.utah.gov — created solely to promote the suit, the state justifies the action by saying, “Federal overreach prevents Utah from actively managing public lands, impacting recreation, local economies, and resource development.”
And they’re mad because the feds shut down a handful of trails to motorized travel (while leaving far more open to OHVs and jeeps and other internal-combustion-engine-propelled machines). Oh, yeah, and Gov. Spencer Cox is apparently feeling sensitive about his opponent and state lawmaker Phil Lyman out-wing-nutting him on public lands issues. So instead of his old “disagree better” routine, Cox has gone all in on the MAGA grievance party, in which he whines and cries about having too much public land in his state, even though that public land is easily the state’s most valuable asset and alluring draw. It’s all a vain and vacuous spectacle aimed at riling up the extreme right wing that is increasingly calling the shots in Utah, Wyoming, and Idaho.
And one way to do that is to appeal to a sense of nostalgia for a past that never really existed, for which “Make America Great Again” is exhibit A. Exhibit B? The ad Utah posted on Twitter or X or Elno’s rantroom to build support for its lawsuit (I’ll get to the legal merits in a moment). Let’s take a look:
The ad is overflowing with misinformation, but it tugs at the heartstrings and evokes that faux nostalgia, which is the objective, I guess. It does harken back to the wrong era, though: The Sagebrush Rebels’ glory days ended in 1976, when Congress passed the Federal Land Policy Management Act, and when President Jimmy Carter vowed to end the Western “rape, ruin, and run” ethos. And, besides, I’m pretty sure no RV-appropriate roads are being closed anywhere in Utah. The handful of routes that are going non-motorized are in the backcountry, and are mostly used by OHVs.
Okay, but let’s get to the legalese. First of all, Utah’s claim is baseless, because the 1894 Enabling Act, which paved the way to Utah’s statehood, gave up all right to the public domain (i.e. lands stolen from the Diné, Ute, and Paiute people). It reads:
That the people inhabiting said proposed State do agree and declare that they forever disclaim all right and title to the unappropriated public lands lying within the boundaries thereof.
See that “forever” part? Well, we’re still within that timeline.
Utah’s complaint reads: “Nearly half of that federal land—roughly 18.5 million acres—is ‘unappropriated’ land that the United States is simply holding, without formally reserving it for any designated purpose or using it to execute any of its enumerated powers.” But then, in the very same paragraph, Utah contradicts the no-designated-purpose part by writing that the BLM “earns significant revenue by leasing those lands to private parties for activities such as oil and gas production, grazing, and commercial filmmaking, and by selling timber and other valuable natural resources that the federal government retains for its own exploitation.”
The formal purpose of unappropriated BLM land is just this, what’s called multiple-use in FLPMA. And, by the way, the federal government isn’t exploiting those resources — which belong to the American people. The oil and gas companies, livestock operators, mining companies, and recreationists are. Utah also fails to mention that a lot of that revenue comes back to the state and local communities.
Meanwhile all the taxpayer money the state is throwing away on spurious lawsuits, and on the ads to support them, ain’t coming back.
But what’s most irking is Utah’s victim shtick. They feel like they’re being discriminated against because nearly 70% of the state is public land, while only 1% of Connecticut and New York or managed by the federal government. I guess Utah’s so-called leaders haven’t noticed that East Coasters are coming to Utah in droves, to visit or to live, and are stocking up the state’s coffers in the process. Are they coming for the sodas? The fry sauce? The backwards ass politics?
Nope. They’re coming for all of that public land.
The arrogance of the off-road vehicle lobby — Jonathan P. Thompson, January 2, 2024
The AI intern made this. Not terrible, I guess. Credit: Jonathan P. Thompson/The Land Desk
A new report from CoreLogic finds 2.6 million homes in the West are in wildfire danger zones. That includes 1.26 million in California and more than 321,000 in Colorado. Damn. I reckon a lot of those folks have or will get a grim letter from their insurance company canceling coverage or hiking prices.
A double rainbow arches over the Painted Wall in Black Canyon at Gunnison National Park.
Photo Credit: Dave Showalter
From email from Reclamation (Erik Knight):
Releases from the Aspinall Unit will be decreased from 1500 cfs to 1450 cfs in the afternoon of Monday, August 26th. Releases are being decreased as flows on the lower Gunnison River are well above the baseflow target of 1050 cfs.
Flows in the lower Gunnison River are currently above the baseflow target of 1050 cfs. River flows are expected to remain above the baseflow target for the foreseeable future.
Pursuant to the Aspinall Unit Operations Record of Decision (ROD), the baseflow target in the lower Gunnison River, as measured at the Whitewater gage, is 1050 cfs for August through December.
Currently, Gunnison Tunnel diversions are 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon are around 450 cfs. After this release change Gunnison Tunnel diversions will still be 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon will be around 400 cfs. Current flow information is obtained from provisional data that may undergo revision subsequent to review.
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
Hydrological drought is a pervasive and reoccurring challenge in managing water resources. Reservoirs are critical for lessening the impacts of drought on water available for many uses. We use a novel and generalized approach to identify periods of unusually low reservoir storage—via comparisons to operational rule curves and historical patterns—to investigate how droughts affect storage in 250 reservoirs across the conterminous U.S. (CONUS). We find that the maximum amount of water stored in reservoirs is decreasing, and that periods of unusually low storage are becoming longer, more severe, and more variable in (a) western and central CONUS reservoirs, and (b) reservoirs with primarily over-year storage. Results suggest that reservoir storage has become less reliable and more vulnerable to larger deviations from desired storage patterns. These changes have coincided with ongoing shifts to the hydroclimate of CONUS, and with sedimentation further reducing available reservoir storage.
Key Points
Low-storage periods are longer, more severe, and more variable in over-year storage reservoirs and in the western and central CONUS
Longer periods of low storage for some regions in recent years suggests decreased reservoir reliability in a changing hydroclimate
Maximum annual storage is also declining across CONUS, furthered by storage losses from sedimentation
Plain Language Summary
Drought in water systems is a major challenge in managing water resources. Reservoirs are important as they can lessen the impacts of drought on water availability for many users. However, they are impacted by drought as well. We use a novel and generally applicable method to identify when reservoir storage is unusually low, potentially from drought, at 250 reservoirs across the conterminous U.S. We find that the maximum amount of water stored in reservoirs is decreasing across the U.S. We also find that periods of unusually low storage are becoming longer and more severe in western and central U.S. regions as well as for certain types of reservoirs. This suggests that reservoir storage may be less reliable and more vulnerable to extreme conditions and may be further impacted by changing climate and hydrology across the U.S. and by sediment building up behind reservoirs.
Danny Hogan digs a snow pit before taking scientific measurements in Gothic, Colo. on March 15, 2024. He co-authored a new study that suggests spring weather could play a bigger role in water forecasting than researchhers previously thought. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
August 23, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
A new study of high-mountain snow and rain suggests research should pay more attention to springtime conditions than scientists previously thought. The new data could help hone water supply forecasts for the streams that feed the Colorado River.
Researchers with the University of Washington initially set up a study near Crested Butte, Colo. to gather data about wintertime snow behavior. However, they found that weather and climate factors in warmer months had a noticeable impact on the amount of snowmelt that ended up flowing into streams and rivers.
“We thought it was about snow,” said Jessica Lundquist, a co-author of the study. “Really, when we looked at all the statistics across all the seasons, spring is the most dynamic season, and this tells us to change our focus to what’s happening in the spring.”
Water forecasts for the Colorado River, which supplies about 40 million people across seven western states, are mostly focused on mountain snow. Eighty-five percent of the Colorado River starts as snow in the high-altitude mountains of Colorado and Wyoming.
As climate change and steady demand have shrunk the river’s supplies, scientists have worked to produce increasingly granular data about that mountain snow and how it melts. That gives water managers — sometimes in cities hundreds of miles away — a more accurate sense of how much water they can expect to flow their way each year.
In this case, spring is defined as March, April, and May. The factors that make those months so important are sunshine, plants, and rain.
If it’s sunny in the spring, plants are thirstier and soak up more snowmelt from the ground. If it’s cloudy and rainy, two things happen — plants are less thirsty and pull less water from the soil, and the water they do get is more likely to be recently fallen rain instead of snowmelt.
“If it’s going to be sunny, the plants are going to say, ‘Oh, I’m so happy. The snow just melted and I have a ton of water, so I’m going to grow like gangbusters,’” said Danny Hogan, the study’s other author. “This research really centers the importance of studying the whole snow season, not just when the snowpack is the deepest.”
The Yampa River flows through northwest Colorado after an unusually snowy winter on May 21, 2023. As climate change and steady demand have shrunk water supplies in the Colorado River system, scientists have worked to produce increasingly granular data about that mountain snow and how it melts. Photo credit: Alex Hager/KUNC
Hogan and Lundquist said this research, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, is important because it helps explain why streamflow has varied so greatly in recent decades. Since 2000, streamflow in the Colorado River basin has gone down by 19%. The new data shows springtime precipitation and water demand from plants account for about two-thirds of that change.
Colorado statewide annual temperature anomaly (F) with respect to the 1901-2000 average. Graphic credit: Becky Bolinger/Colorado Climate Center
Warming temperatures in the 21st century have made it harder to predict the amount of water that ends up in the Colorado River each year. Previously, forecasts were mostly focused on the amount of snow in the mountains. But recent years have brought a growing gap between the amount of snow that falls and the amount of snowmelt that flows through streams, rivers, and reservoirs.
Scientists are only beginning to understand what is driving that gap.
Hogan and Lundquist originally set out to study another under-researched factor that influences the difference between snow totals and streamflow. At the research site near Crested Butte, they first studied snow sublimation — the process by which snow evaporates before it has a chance to melt.
For the winter of 2023-2024, models projected that 30% to 40% of snow would be lost to sublimation. The team found that about 10% of snow was actually lost to sublimation, less than models predicted. Those findings helped pave the way for the paper on spring conditions.
Other scientists have also been studying the influence of climate change on runoff. Much of that work has focused on soil moisture. Early findings indicate that warmer temperatures are causing drier soils, which soak up snowmelt before it has a chance to reach streams and rivers.
I watched this morning the smokestack implosion at San Juan Generating Station near Farmington, New Mexico. These tall vertical pipes were part of the landscape for decades. It took seconds for them to collapse. pic.twitter.com/ZAGbeD7yt1
The Farmer’s Almanac released their official winter forecast map for winter 2024-2025, and in the meteorological community this means… nothing. Despite the consistent national and local media attention the Farmer’s Almanac gets year-after-year, and assertions about its fabled accuracy, it is not a tool that the scientific community uses or endorses.
Seasonal forecasting is a very difficult problem, and the forecasts are often wrong, sometimes even verifying worse than a random guess, so why wouldn’t weather forecasters embrace the Farmer’s Almanac? There are two major reasons: 1. The Farmer’s Almanac’s seasonal forecasting methods are not transparent, and 2. The Farmer’s Almanac is not skillful.
Let’s start with the lack of transparency: There is no peer reviewed scientific literature backing the Farmer’s Almanac’s seasonal forecasting methods. In fact, their methods aren’t even disclosed. This from farmersalmanac.com: “Over the years, various methods have been used to make the Farmers’ Almanac predictions, including studying sunspot cycles, solar activity, tidal forces, and even the reversal of winds in the stratosphere over the equator.” They add: “The Moon acts as a “meteorological swizzle stick,” occasionally stirring up atmospheric disturbances with its cyclical and predictable movements…” As a climate scientist, this description of methods does not instill me with confidence. While we know that sunspot cycles, and the quasi-biennial oscillation (reversal of winds in the stratosphere over the equator) do influence seasonal weather to some degree, there is no mention of some of the largest tools used by in seasonal forecasting: the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Madden-Julian Oscillation (MJO), and trends associated with climate change. As for the moon being a “meteorological swizzle stick,” yes, the moon actually does impact the weather. The atmosphere is a fluid just like the ocean, and a full moon stretches the atmosphere out slightly much like the ocean tides. This effect has been shown to raise precipitation rates, but only by 1-2%. Furthermore, this is a daily cycle. Whether the moon is new or full, we face the moon once/day. How can a daily cycle, which is always present, be used to make a forecast more accurate for the whole winter? I would ask the Farmer’s Almanac forecaster my questions personally, but the forecaster (yes, it’s apparently just one person, not a team) who goes by the pseudonym Caleb Weatherbee, remains anonymous so he is not “hassled.” I believe a seasonal forecaster should be able to defend their forecasting methods against the scruples of scientific peer review and public comment.
What about accuracy? The average customer probably will not care that the Farmer’s Almanac methods are opaque so long as the forecasts are accurate. A 2010 Weatherwise study from the University of Illinois used a list of 32 cities to test the accuracy of the Farmer’s Almanac and found that it was just under 52% accurate; not much better than a coin flip. Yet the tool’s popularity persists. Why? Have the forecasts improved? Are they equal to, or better than, the seasonal forecasts climatologists and meteorologists look at? For this blog, we evaluate the skill of the Farmer’s Almanac winter outlooks relative to the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center CPC seasonal outlooks over the last five years (winter 2019-2020 through winter 2023-2024). The current CPC winter forecast is shown below:
The data: We used 4km resolution Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes (PRISM) modeled climate data from across the contiguous United States. PRISM leverages observations from trusted weather networks (such as the National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program) and uses physically derived relationships between meteorological variables and elevations/slope angles to create beautiful, spatially complete reanalyses of our weather. We averaged December-February PRISM temperatures and precipitation over the regions shown in the Farmer’s Almanac above. This is our forecast verification dataset. A description of which states are in which region is available in the following table (bear in mind that the Farmer’s Almanac drew these regions, not me. I would never consider Tennessee part of the “Great Lakes” region):
Selecting Forecasts for Evaluation: One of the problems with testing the skill of the Farmer’s Almanac forecasts is that most of the language is subjective. For example, the Farmer’s Almanac forecast for winter 2022-2023 in the North-Central region was “Hibernation Zone. Glacial, Snow-Filled.” How does one evaluate this forecast? Is a normal, or even above normal, winter in the north-central United States not glacial and snow-filled? Because of this we will only evaluate skill in regions where the Farmer’s Almanac declares that temperature or precipitation will be below, near, or above normal. For the sake of consistency, we will only evaluate the Climate Prediction Center in the same number of regions for the same variables. For instance, if the Farmer’s Almanac makes testable claims in two regions for temperature, and one for precipitation, we will use the CPC maps to do the same, testing their two most confident regional temperature predictions, and single most confident precipitation predictions.
Testing skill: It is common for seasonal forecasts to be made using terciles. A tercile represents one third of the probability distribution of a dataset. The lower tercile represents below normal conditions, the middle tercile represents near normal conditions, and the upper tercile represents above normal conditions. For example, if winter temperatures were colder than in 80% of years in the historical record, that would be in the lower tercile (since in over two thirds of years temperatures were greater). In this study we use the following scoring matrix to judge a winter forecast:
Below normal will be defined as temperatures or precipitation within (or below) the lower third of the 1991-2020 climate normals. Above normal is defined as temperatures or precipitation within (or above) the upper third of the 1991-2020 climate normals distribution for a region. Near normal is defined as the middle tercile in the 1991-2020 PRISM climate normals. For example, if the Farmer’s Almanac forecasts “normal temperatures” for the Pacific Northwest Region in winter 2022, and the PRISM averaged December-February temperatures fall within the 1991-2020 middle tercile range, that forecast is worth +2 points. If it is outside of the middle tercile range, it is worth –1. Upper and lower tercile forecasts work differently: they are worth more points if correct (because the forecaster must be confident in a deviation from normal) but will burn the forecaster if they miss by a wide margin. An upper or lower tercile forecast that is correct is worth +3, but if the opposite tercile verifies, it is –3. Note that the expected value for a lower, middle, or upper tercile forecast is zero if forecasting randomly.
Complications: There are a few problems with these methods that would need to be examined more closely to submit this kind of comparison to peer review: 1. Unlike CPC, the Farmer’s Almanac forecasts, even when calling for below, near, or above normal, make no mention of terciles. The Farmer’s Almanac forecaster may tailor their seasonal forecasts a bit differently if apprised to the rules of our game. 2. It is also worth noting that the CPC forecasts are not deterministic, they are probabilistic. Each grid point is assigned a probability of below normal, near normal, and above normal temperature and precipitation. In this evaluation CPC forecasts are treated as deterministic. In some cases, a CPC forecast is treated as calling for “above normal” or “below normal” temperature or precipitation when CPC is only 40-50% confident in above (or below) the upper (or lower) tercile. 3. The CPC does not use the climate divisions drawn in the Farmer’s Almanac, or any divisions for that matter; it is a gridded product. Determining the regions in which CPC is most confident in the winter forecast sometimes takes some creative eyeballing. Like the Farmer’s Almanac, the CPC forecast team would probably tailor their winter forecasts differently if apprised to the rules of the game. With all the methodology and caveats finally out of the way, let’s play!
2019-2020: Year number one of our Farmer’s Almanac vs Climate Prediction Center skill challenge is winter (December-February) 2019-2020. If we look at the Farmer’s Almanac forecast, we see a few subjective yet colorful descriptions of winter: “frozen, snowy,” “brisk & wet,” “frosty, wet & white.” These descriptions generally describe the winter climates of the Great Lakes, Southeast, and Atlantic Regions of the United States respectively. However, we do see three claims that we can test using PRISM temperature and precipitation data: “Normal Precipitation” in the Pacific Northwest, “Normal Precipitation” in the Southwest, and “Average Precipitation” in the South-Central Region. We will not distinguish between “normal” and “average” here. For each of these regions, a December-February precipitation value in the middle tercile range of the 1991-2020 normals will be scored as +2, and an outer-tercile value will be scored as –1.
The 2019-2020 Pacific Northwest Region-average December-February precipitation value of 14.26” is ever-so-close to the inner tercile range (11.15-14.16”), but no cigar. -1. The southwest region verified much drier than normal. -1 again. However, the South-Central region value of 7.87” barely squeezes into the inner tercile range of 6.33-7.88”. +2. It’s a wash for an annual score of zero.
All three of the Farmer’s Almanac’s testable claims were precipitation forecasts. Per our methods above, we will now score the CPC’s three most confident regional precipitation forecasts for December-February 2019-2020. These include above normal precipitation over the North-Central and Great Lakes Regions, and below normal precipitation over the Southwest Region.
The CPC starts strong in winter 2019-2020 with a clean sweep. PRISM-averaged, North-Central Region Precipitation verifies across the region at 3.47”, which, believe it or not, is above the 67th percentile value of 3.22”. This region is so cold in winter that high precipitation events are rare. The Great Lakes Region value comes in at 11.17”, comfortably eclipsing the 67th percentile of 9.30”. The Southwest Region, as stated earlier, was dry, which also matched the CPC forecast.
At the end of one round, the scoreboard reads CPC: 9, Farmer’s Almanac: 0 with the CPC achieving the maximum possible score for the round. Is hope lost for the Farmer’s Almanac already? With four of five years remaining, I doubt it!
2020-2021: It is a new year and new battle for the Farmer’s Almanac, who have again submitted a forecast with top-notch descriptive language. This forecast includes details about the interregional and intertemporal variation of temperature and precipitation: “Wet Coastal Regions, Snowy Inland” for the Southwest, and “Temperamental! Wild swings from mild to tranquil to cold & wintery” for the South-Central Region. Within this forecast lies two testable claims: “Normal Temps” for the Southwest and “Seasonably Cold” for the… Mid-Atlantic? This region is not used in all years. We will create an ad-hoc region from Virginia up though Pennsylvania that runs from West Virginia to the Atlantic Coast to score this. Indeed, both the Southwest and Mid-Atlantic Regions had near normal winter temperatures, giving the Farmer’s Almanac a score of +4 for the year.
How about the CPC? Given our stated methods, this time, we must test their two most confident regional temperature forecasts. This includes an increased chance of above normal temperatures for the Southwest and South-Central Regions. The Southwest saw near-normal winter temperatures. The Farmer’s Almanac called it. The CPC did not. Does it get better for the CPC from here? Oh no! The CPC’s call for increased chances of a warmer than normal winter in the South-Central Region will not amuse Texans, who had disastrous, and sometimes deadly, impacts from a horrible cold snap in February 2021, which saw millions of Americans without power. This earns the CPC an emphatic –3.
At the end of two rounds the Farmer’s Almanac has nearly drawn even, trailing by a manageable deficit of 6-4.
2021-2022: The 2021-2022 winter comes with greater potential for the tide to shift in either direction. The Farmer’s Almanac has submitted a seasonal forecast with six testable claims: three for temperature, and three for precipitation. Descriptive language still abounds, calling for “numb’s the word, just shoveling along” in the North-Central Region. We also have calls for normal, or typical, temperature and precipitation in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest Regions, near normal precipitation in the South-Central Region, and “typical winter chill” in the Northeast Region. The Northeast Region did see “typical winter chill,” with an average temperature of 25.3 °F, comfortably inside the middle tercile. I did want to subtract points for the addition of “stormy Jan, tranquil Feb.” as this was not even close to true. February was easily the coldest month of the winter in New England in 2022. I’ll award credit for the forecast of average winter temperatures, even if the temporal variability was plainly wrong. +2. The Farmer’s Almanac correctly called near-normal winter temperatures in the Pacific Northwest, but precipitation verified just outside of the inner tercile: 11.10” (the 33rd percentile is 11.15”). The Almanac forecast was ugly down south. It called for near normal temperatures and precipitation for the Southwest, and near normal precipitation for the South-Central Region. Both regions were significantly warmer and drier than normal. All tallied, it’s a wash. The Farmer’s Almanac made six testable claims and scored a net zero points.
We evaluated the CPC’s three most confident regional forecasts for temperature and precipitation. The region-averaged December-February temperatures were 45.7 °F for the South-Central Region and 49.7 °F for the Southeast Region. These marks were comfortably in the upper tercile of the 1991-2020 distribution and net the CPC +6 points. The call for an increased probability of above normal temperatures in New England did not pan out, again thanks to that bone-chilling February. Zero points. The CPC also made a smart call in the Great Lakes, forecasting an increased probability of above normal precipitation, likely driven by La Niña conditions. The region average of 9.82” did exceed the 67th percentile of 9.30”. It was a wash out west. The CPC faced a tough break as the increased probability of above normal precipitation in the Pacific Northwest was followed by lower tercile precipitation, -3 points. However, the forecast of an increased probability of below normal precipitation in the southwest did pan out. The December-January value of 4.31” was below normal, netting +3.
Three years of data and 11 total testable claims was enough for the CPC to begin to pull away from the Farmer’s Almanac with cumulative scores of +15 for the CPC, and +4 for the Farmer’s Almanac.
2022-2023: The winter 2022-2023 season brought the third year in a row of La Niña conditions. The prevailing evidence suggests that this is associated with wetter than normal conditions over the northern United States, especially the Great Lakes Region, and drier than normal conditions over the south and southwestern United States. Much warmer than normal Atlantic Ocean temperatures also lent confidence, at least for the CPC, that a warmer than normal winter could occur up and down the eastern seaboard.
The Farmer’s Almanac forecast featured three testable claims this winter including “normal precipitation” for the Pacific Northwest, “drier than normal” for the Southwest, and “normal precipitation” for the South-Central Region. Other regional forecasts, such as “Hibernation Zone, Glacial, Snow-Filled” for the North-Central Region, and “Significant Shivers, Slushy, Icy, Snowy” for the Northeast Region unfortunately could not be scored.
The Farmer’s Almanac net +1 points in 2023, dropping back down to a cumulative score of just +2. “Normal precipitation” was the correct forecast for the Pacific Northwest and South-Central Regions. The call for “drier than normal” in the Southwest was terrible as much of the Sierra Nevadas and western Rocky Mountains received near-to-record high snowpack in winter 2023. One might also argue that “unreasonably cold” was not a good forecast for the Great Lakes Region, which had one of the mildest winters on record. However, perhaps it is fair to counter that winter in the Great Lakes Region is always “unreasonably cold.”
The Climate Prediction Center net another +3 points in winter 2022-2023 with their three most confident regional precipitation predictions. The Great Lakes Region again verified with above normal precipitation at 9.55″ averaged across the region. The CPC forecast called for an increased probability of below normal precipitaiton in the South-Central and Southeastern Regions. Both of these regions ended up with near normal precipitation, and scored 0 points.
Neither the Farmer’s Almanac nor the CPC had a particularly strong showing in 2022-2023, netting only +1 and +3. After four years, the cumulative scores are +18 for the CPC and +5 for the Farmer’s Almanac. With just one year left in our forecast competition, it would take a crystal ball for the Farmer’s Almanac to make up that kind of a deficit.
2023-2024: The Farmer’s Almanac only floundered in the final year of competition, calling for ”unseasonably cold” conditions in the South-Central Region (it was warmer than normal: -3) and ”seasonably cold” conditions in the Pacific Northwest (also warmer than normal: -1).
Winter 2023-2024 brought El Niño conditions for the first time in the five-year competition. Meanwhile, Atlantic Ocean temperature anomalies remained high. The CPC used these facts in tandem to confidently call for increased chances of above normal temperatures across the northern United States and above normal precipitation in the southeastern United States. CPC had a very good year, and had the Farmer’s Almanac made more testable claims about temperature and precipitation, it could have scored as high as +12 or +15. However, the call for increased chances of above normal temperatures in the Pacific Northwest and Northeast both verified, and can be counted using our methodology above for an additional +6.
All things considered, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center blew out the Farmer’s Almanac over our last five years of winter temperature and precipitation predictions. The CPC came away with a final score of +24, and the Farmer’s Almanac came away with a score of +1 where the expected value for both entities using random number generation would be 0.
The CPC shined in the Great Lakes Region, netting +9 points in over five years. Some of the CPC’s totals could have been higher if we were not enforcing that the CPC only be evaluated on the same number of regional forecasts/year as the Farmer’s Almanac. The CPC did not shine everywhere. The CPC net zeros points in the Pacific Northwest, which was worse than the Farmer’s Almanac (+3), and zeros points in both the South-Central and Northeast Regions (tied with the Farmer’s Almanac). When we look at individual regions, five years is a small sample size, so I would not recommend Seattle residents pick up this year’s copy of The Almanac today. The North-Central Region was also tricky for the CPC because it is a large, diverse region, and seasonal forecasts rarely leaned confidently one way or the other across the region. In some cases, there was an increased probability of above normal temperatures in the south end of the region, and below normal temperatures in the northern end of the region, or vice versa.
The CPC’s score of +24 was greater than that of over 99% of 10000 simulations using random number generation, so we can say with confidence that the CPC is better at forecasting winter temperature and precipitation than random forecasting. The Farmer’s Almanac score was only better than about 55% of 10000 random number generation simulations. We cannot reject the hypothesis that the Farmer’s Almanac makes winter forecasts equivalent in skill to picking randomly. This is the outcome I expected given the tools and resources these two entities use to make their predictions.
Seasonal forecasting is an ongoing challenge in the scientific community. For many stakeholders, significantly better than random chance is simply not good enough. More precision is often needed for stakeholders to make changes to their operations based on a forecast (e.g. farmers planting different crops, ski resorts extending snow making operations). I still understand why the Farmer’s Almanac is popular. It is entertaining. However, if you are considering making decisions based on a seasonal forecast that have any real economic consequence, I strongly suggest deferring to experts like the Climate Prediction Center.
Doug Kemper near his home in Denver. Photo/Jill PIatt Kemper
Click the link to read the article on the Big Pivots website (Allen Best):
August 19, 2024
Women will be among the attendees at the Colorado Water Congress annual summer conference this week, and relatively speaking, lots of them.
It wasn’t always so, says Doug Kemper, the executive director for the organization, Colorado’s largest group dedicated to convening discussions about water issues.
Kemper, who is moving on in September after 20 years managing the Water Congress, recalls that when he got involved in Colorado water matters about 40 years ago, water meetings were very different. Young people were expected to sit in the back and listen, to pay their dues.
“It wasn’t 100%, but the feeling was that you sit in the back and go along for the ride.”
Water Congress – and by extension all water matters in Colorado – have become more intergenerational. And more diverse in gender.
“You see a much higher percentage of women, and that just makes for a better (water) community. We are not where we need to be yet. But those are the two big changes in the makeup of the water community in the last 20 to 30 years, and especially in the last 10.”
Also evident, at least in the agenda for Water Congress conferences in the last few years, has been the inclusion of native voices – including native women. This summer’s conference in Colorado Springs is no exception. In addition to sessions devoted to agriculture, the Colorado River and other topics, a half-hour is allotted to comments from representatives of both the Southern Ute and the Ute Mountain Ute tribes. Both speakers will be women.
And yet another change, which can also be seen in the agenda for Water Congress but elsewhere, too, is the proliferation of locally based watershed groups.
Kemper grew up primarily in Atlanta, and got his first college degree in Nashville before making his way to Colorado. Part of his motivation was the Colorado River. In a freshman class he had heard an explanation about the Colorado River Compact that stuck with him.
“We were being told in 1973 – 51 years ago — that out West, they have these seven states that share the Colorado River, and you know what they did? They have allocated more water from the river than there is river.”
Kemper remembers thinking, “What an interesting problem.”
Colorado River headwaters-marker. Photo credit: Allen Best/Big Pivots
Engineers are attracted to problems, he says. “Not that I thought I had the solution. But I was fascinated by the problem.”
By late 1980, with a degree in environmental and water resources engineering, he was in Colorado. (He later picked up a master’s in civil engineering and water resources from the University of Colorado-Boulder).
At the Colorado Air Pollution Control Division, working on problems that are familiar yet today: ozone and particulates. But his greater interest was in water, and so he then worked for a variety of smaller consulting firms, working on everything from uranium mining to a job in Longmont that led to a deeper understanding of the conversion of water from agriculture to urban uses.
By 1986, he was ready for a new challenge. He got hired by Aurora and eventually became the manager of water resources, a position that he held until 2005, when he left to oversee the Colorado Water Congress.
Even when he started that position, Aurora was getting water from three different river basins in Colorado: The South Platte, the Arkansas and the Colorado.
Aurora, working with Colorado Springs, wanted to expand its diversions from the Colorado River Basin through a project in the Eagle River Basin, near Vail, called Homestake II.
The project, as proposed, was scuttled in the early 1990s, and it remains unclear whether any of that water will ever get diverted.
In 1992, Denver and other Front Range water providers also were sent reeling when the Environmental Protection Agency refused to issue a permit vital for a giant diversion project called Two Forks. It would have enlarged diversions from Summit County – and even from the Vail area.
From his Aurora Water office Kemper saw this and thought, “You know, we have to change our whole approach to water resources, at least in the cities.”
He obtained training, at Harvard and elsewhere, on collaborative problem solving and consent building. The task: learn how to work with people in a high-conflict environment. That, says Kemper, defined the rest of his career — although, he adds, the us vs. them that dominated water thinking 50 to 75 years ago may not be entirely gone. “We may be coming back to that now.”
Aurora has gone from a typical Front Range city, intent upon recreating landscapes from the Midwest or East, to one that aggressively promotes low-water landscapes. One educational tool is a demonstration garden near the municipal building. Photo/Allen Best
Aurora, founded in 1891, began as a farming community. The population rapidly expanded from 11,000 in 1950 to 222,000 in 1990, when Kemper was trying to figure out where the water was to come from. (It is now 400,000).
That was the era of big projects. Homestake and Two Forks were big, big projects. Their defeat forced cities to look at transfers from agriculture in Eastern Colorado and in smaller, more incremental ways.
Something else also happened: water conservation. Per capita water use in the 20th century had been rising, in the case of Aurora from 110 gallons daily per capita in the mid-1950s to 180 gallons per capita by the 1980s.
During the last several decades, that per-capita growth flattened and then declined. Aurora’s water use per capita is now at 115 gallons per day.
We have low-water toilets and washing machines, but also new urban landscapes. Cities are also rising vertical. The denser housing reduces the amount of water devoted to front yards and backyards.
Front Range cities have grown considerably but in the last 20 years without necessarily expanding water supplies.
Concurrent with this change has been a revised attitude about water supplies in Colorado. Early in Kemper’s career, it was a mantra that Colorado had at least a half-million acre-feet of water on the Western Slope to develop.
Any lingering thoughts in that regard have largely been shelved by the drought of the 21st century coupled with the aridification caused by a warming climate. Transmountain projects are expensive – and will the water even be there?
Long-time Western Slope water activist Ken Neubecker credits Northern Water with taking local and envirornmental concerns seriously, in its project to enlarge diversions from Windy Gap, but he also says that Doug Kemper was a pioneer in the art of listening. Photo/Norhern Water
Ken Neubecker credits Kemper with being a “pioneer in the changing of the guard.” He points to the attitudes of Denver Water in the 1960s and 1970s. He summarizes the attitude of at least one chief executive of Denver water during that time as being: “We have the water rights, we have more money than you, and we will see you in court.”
Neubecker, a Glenwood Springs-area resident who was a long-term representative for American Rivers, says that Denver retained elements of this attitude even after it lost in the Two Forks battle.
Other water diverters over time had become more willing to have discussions, to take the problems of the Western Slope interest and the environmental community more seriously. He credits in particular the wok of Northern Water.
Denver Water, though, didn’t entirely shift until another Western Slope resident, Jim Lochhead, was hired to oversee the agency.
Neubecker says that Kemper dramatically changed Water Congress. “Not overnight, but he shifted the organization’s thinking into greater inclusivity, the idea that ‘we’re in all in this together,’” he said. “And my position also changed,” he added, from “‘Hell no, not one more drop,’ to ‘We can work together. And the Front Range can still get some of the water. It just depends upon how we do it.’”
As for Kemper’s plans after leaving the Water Congress in September, he says he has deliberately chosen to have none. “I have never taken more than two weeks off literally from the time I was in 10th grade, So, right now, I am trying not to have any commitments. I’ll just let things happen.”
Doug Kemper was surrounded by previous Wayne N. Aspinall recipients at the CWC Summer Conference, where he received the award.
You probably have been hearing phrases like “climate crisis,” “climate emergency” or “climate justice” more often lately as people try to get across the urgent risks and consequences of climate change. The danger is real, but is using this language actually persuasive?
It turns out that Americans are more familiar with – and more concerned about – climate change and global warming than they are about climate crisis, climate emergency or climate justice, according to a recent survey we conducted with a nationally representative sample of 5,137 Americans.
Moreover, we found no evidence that the alternative terms increased people’s sense of urgency, willingness to support climate-friendly policies or willingness to act.
The familiar terms – climate change and global warming – did at least as well, and sometimes better, than climate crisis and climate emergency in eliciting concern, perceived urgency and willingness to act. Climate justice consistently tended to do worse, likely in part because it was the least familiar. The responses were similar among Republicans, Democrats and independents.
Just keep it simple
In our work as researchpsychologists, we have explored how Americans respond to the ways climate change is communicated and have uncovered a need to use straightforward language.
For example, people we interviewed for a study published in 2021 felt that climate experts were talking over their heads with terms like “adaptation,” “mitigation,” “sustainability” and “carbon-dioxide removal.” They wanted experts to use more familiar terms instead.
This inspired us to write a quick guide to climate jargon, published in The Conversation. Using everyday language makes information easier to understand, and even highly educated people tend to prefer it.
Yet, experts often use complex jargon because it is familiar to them, and they may not realize it is unfamiliar to others.
How the terms evolved
It has become common to talk about climate change and global warming as if they have the same meaning, but there are differences. Climate change refers to changes in the overall climate, while global warming refers specifically to rising temperatures.
Past surveys also found that Democrats used to think of global warming as being more serious than climate change, while Republicans thought of climate change as more serious than global warming. But according to a recent review, these partisan differences have now faded, and a majority of Republicans and Democrats tend to express concern about both terms.
Alternative terms such as climate crisis, climate emergency and climate justice have been used to emphasize other aspects of climate change and to try to raise concern. In 2019, the British newspaper The Guardian switched to using climate crisis and climate emergency because it wanted to convey urgency.
Activists use the term climate justice to draw attention to climate change as a human rights challenge: Low-income people around the world suffer the most from the effects of climate change, despite being the least responsible for causing it.
The takeaway: Avoid overheated language
Right now, the terms climate crisis, climate emergency or climate justice are less familiar and elicit less concern than climate change or global warming.
Even if these terms become more commonplace, there is no guarantee that they will heighten concern or inspire action. In fact, studies have suggested that phrases like climate crisis could backfire if they don’t resonate with people.
Our advice: Don’t make the mistake of using overheated language. Just stick with familiar terms that people understand – use global warming when referring to rising temperatures and climate change for overall changes in the climate.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials have launched an extensive monitoring and public outreach plan following the detection of invasive zebra mussel larvae in several locations along the Colorado River near Grand Junction last month. But their next steps will depend on what they learn about the extent and the source of the invasive population, which could pose an “extreme risk” to local ecosystems and water utilities.
“If they are in a small pond, as an example, there is a completely different arsenal of tools that we may have in our tool belt to try to address that situation than if they are in an open water system like the Colorado River,” Robert Walters, CPW’s invasive species program manager, told a committee of state lawmakers on Wednesday. “Until we identify the source of the population, it’s really difficult to say what those control options might be.”
Zebra mussels are dangerous to water ecosystems because they strip plankton, an essential food source, from the water. Additionally, they can threaten water supplies and irrigation systems by impeding or stopping water flows and attaching to infrastructure, causing millions of dollars in damages and increased maintenance costs.
The fingernail-sized mussels, which are native to the Black and Caspian seas, are “almost impossible to eradicate” once a population is established, CPW officials say. The species has impacted ecosystems in the Great Lakes region since the late 1980s, and has subsequently spread throughout many parts of the United States by attaching to boats and other aquatic equipment.
Walters said that after additional sampling in the last few weeks, the agency now considers the Colorado River to be “positive” for zebra mussels. CPW previously deemed the river and the Government Highline Canal, a 55-mile-long irrigation project that diverts some of the river’s water to farms in the Grand Valley, “suspect” after initial testing detected zebra mussel DNA in early July. The total number of locations where the species has been detected is now seven.
“Our focus now is really on the monitoring,” Walters said. “We want to know where these are coming from and how far they have spread here in the state, as that is going to influence our long-term planning.”
A Colorado Parks and Wildlife map shows the locations where zebra mussel DNA has been detected along the Colorado River and Government Highline Canal. (CPW)
The agency is coordinating its response with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, which owns the Highline Canal, along with the Army Corps of Engineers, which is conducting a “west-wide boater movement study” to identify how and where contaminated boats may have entered Colorado waterways. Public awareness campaigns and a network of inspection and decontamination stations at popular boating sites are key prevention strategies, Walters said. A 10-second high-pressure spray of hot water is enough to kill and remove zebra mussels that have attached to a boat.
CPW urges anyone using the Colorado River to clean, drain, and dry their vessels and equipment — including boats, rafts, kayaks, paddle boards and fishing equipment — after they leave the water.
So far, no adult zebra mussels have been found in the Colorado River, Walters said — only so-called veligers, the species’ larval form. Public education and awareness will be critical to minimizing the impacts of what for now is a “very low density of veligers that we are detecting,” he said.
“We have had zero positive detection since those last ones in the middle of July,” Walters added. “That doesn’t mean we aren’t continuing to look. We are out there every single week collecting additional samples, trying to identify where these are coming from.”
Bicycling the Colorado National Monument, Grand Valley in the distance via Colorado.com
sSeptember 26, 2023 – Small cubes of the PolyEster Covalently Adaptable Network (PECAN) resin used to understand their depolymerization kinetics. (Photo by Werner Slocum / NREL)
Click the link to read the release on the NREL website:
August 22, 2024
Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) see a realistic path forward to the manufacture of bio-derivable wind blades that can be chemically recycled and the components reused, ending the practice of old blades winding up in landfills at the end of their useful life.
The findings are published in the new issue of the journal Science. The new resin, which is made of materials produced using bio-derivable resources, performs on par with the current industry standard of blades made from a thermoset resin and outperforms certain thermoplastic resins intended to be recyclable.
The researchers built a prototype 9-meter blade to demonstrate the manufacturability of an NREL-developed biomass-derivable resin nicknamed PECAN. The acronym stands for PolyEster Covalently Adaptable Network, and the manufacturing process dovetails with current methods. Under existing technology, wind blades last about 20 years, and afterward they can be mechanically recycled such as shredded for use as concrete filler. PECAN marks a leap forward because of the ability to recycle the blades using mild chemical processes.
The chemical recycling process allows the components of the blades to be recaptured and reused again and again, allowing the remanufacture of the same product, according to Ryan Clarke, a postdoctoral researcher at NREL and first author of the new paper. “It is truly a limitless approach if it’s done right.”
He said the chemical process was able to completely break down the prototype blade in six hours.
The paper, “Manufacture and testing of biomass-derivable thermosets for wind blade recycling,” involved work from investigators at five NREL research hubs, including the National Wind Technology Center and the BOTTLE Consortium. The researchers demonstrated an end-of-life strategy for the PECAN blades and proposed recovery and reuse strategies for each component.
“The PECAN method for developing recyclable wind turbine blades is a critically important step in our efforts to foster a circular economy for energy materials,” said Johney Green, NREL’s associate laboratory director for Mechanical and Thermal Engineering Sciences.
The research into the PECAN resin began with the end. The scientists wanted to make a wind blade that could be recyclable and began experimenting with what feedstock they could use to achieve that goal. The resin they developed using bio-derivable sugars provided a counterpoint to the conventional notion that a blade designed to be recyclable will not perform as well.
“Just because something is bio-derivable or recyclable does not mean it’s going to be worse,” said Nic Rorrer, one of the two corresponding authors of the Science paper. He said one concern others have had about these types of materials is that the blade would be subject to greater “creep,” which is when the blade loses its shape and deforms over time. “It really challenges this evolving notion in the field of polymer science, that you can’t use recyclable materials because they will underperform or creep too much.”
Composites made from the PECAN resin held their shape, withstood accelerated weatherization validation, and could be made within a timeframe similar to the existing cure cycle for how wind turbine blades are currently manufactured.
While wind blades can measure the length of a football field, the size of the prototype provided proof of the process.
“Nine meters is a scale that we were able to demonstrate all of the same manufacturing processes that would be used at the 60-, 80-, 100-meter blade scale,” said Robynne Murray, the second corresponding author.
The other coauthors, all from NREL, are Erik Rognerud, Allen Puente-Urbina, David Barnes, Paul Murdy, Michael McGraw, Jimmy Newkirk, Ryan Beach, Jacob Wrubel, Levi Hamernik, Katherine Chism, Andrea Baer, and Gregg Beckham.
The U.S. Department of Energy jointly funded the research through its Advanced Materials and Manufacturing Technologies Office and Bioenergy Technologies Office and their support of the BOTTLE Consortium. Additional research and funding will allow the investigators to build larger blades and to explore more bio-derived formulations.
NREL is the U.S. Department of Energy’s primary national laboratory for renewable energy and energy efficiency research and development. NREL is operated for DOE by the Alliance for Sustainable Energy LLC.
The Crossing Trails Wind Farm between Kit Carson and Seibert, about 150 miles east of Denver, has an installed capacity of 104 megawatts, which goes to Tri-State Generation and Transmission. Photo/Allen Best
Captain Kirk Hamilton snapped the above photo in the early morning hours of Feb. 3, 2021 on one of his aerial cloud seeding missions in the North Platte River Basin as part of the Jackson County pilot program over the Never Summer mountain range. (Kirk Hamilton, Weather Modification International)
An experiment to use a potentially more effective form of cloud-seeding in the North Platte Basin has been postponed indefinitely due to a shortage of planes and funding.
Cloud-seeding from airplanes is able to target specific storms, increasing the technology’s ability to generate more water, but it’s expensive and can cost up to three times more than ground-based programs, according to Andrew Rickert, weather modification program manager with the Colorado Water Conservation Board.
According to Barbara Vasquez, representative from the North Platte Basin to the Colorado Water Conservation Board, the North Platte is the only basin in Colorado where aerial cloud seeding has been conducted so far. Aerial cloud seeding has taken place in the Medicine Bow Range and the Sierra Madre mountains in Wyoming and Colorado, and in Colorado’s Never Summer range.
Rickert said such programs, despite their funding difficulties, are important in building a range of tools to increase water supplies. “With where the state is heading with climate change and drought, it is important for Colorado to do everything we can to bolster our snowpack. You can do as much storage and conservation as possible, but cloud seeding is the only way to physically add water to a system which is something we need to constantly be focused on.”
Cloud-seeding graphic via Science Matters
Cloud seeding involves dispersing a small amount of silver iodide into the atmosphere. The chemical acts as a “dust” particle allowing for water droplets or ice crystals to form in clouds and increase precipitation. Silver iodide is a naturally occurring compound that proponents of cloud seeding claim has no known harmful environmental effects.
The Jackson County Water Conservancy District partnered with the State of Wyoming and Colorado to take on a pilot project in the Never Summer Mountain Range from Cameron Pass to Willow Creek Pass in 2019.
The decision to suspend the North Platte aerial cloud-seeding program is partly due to limited availability of the aircraft from Wyoming, which supplied the plane for Colorado.
“We were working with the Wyoming [Water] Development Office which was paying to house the plane in Wyoming, so one of the problems we ran into was when there were seedable storms in both states, Wyoming always got preference,” Rickert said. “We were OK with that because we weren’t paying as much as them, but we were always playing second fiddle.”
Barry Lawrence, deputy director of planning with the Wyoming Water Development Office, said it was important for Wyoming to have first shot at airplane use. “It was written into our contract that the second priority was to go into Colorado if conditions were right.”
But Lawrence also said there are important benefits to the collaboration between the two states. “It’s important to start thinking watershed wide and not to bar political boundaries/state lines, but to think about the watersheds and what we can do to make the system whole.”
An additional reason for ending the pilot program is funding. In 2018, the Colorado Water Conservation Board approved a three-year, $150,000 grant for the aerial cloud seeding. It was renewed in 2021 for $225,000.
But that’s not much money when it comes to aerial cloud-seeding.
In 2022-2023, Wyoming spent $873,353.00. The Jackson County Water Conservancy District provided an additional $84,000.00 for operations conducted in Colorado’s Never Summer Mountains.
Jimmer Baller, president of the Jackson County water district, says that the program is just too costly right now for the county to take on without future funding from the state, but a revival of the program is not out of the question.
The CWCB’s Rickert said he is already working on increasing cloud seeding operations in the state and is considering how to support aerial seeding.
At the same time, the CWCB has seven permitted ground-based cloud seeding programs in the state from Vail to Grand Mesa, Rickert said.
The News:Agenda 47 — the Trump campaign’s platform — promises to develop 10 “Freedom Cities” on “empty” public lands in the Western United States if he is elected president.
Context: After Trump lost the 2020 election, the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation, along with help from dozens of former Trump administration staffers, set about to create Project 2025, a “playbook” for Trump just in case he managed to win this November’s presidential election.
Suffice it to say, Project 2025 is downright terrifying, as this excellent analysis by Michelle Nijhuis and Erin X. Wong reveals. In fact, it’s so weird — and so unpopular — that Trump has scrambled to distance himself from the whole endeavor, even claiming he doesn’t know anything about it or the people pushing it. That’s despite having praised the plan during a speech to the Heritage Foundation in 2022, despite the fact that many of the plan’s architects were in his administration, and despite the fact that his VP candidate J.D. Vance wrote the foreword to Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts’ new book.
But it doesn’t really matter, because Trump has his own authoritarian plan. It’s called Agenda 47, and serves as a template for the only slightly less creepy sounding Republican Party Platform. Agenda 47 is a bit shorter and less detailed than the 900-page Project 2025, which maybe makes it slightly more palatable to certain voters, but is equally nuts and just as scary. It vows to protect freedom of speech and cut funding for any school that teaches “inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content.” If elected, Trump and company would also “deport pro-Hamas radicals and make our college campuses safe and patriotic again.” Nothing fascist about that!
When it comes to public lands and the environment, Trump plans to do more of what he did last time he was in the White House — which is to say eviscerate environmental, health, safety, and worker protections in the name of “energy dominance” and corporate profit. The GOP platform also calls for using federal land for housing development. In theory this would bolster supplies of housing, thereby reducing prices and alleviating the housing crisis. The theory is deeply flawed, however, and though it may sound well-intentioned, ultimately it is just another ploy to privatize public land.
On this and other initiatives both Agenda 47 and the GOP platform (which are near-mirrors of each other) are scant on details. Hoping to learn more, I delved into Trump’s Agenda 47 archives and … holy crapoli! I had to wonder if Trump’s running for president or for the mayor of Crazytown — he’s the hands-down favorite for the latter.
Last March the Trump campaign unveiled its Agenda 47. Apparently it wanted to modernize the old “make America great again” slogan, so it went instead with:
Agenda47: A New Quantum Leap to Revolutionize the American Standard of Living.
Despite making no sense, you gotta give them credit for having a forward-looking slogan rather than the backward-looking one (which they have since reverted to, by the way). Indeed, it’s so forward-looking that they would “create a new American future.” Silly ol’ me thought that the future was always new on account of being, you know, the future and all.
And what will this new future look like? Freedom Cities!
You’re probably thinking: Why the hell would anyone want to build ten new cities in the drought-stricken West when there’s not enough water to go around now? What’s the point anyway? To make a few real estate developers incredibly rich? To realize a megalomaniac demagogue’s dream of building new cities to match some bizarre ideological vision? Will Trump resurrect Albert Speer to design the new cities?
Apart from the big picture flaws, this whole thing is riddled with wrong from start to finish. Let’s break it down:
“… open up the American frontier.” Are you friggin’ kidding me? Is this from the Trump campaign or the Andrew Jackson’s Corpse campaign? Referring to the Western U.S. as the “frontier” was racist and ignorant in the 19th century. It was intended to portray the region — and the Indigenous people who live there — as a wild and savage place that needed to be tamed and/or killed by EuroAmerican invaders so they could steal the land and put it into the public domain so some dumbass could come along and build some Freedom Cities there a couple centuries later so they could create a new American future. Using the term now is still ignorant and racist and just downright stupid.
“Hundreds of millions of these acres are empty.” Oh, really? Well, let’s see, the Bureau of Land Management oversees about 248 million acres and the Forest Service another 193 million acres. So, basically, Trump’s saying that at least half of America’s public lands are “empty.” This is age old code (also see “underutilized”) for describing landscapes that haven’t been industrialized, drilled, mined, grazed to death, or otherwise ruined. Of course, none of the public lands are actually empty, but I think y’all know that.
Trump assures us these cities won’t be built on “national parks or other natural treasures.” Thing is, if Trump and his ilk get their way, there will be precious few natural parks or monuments or ‘natural treasures’ remaining. Certainly you remember how the Trump administration eviscerated Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monuments. There’s zero reason to expect him not to do the same if he were elected again — only to a further degree.
If this whole Freedom Cities thing sounds like something a couple sixteen year olds would dream up while getting stoned while sitting on some desert butte (Free Doritos for everyone, brah!), then just read on. Trump would also “modernize transportation,” not by building trains and buses or even electric cars, but by bolstering efforts to develop “vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for families and individuals.” And to help make these and all of America’s cities “beautiful,” they’ll build “towering monuments to our true American heroes.” Does anyone else catch a whiff of Nicolae Ceausescu or even Albert Speer while reading this?
So these brand new cities, built on public land, would be swarming with people-carrying quad-copters swerving to miss one another and the monumental statues of Donald Trump and Andrew Jackson and Tucker Carlson. And how will they people these cities after carrying out the “largest deportation in American history”? They’ll offer “‘Baby Bonuses’ for young parents to help launch a new baby boom.”
If that seems zany, now imagine having one of these metropolises plopped down smack dab in one of your favorite swaths of “empty” public lands. Eek! Sounds like fodder for a dystopian horror film, working title: Agenda 47.
⛏️Mining Monitor ⛏️
Sign in the Lisbon Valley of southeastern Utah. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.
When two trucks hauling uranium ore rumbled out of Energy Fuel’s Pinyon Plain Mine near the Grand Canyon Tuesday on their way to the White Mesa Mill in Utah, Navajo Nation President Buu Nygren sent law enforcement officers to stop them. The trucks managed to get off tribal land before the police could catch them, but the next shipments are likely to be stopped. It’s the latest episode in a long-simmering battle between the tribe and the uranium industry — and a test case for tribal sovereignty.
Whether the U.S. uranium mining industry is experiencing a full-on renaissance or is merely having zombie-dream twitches isn’t yet clear. But the ore shipments represent the clearest sign of life, yet, since it is the first time freshly mined ore will be processed in years. Tribal nations, advocates, and lawmakers have pushed back against both the mine and the mill for years due to the potential for contaminating groundwater aquifers.
In 2012, the Navajo Nation banned uranium shipments across tribal lands. But it is not clear whether it applies to the federal and state highways used by Energy Fuels’ trucks.
Energy Fuels had previously agreed to give the Navajo Nation and other stakeholders a two-week notice before shipping any ore; they actually didn’t notify anyone until after the trucks left the mine. Arizona Attorney General Kris Mayes got involved, and issued a statement reading: “Hauling radioactive materials through rural Arizona, including across the Navajo Nation, without providing notice or transparency and without providing an emergency plan is unacceptable.”
And now Arizona Gov. Katie Hobbs has helped broker a pause in shipments to give the Navajo Nation and Energy Fuels a chance to work things out.
***
The Pinyon Plain Mine and White Mesa Mill get all of the attention, but the mining industry — uranium and otherwise — is also stirring elsewhere. Some quick hits:
Energy Fuels is also doing work at its Whirlwind Mine right on the Colorado-Utah border above Gateway and on its La Sal Complex, which sits less than a mile away from the community of the same name — and a school. Energy Fuels is also looking to develop the Roca Honda Project on Forest Service land near Mt. Taylor in New Mexico.
Utah regulators have accepted Anfield Energy’s application to restart its Shootaring Canyon mill near Ticaboo, Utah, which means the state can now begin its review. Anfield hasn’t had as much luck with its operating plan for its Velvet-Wood Mine in the Lisbon Valley: The BLM’s Monticello Field Office deemed it incomplete, and wouldn’t even consider it until Anfield filled in numerous blanks.
Egad! The BLM is actually raising mining claim maintenance fees. That’s the amount one has to pay when staking, or locating, a claim and once every year after that. It was $165. Next month it will shoot up to $200 per claim (plus a $25 processing fee and $49 location fee tacked onto the initial payment). That’s a whopping 20% increase, but still seems to be a pretty darned good bargain and is unlikely to dissuade speculators.
The Energy Permitting Reform Act, a bill making its way through Congress, would codify mining companies’ ability to stake mining claims on public lands to use as waste dumps and for other ancillary purposes. It’s just one of the ways the legislation, which is being pushed as a way to speed up clean energy projects, would benefit the extractive and fossil fuel industries. Originally pushed by Sens. Joe Manchin and John Barrasso, some Democrats, including Sen. Martin Heinrich of New Mexico, have signed on in support.
The outflow at the bottom of Navajo Dam in New Mexico. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
From email from Reclamation (Susan Novak Behery):
Due to sufficient flows in the critical habitat reach, the Bureau of Reclamation has scheduled a decrease in the release from Navajo Dam from 700 cubic feet per second (cfs) to 600 cfs for Friday, August 23rd, at 4:00 AM.
Releases are made for the authorized purposes of the Navajo Unit, and to attempt to maintain a target base flow through the endangered fish critical habitat reach of the San Juan River (Farmington to Lake Powell). The San Juan River Basin Recovery Implementation Program recommends a target base flow of between 500 cfs and 1,000 cfs through the critical habitat area. The target base flow is calculated as the weekly average of gaged flows throughout the critical habitat area from Farmington to Lake Powell.
This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. If you have any questions, please contact Susan Behery (sbehery@usbr.gov or 970-385-6560), or visit Reclamation’s Navajo Dam website athttps://www.usbr.gov/uc/water/crsp/cs/nvd.html
Doug Kemper was surrounded by previous Wayne N. Aspinall recipients at the CWC Summer Conference, where he received the award.
Here’s the release from the Colorado Water Congress:
August 20, 2024
Douglas Kemper awarded prestigious 2024 Aspinall Award
Presented by the Colorado Water Congress
Colorado Springs – Aug. 20, 2024– The Colorado Water Congress awarded Douglas Kemper, a life-long advocate of Colorado water issues, the 2024 Wayne N. Aspinall “Water Leader of the Year’ Award.
The Aspinall Award is given annually in recognition of a career of service and contribution to Colorado’s water community. It is awarded to a person who has dedicated a significant part of his or her career to the advancement of the state and its programs to protect, develop and preserve the state’s water resources.
It is tradition for the Aspinall Award to be presented at CWC’s annual event. This year, the previous Aspinall Award winners decided to honor Mr. Kemper with this award at his last CWC conference preceding his upcoming retirement this fall.
About Douglas Kemper Doug Kemper is the longtime Executive Director of the Colorado Water Congress, where he has worked tirelessly to convene the Colorado water community to find shared solutions since 2005. Active involvement with the CWC spans most of his career, including leadership positions on the CWC Board of Directors.
Prior to leading at CWC, he spent nearly 20 years directly planning, developing, and operating the raw water supply system at Aurora Water. His proficiencies include water policy development, surface and ground water resources management, and collaborative negotiations. Doug has used his extensive skillset to create ripple effects in the Colorado water community that will reverberate long after his upcoming retirement this fall.
Through his position as Executive Director of the Colorado Water Congress, Doug has also supported Colorado’s strong involvement in the National Water Resources Association. In his recent years, Doug has served as the State Executive’s Chair for 4 years and served as the Vice Chair for many years before that. He has increased the State Executives’ activity and their working relationships with one another.
Doug has a Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in Civil/Water Resources Engineering. His Master’s work focused on agricultural irrigation efficiency and water quality studies. His is a Colorado registered Professional Engineer.
About the Wayne N. Aspinall Award The Colorado Water Congress presents the prestigious Wayne N. Aspinall Award annually to a Coloradan who has long demonstrated courage, dedication, knowledge and leadership in the development, protection and preservation of Colorado water – those attributes possessed by Mr. Aspinall. The late Wayne Aspinall, a lawyer and former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, remains one of the most influential water leaders in Colorado history.
Part of the memorial to Wayne Aspinall in Palisade. Aspinall, a Democrat, is a legend in the water sector, and is the namesake of the annual award given by the Colorado Water Congress. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
37% of the Lower 48 is short/very short, same as last week. Soils dried out in the Southeast, TX, and OH. Much of the North & Midwest improved. NM, WV, & the Northwest remain the driest areas, in terms of topsoil moisture.
A high-pressure ridge continued across the southern Plains during this U.S. Drought Monitor (USDM) week (August 14-20), bringing dry and very hot weather, especially to Texas. Pacific weather systems moving in the jet-stream flow brought above-normal precipitation to parts of the West Coast, the northern to central Rockies, and parts of the central to northern Plains, the Midwest, and Northeast. The rain was frequently hit-or-miss, with large parts of the Pacific Northwest to Plains, and Midwest to Northeast, receiving little to no precipitation. In addition, much of the Southwest, and southern Plains to Southeast, were drier than normal this week. An upper-level trough kept the Far West cooler than normal, while a large cold front brought cooler-than-normal temperatures to much of the Midwest to East Coast. The rain contracted drought and abnormal dryness in parts of the Rockies to central Plains, and a few parts of the Midwest and East Coast. But drought or abnormal dryness expanded or intensified in parts of the West that missed out on the precipitation, parts of the Great Plains, from the Tennessee Valley to central Gulf of Mexico coast, and parts of the Midwest to central Appalachians. The lack of rain continued to dry out soils across large parts of the West (especially the Pacific Northwest), in the southern Plains, the Lower Mississippi Valley, and central Appalachians. Numerous wildfires were burning across the West with some sparking up in the southern Plains and western High Plains. The most severe drought areas included the central Appalachians to Upper Ohio River Valley, the Rio Grande River Valley, eastern Wyoming, western Montana, and central Washington…
Like other parts of the country, there were wet areas and dry areas this week in the High Plains region. Weekly rainfall totals ranged from zero in parts of Wyoming to locally over 2 inches in the Dakotas, Nebraska, and Kansas. Eastern parts of the Dakotas and Nebraska averaged near to cooler than normal for the week, but areas to the west and south were warmer than normal, with some areas 2 to 4 degrees above normal. There was expansion of drought and abnormal dryness in most states in the region, more in the north, and contraction in mostly southern states. The more notable changes were expansion of moderate to severe drought in Kansas and Wyoming with extreme drought being introduced in Wyoming and adjacent South Dakota, and contraction of abnormal dryness and drought in Colorado and Kansas, especially southeast Kansas where locally up to 5 inches of rain fell. Reports of significant hay loss and early cattle sales in South Dakota may be due to a combination of drought and a June 19 freeze event; other drought impacts include surface water shortage and poor water quality for livestock. According to USDA reports, in Wyoming, 75% of the topsoil moisture and 81% of the subsoil moisture are short or very short and 66% of the pasture and rangeland was rated in poor or very poor condition. More than 40% of the topsoil moisture was short or very short in Nebraska, Colorado, and Kansas, with 55% of the subsoil moisture so rated in Kansas…
Colorado Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 20, 2024.
Half an inch of rain or more fell this week along the Washington and Oregon coast, in the Rockies, and parts of the Southwest (Four Corners States), with little to no rain falling across most of California, Nevada, and interior portions of the Pacific Northwest. Temperatures were cooler than normal in the Far West to Great Basin, averaging as low as 4 to 6 degrees below normal, but warmer than normal in southern and eastern areas, averaging 2 to locally 8 degrees above normal in Arizona, New Mexico, and Montana. Contraction of abnormal dryness or drought occurred in a few parts of New Mexico, Utah, and Montana, but drought or abnormal dryness expanded in the Pacific Northwest, California, and Nevada. The most notable changes occurred in Washington and Oregon, where moderate to severe drought expanded. More than 60% of the topsoil/subsoil moisture was rated short or very short in Oregon (81%/75%), Washington (69%/65%), Idaho (65%/62%), Montana (78%/79%), and New Mexico (70%/70%). Almost two-thirds of the pasture and rangeland was rated in poor to very poor condition in Oregon (62%) and Washington (63%)…
The keywords for the South region are hot and dry. Most of the region was warmer than normal, with only eastern Tennessee near normal. Parts of northern Texas had weekly temperatures 6 to 10 degrees above normal, with daily high temperatures over 100 degrees F all week and exceeding 110 on some days. Parts of Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma received over 2 inches of rain this week, with locally over 5 inches, and there was a smattering of showers in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Tennessee, with rainfall mostly half an inch or less. All of Texas and most of Oklahoma received little to no rain this week. With dry soils, high evaporation, and deficient rainfall, abnormal dryness expanded in parts of most of the South region states. Moderate drought expanded in Texas, especially in north central Texas where the fire danger was high and several large wildfires were burning; extreme drought expanded in the Texas Trans Pecos. Moderate to severe drought expanded in Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Tennessee. Abnormal dryness and moderate drought were trimmed where the heaviest rains fell in eastern Oklahoma and western Arkansas. Soils were very dry: USDA topsoil/subsoil percentages short or very short include 75%/65% for Texas, 65%/50% for Louisiana, 62%/59% for Mississippi, 53%/49% for Arkansas, 50%/52% for Tennessee, and 47%/49% for Oklahoma. Mississippi experienced a 70% loss of field corn in the east-central portion of the state during the mid-June through early July dry period. Extension agents are reporting a likely significant loss of cotton and soybeans in this region as well. Cotton plants are dying, and soybeans in many locations set pods without beans. According to the USDA Crop progress report for Mississippi, pasture land, soybeans, and cotton are currently worse than 2023 levels. In Tennessee, there were reports of a pond drying up, lack of forage growth (in June and July), and tree stress (early browning and dropping of leaves). The USDA reported 46% of the pasture and rangeland in Texas was in poor to very poor condition…
Looking Ahead
In the two days since the Tuesday valid time of this USDM, scattered showers and thunderstorms brought areas of rain to parts of the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and Plains, but the rest of the contiguous U.S. (CONUS) was mostly dry. For August 22-27, the upper-level ridge will slowly shift east, bringing warmer-than-normal temperatures to much of the CONUS between the Plains and Appalachians, while an upper-level trough will move into the West, bringing cooler-than-normal temperatures. An inch or more of rain is predicted for the Cascades, much of the Southwest (Four Corners States), and parts of the northern Rockies and central Plains. A stalled frontal boundary will bring an inch to locally 3 inches or more of rain to the Florida peninsula. Half an inch of precipitation is forecast for areas in the central to northern Plains, Middle to Upper Mississippi Valley, parts of New England, and northern parts of the West. Large parts of California and Nevada, the southern Plains, and Lower Mississippi Valley to Mid-Atlantic coast can expect little to no precipitation.
For much of the next 2 weeks, the ridge and trough pattern will continue to slowly move east. The Climate Prediction Center’s (CPC) 6-10 Day Outlook (valid August 27-31) and 8-14 Day Outlook (valid August 29-September 4) favor warmer-than-normal temperatures across the CONUS east of the Rockies, shifting to the East Coast as the ridge moves east. Odds favor below-normal temperatures over the Pacific Northwest and northern Rockies at first, then over the northern Plains as the trough moves east. The West Coast and southern tier states are likely to be warmer than normal through the period. Alaska may see cooler-than-normal temperatures in the southwest to warmer-than-normal temperatures in the northeast. Odds favor below-normal precipitation across parts of the Pacific Northwest and a large area centered over the Mid-Mississippi and Ohio Valleys, while above-normal precipitation is favored from the Southwest to northern Plains and parts of the Gulf Coast states, in the northern Rockies early in the period, and along the extreme East Coast late in the period. Most of Alaska could see wetter-than-normal conditions.
US Drought Monitor one week change map ending August 20, 2024.
Researcher Seth Arens prepares to count plants in Glen Canyon on July 16, 2024. His study shows that many plants in areas once submerged by Lake Powell are the kind of native species that lived in the area before the reservoir. Alex Hager/KUNC
Click the link to read the article on the KUNC website (Alex Hager):
August 20, 2024
This story is part of ongoing coverage of the Colorado River, produced by KUNC and supported by the Walton Family Foundation. KUNC is solely responsible for its editorial coverage.
Seth Arens has all the adventurous swagger of Indiana Jones. His long hair is tied up in a bun, tucked neatly under a wide brimmed hat. His skin bears the leathery tan of someone who has spent the whole summer under the desert sun.
But as Arens pushed his way through a taller-than-your-head thicket of unforgivingly dense grasses, he explained why he doesn’t carry a machete, betraying his differences from the whip-cracking tomb raider.
“I guess, as an ecologist, I can’t quite bring myself to just hack down vegetation,” Arens said.
Arens is a scientist with Western Water Assessment and the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, both environmental research groups headquartered at the University of Colorado Boulder.
He has spent weeks traversing the smooth, twisting red rock narrows of Glen Canyon in search of his own kind of treasure: never-before-collected data about plants.
Glen Canyon is perhaps best known for the reservoir that fills it. Lake Powell, the nation’s second-largest reservoir, has kept much of the canyon underwater since the 1960s and 70s. The 21st Century has changed that. Climate change and steady demand have brought its water levels to record lows, putting once-submerged reaches of the canyon above water for the first time in decades.
Katie Woodward, Seth Arens and Eric Balken stand in a stream-fed pool in Glen Canyon on July 16, 2024. This area was once completely submerged by Lake Powell, but now thrives with native plants. Alex Hager/KUNC
What happens next is still up in the air. Some environmental advocates want to see the reservoir drained so plants, animals, and geologic features can come back. Boaters and other recreators want to maintain the status quo – keep storing water in Lake Powell and sustain a tourism site that brings in millions of visitors each year.
In the snaking side canyons that were once under Lake Powell, Arens is methodically counting plants at different sites over the course of multiple years. He is creating a record of which species are taking root, and what might be lost if the reservoir were to rise again.
“Nature has given us a second chance to reevaluate how we’re going to manage this place,” Arens said.
While the study is still underway, Arens said native species dominate the landscape alongside the area’s creeks. The same kinds of plants that lived in Glen Canyon before Lake Powell have taken root again — even after their habitats were drowned — filled in with towering piles of sediment deposits, and then shown the light of day once more.
“It turns out nature is doing a pretty good job by itself,” Arens said, “Of coming back and establishing thriving ecosystems.”
‘Old assumptions’ and new policies
The data produced by this study is going public during a pivotal time for the Colorado River and its major reservoirs.
Decisions made over the next two years will shape who gets how much water from the shrinking river, which supplies roughly 40 million people. Cities and farms from Wyoming to Mexico are all trying to make sure they get their fair shares, and environmental advocates are trying to make sure the region’s plants and animals aren’t an afterthought.
A killdeer stands in a spring-fed stream in Glen Canyon on July 17, 2024. The native plants alongside the canyon’s streams are host to a variety of birds and other animals such as beavers, toads, lizards and insects. Alex Hager/KUNC
The current guidelines for managing the river expire in 2026. Right now, policymakers are working on a set of replacements. Eric Balken, director of the nonprofit Glen Canyon Institute, wants those new rules to factor in the wellbeing of plants around Lake Powell.
“If the old assumption was that we can store water in Glen Canyon because there’s nothing there, that assumption is wrong,” he said. “There is a lot here. There is a serious ecological consequence to putting water in this reservoir, and we cannot ignore that anymore.”
Balken’s group, which advocates for draining Lake Powell and storing its water elsewhere, provided some funding for the plant study being conducted by Seth Arens. Glen Canyon Institute is hoping it will provide data that proves the value of the canyon’s plant ecosystems to policymakers.
That’s extra important, Balken said, because federal water managers aren’t doing enough for Glen Canyon’s plants right now.
The Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency that manages the West’s reservoirs, outlined its current strategy for river management in an October 2023 document called the “Draft Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement.” Balken called that document’s assessment of Glen Canyon plants “demonstrably false.”
In short, Reclamation describes an environment dominated by invasive plants that only stand to cause problems.
“When I read that,” Balken said, sitting near a patch of native willow plants feet from Lake Powell’s edge. “I just thought, ‘Had these people even been to Glen Canyon?’” This place is a vibrant, burgeoning ecosystem.”
Reclamation’s report mentions some native species that form “unique ecosystems within the desert,” but appears to conclude that rising reservoir levels – which are partially the result of the agency’s own management decisions – would ultimately be good for plant life around Lake Powell.
Seth Arens pilots a boat across Lake Powell between research sites on July 17, 2024. Some environmental advocates want to see the reservoir drained and its water stored elsewhere, while proponents of Lake Powell hail its value as a recreation area. Alex Hager/KUNC
It highlights the presence of invasive plant species and says “any additional acreage of exposed shoreline around Lake Powell has the potential to be invaded by invasive plant species such as tamarisk and Russian thistle.”
Balken and Arens argue the opposite, pointing to early survey findings that include widespread native plant life in areas that have been exposed by declining reservoir levels.
Reclamation declined to be interviewed for this story, but a spokeswoman for the agency wrote in an email to KUNC, “Reclamation’s consideration of impacts to vegetation are primarily for resources downstream of Glen Canyon Dam that are affected by dam releases.”
The spokeswoman wrote that “most of the releases, even on the annual time scale, have negligible effects on lake levels and vegetation,” and pointed to inflows, such as annual snowmelt, as having a bigger impact on water levels in the reservoir than Reclamation’s releases of water from Glen Canyon Dam.
Balken suspects that Reclamation lacks data about Glen Canyon’s plants and hopes that the ongoing study will fill in those gaps and help shape management plans going forward.
The National Parks Service, which manages recreation on Lake Powell and gathers some data about the surrounding environment, was not able to provide comment for this story in time for publication.
‘A chance for survival’ around Lake Powell
While Arens’ study hasn’t produced any hard data yet, he is taking a mental tally of plants every time he trudges through the lush, winding creekbeds that channel spring-fed streams into Lake Powell.
These riverside ecosystems were shaped by their years spent underneath the reservoir, and little signs of that reality are everywhere.
Seth Arens looks at plants growing from crevices in a rock wall in Glen Canyon on July 16, 2024. These “hanging gardens” thrive in shady canyon bends where water seeps from the wall. Alex Hager/KUNC
Standing in the baking desert sun, Arens poked at a digital map on his phone screen while trying to find his next research site, and the map showed that he was standing underwater. Much of the canyon is lined with banks of sediment, sometimes more than a dozen feet tall, that were left behind by the still waters of Lake Powell. Those banks now provide heaps of soil for the roots of native plants.
Now that some of those areas have been left to grow for more than two decades, in some cases, they abound with life.
In one canyon, frogs and toads hop along the clear trickle just downstream of a beaver pond while birds flit in and out of tall, shady cottonwoods. In another, ferns sprout from crevices where water seeps onto a damp rock wall.
It’s a veritable oasis in the desert – the kind of cool, spring-fed Eden that populated the heat-induced daydreams of thirsty cowboys traversing the expanses of the Old West.
Katie Woodward, Arens’ research assistant, is finding inspiration in these canyons, too.
“It’s very obvious that nature can take care of its own and turn a highly disturbed landscape, a landscape that was disturbed because of the follies of man, and change that into something that is diverse and productive,” she said. “I would have never believed how possible that was until I came down here.”
The researchers hope their findings about that recovering landscape end up in front of policymakers, whose decisions could shape the future of Glen Canyon’s native ecosystems.
Katie Woodward takes notes on plant species in Glen Canyon on June 16, 2024. She and researcher Seth Arens trek through remote desert canyons to tally the plants within, and have found mostly native vegetation in the canyon’s riparian ecosystems. Alex Hager/KUNC
“As Glen Canyon resurfaces, there’s an incredible moment for species that are feeling the pressures of both human-induced and naturally driven change on water resources in riparian areas in the west, to have a chance for survival in a future that feels really unknown and kind of scary.”
Some of those unknowns might get settled soon, as the next rules for Colorado River management are likely to include new plans for storing water in Lake Powell. State water negotiators have projected optimism that policy meetings will result in a new agreement for water management before the 2026 deadline.
Less than 12 hours after the Biden Administration and the Imperial Irrigation District approved an unprecedented deal to conserve 700,000 acre feet of Colorado River water through 2026, the flow of river water to the rural valley three hours south of Los Angeles slowed. District personnel moved out before sunrise to install more than 1,600 locks on gates to canals supplying hundreds of farm fields, cutting off water deliveries for up to 60 days this year. The process will be repeated over the next two summers.
In exchange, the powerful agency and farmers who volunteer to not receive the water and hold off on growing hay in hot summer months will be paid nearly $700 million in federal funds — by far the largest of numerous agreements struck with water agencies and tribes to prop up the overused, drought-ravaged river and its reservoirs. For irrigation district officials, the agreement, which will conserve a huge amount of water, about as much as the state of Nevada uses annually, caps years of arduous negotiations and multiple federal reviews…
But the way the deal was finalized and its potential impacts on the also rapidly dwindling Salton Sea and local public health angered numerous environmental justice and policy groups. They said the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and the powerful water agency rushed through cursory approvals and ignored much of their lengthy comments, including ideas on how to monitor and reduce air quality and wildlife impacts that they say will occur from holding back such a huge amount of water.
The irrigation district board on Sunday hastily scheduled a special meeting for Monday night to approve the agreement, before reclamation staff had even released their final determination that cutting so much agricultural runoff into the sea would have “no significant environmental impacts.” Five hours before the meeting on Monday afternoon, the feds released their final determination and posted 150 pages of responses to the lenghty comments submitted by more than half a dozen groups and several individuals who have studied the Salton Sea for decades, including a major annual transfer of water to suburban San Diego that is rapidly depleting the water body, California’s largest.
In an email headed “IID’s quickie action,” Joan Taylor, chairperson of the Sierra Club’s California/Nevada Desert Committee wrote, “It’s commendable that IID recognized a responsibility to cut down on water use to help protect the water supply for the West, but what they’re doing is akin to doubling the water transfer to San Diego. We know that already has profound impacts. So this is a very big deal … and will suddenly increase dusty lakebed exposure around the Salton Sea by 13,000 acres.”
These hay bales stand ready to be collected on a ranch outside of Carbondale. Upper Colorado River Basin officials are working on a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation so water saved as part of conservation programs can be tracked and stored in Lake Powell. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Colorado River water managers are moving forward with a plan to track and get credit for conserved water.
The Upper Colorado River Commission on Monday voted unanimously to move ahead with the creation of a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation that would provide accounting and credit to the Upper Basin states (Colorado, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming) for water saved through conservation programs. It would also identify qualifying criteria for water conservation projects. A draft of the MOU is expected by the end of September.
The states and the bureau would conduct this provisional accounting of water saved in Lake Powell and other Upper Basin reservoirs through 2026.
“The provisional accounting is exactly that,” said UCRC Executive Director Chuck Cullom. “It is not an operational guide for Reclamation; it is a means for folks to understand how much water would be available in that account upon the implementation of a formal agreement or credit program.”
Credit for the stored water could be formalized in one of two ways: as part of the post-2026 guidelines for reservoir operations, which the seven Colorado River basin states are in the midst of negotiating, or by implementing the demand management storage agreement, which was part of the 2019 Drought Contingency Plan.
For the past two years, some Upper Basin water users have been participating in a federally funded program known as the System Conservation Pilot Program, where they are paid to voluntarily use less water. The program is projected to save about 101,000 acre-feet of water at a cost of $45 million.
Despite one of the stated intentions of SCPP being to protect critical reservoir levels, the program does not track the conserved water to see how much of it ultimately ended up in Lake Powell. This lack of accounting has been one of the criticisms of the program, with some water users saying water conserved in the Upper Basin was simply being sent downstream to enable what they say is overuse by the Lower Basin states (Arizona, California and Nevada). The MOU would be a step toward remedying that.
“If we’re reducing demand and using taxpayer money to do it, then we have to make sure that it’s meaningful,” said Anne Castle, UCRC chair and the body’s federal representative. “It needs to provide benefit to the states that created that conserved water. That’s particularly important right now when the basin states are in difficult discussions about how to allocate the reductions in use that we all know are needed in the future.”
Upper Basin states are interested in “getting credit” for stored water because it could protect them in the event of a compact call. As the effects of demand, drought and climate change push the Upper Basin closer to not being able to deliver the required amount of water to the Lower Basin under the terms of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, water managers have been grappling with the idea of an insurance pool in Lake Powell. From 2019 to 2022, the state of Colorado explored the contentious concept of demand management, which would pay water users to temporarily cut back and store the conserved water in Lake Powell. Water could be released from this pool instead of shutting off cities and irrigators.
There is urgency to figure out how the Upper Basin states can track, measure and get credit for conserved water because there will soon be more opportunities for water conservation programs. This fall, the Bureau of Reclamation plans to announce funding for what officials are calling “Bucket 2 Water Conservation” projects. These are projects that would achieve verifiable, multiyear reductions in use or demand for water supplies.
The Colorado River near the state line in western Colorado. Representatives from the seven basin states that use the river are negotiating how future cuts will be shared in dry years. Credit: Heather Sackett/Aspen Journalism
Seven-state negotiations
Commissioners also gave an update on those difficult discussions with the seven basin states on how the river will be managed after 2026. Representatives from the UCRC, as well as from California, Nevada and Arizona, are in the midst of figuring out how the nation’s two largest reservoirs will be operated after 2026 and which water users will be cut by how much in dry years.
In their proposal to the Bureau of Reclamation, the Lower Basin states demanded that the Upper Basin share in future cuts when reservoir levels dip. But Upper Basin commissioners stood by the counterproposal they offered in March, called the Upper Basin Alternative, which does not include mandatory cuts for Upper Basin water users.
“The upper division states continue to stand behind the alternative that we submitted and know that it provides a reasonable alternative for sustainable operations of Lake Powell and Lake Mead,” said Colorado Commissioner Becky Mitchell.
Although the Upper Basin’s proposal does not commit to sharing in cuts when reservoir levels fall, it does offer “parallel activities,” which would include voluntary, temporary and compensated reductions in use (as the SCPP does), which are separate from the post-2026 guidelines process.
“We’re moving forward with our parallel actions like we have committed to do,” said Utah Commissioner Gene Shawcroft. “I think that’s significant.”
Although the Upper Basin and Lower Basin states have competing proposals, Upper Basin commissioners said Monday they are still committed to finding a consensus with their Lower Basin counterparts.
The entrance to the Colorado State Land Board’s Lowry Ranch property in Arapahoe County is pictured on May 16, 2024. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)
Colorado regulators on Wednesday gave the go-ahead to a sweeping oil and gas drilling plan on a large tract of state-owned land east of Aurora, with several conditions aimed at addressing concerns from nearby residents opposed to the project.
On a 3-1 vote, members of the Colorado Energy and Carbon Management Commission approved the 32,000-acre “comprehensive area plan” proposed by Denver-based Civitas Resources, which aims to streamline permitting for 156 new oil and gas wells at seven drilling locations in Arapahoe County. But they moved to require that Civitas use emissions-reducing electric drilling equipment, and left the door open to denying permits for proposed well pads nearest to several southeast Aurora subdivisions.
“I do see concerns with the CAP, and I do think there’s additional work that could have and probably should have been done,” said ECMC Commissioner Mike Cross. “But I still do think that it does meet our rules, and is approvable.”
Most of the area in Civitas’ CAP proposal consists of the sprawling Lowry Ranch property, a former U.S. Air Force missile launch site and gunnery range acquired by the Colorado State Land Board in the 1960s. Limited drilling has taken place on the property since the Land Board first issued a lease for oil and gas development in 2012, but the CAP’s approval could fast-track drilling in the area for the next six years.
Save the Aurora Reservoir, a community activist group formed to oppose the project, made their case against its approval in a two-day hearing last week, citing concerns about increased noise, truck traffic, air pollution and wildfire risk. They also worry about the proximity of the Lowry Landfill Superfund Site, on the northwest corner of the project area. Civitas agreed not to drill under the Superfund site at the Environmental Protection Agency’s request.
“We are devastated by the Commission’s decision,” Marsha Goldsmith Kamin, STAR’s president, said in a press release. “This is without doubt the wrong decision for the health, safety, and environment of our community.”
The approval also drew condemnations from state and national environmental groups, including the Sierra Club, which called the plan “reckless.”
“The grassroots efforts in Aurora have been powerful, passionate and persistent,” Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s executive director, said in a statement. “Members of this community deserve access to healthy air and clean water, and shouldn’t have to live in fear of fracked gas operations beneath their homes and schools.”
The 26,500-acre Lowry Ranch, a former U.S. Air Force missile site and bombing range, was acquired by the Colorado State Land Board in the 1960s. (Colorado Newsline illustration/State Land Board map)
Two-year process
Civitas first submitted its CAP application in 2022. Jamie Jost, an attorney representing Civitas, told commissioners Wednesday that the company’s proposal had “evolved for the better” over the course of two years of community outreach and feedback, “including input and influence from STAR.”
“It’s a comprehensive area plan that’s the result of thousands of hours of consultation, cooperation and collaboration with multiple federal, state and local governmental stakeholders, oil and gas operators, mineral owners, community groups and citizens,” Jost said of the proposal.
But Jost also criticized the testimony from STAR and its expert witnesses during last week’s hearings, accusing the group of spreading “misinformation intended to incite fear.” Civitas was particularly adamant throughout the proceedings that STAR’s fears about induced seismic activity — a phenomenon that has been documented elsewhere but is considered a low risk in the geological formations drilled in northeast Colorado — are unfounded.
In a statement, Kait Schwarz, director of the Colorado branch of the American Petroleum Institute, called it “disappointing and revelatory” that environmental groups continue to offer “significant resistance” to drilling proposals following the passage of stricter laws and regulations in recent years.
“Our operators are proud to produce in Colorado, yet it is disheartening to encounter such opposition even when the regulations and requirements are strictly adhered to,” Schwartz said. “This application and decision should serve as a model for addressing future projects.”
None of the drilling sites proposed in the Lowry Ranch CAP would be closer than 3,000 feet from the nearest subdivision — satisfying the 2,000-foot setback requirement adopted by the ECMC in 2020 — but the plan’s opponents say it’s still far too close to neighborhoods, schools, recreation areas like the Aurora Reservoir and environmentally hazardous sites like the Lowry Landfill.
The Lowry Landfill superfund site east of Aurora in Arapahoe County is pictured on May 16, 2024. (Chase Woodruff/Colorado Newsline)
Commissioner John Messner was the lone vote against the plan’s approval. Trisha Oeth, the commission’s newest member, did not take part in the proceedings because they began prior to her appointment to the panel by Gov. Jared Polis in June.
Messner objected to the “vague and noncommittal efforts” made in the proposal to minimize the project’s cumulative impacts on public health and the environment.
“The CAP application as a whole, as presented, does not meet the intent and requirements of our rules, and has not shown that it is protective,” Messner said.
ECMC staff recommended the Lowry Ranch plan’s approval earlier this year. It’s the fourth CAP considered by the commission since its 2020 rules overhaul, and Wednesday’s vote marks the fourth consecutive approval. But Commissioner Brett Ackerman said prior to the vote that “this one felt close.” Commissioners debated whether to delay a decision on the plan, but ultimately moved forward with an approval with the attached conditions.
“Like Commissioner Cross, I do not believe it’s perfect,” Ackerman said. “Like Commissioner Messner, I do have some concerns that it can more closely comply with the intent and specificity of our regulations with a little more work.”
Civitas will still be required to seek ECMC approval for each proposed drilling location in the plan through a process known as an “oil and gas development plan,” or OGDP. That process could include revisions to the proposed sites as a result of a required “alternative locations analysis,” commissioners said Wednesday.
“In order of the things that cause me the most concern, first and foremost would be the proximity of the primary line of well pads to the line of residential developments,” said Ackerman. “They feel a little deaf to some of the concerns of the nearby residents, as opposed to promoting maybe a couple of opportunities for working together with those residents to minimize impacts.”
Releases from the Aspinall Unit will be decreased from 1550 cfs to 1500 cfs on Wednesday, August 21st. Releases are being decreased as flows on the lower Gunnison River are well above the baseflow target of 1050 cfs. Another reduction in the release at Crystal is expected to occur next week if river levels remain above the target.
Flows in the lower Gunnison River are currently above the baseflow target of 1050 cfs. River flows are expected to remain above the baseflow target for the foreseeable future.
Pursuant to the Aspinall Unit Operations Record of Decision (ROD), the baseflow target in the lower Gunnison River, as measured at the Whitewater gage, is 1050 cfs for August through December.
Currently, Gunnison Tunnel diversions are 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon are around 500 cfs. After this release change Gunnison Tunnel diversions will still be 1050 cfs and flows in the Gunnison River through the Black Canyon will be around 450 cfs. Current flow information is obtained from provisional data that may undergo revision subsequent to review.
This scheduled release change is subject to changes in river flows and weather conditions. For questions or concerns regarding these operations contact:
“New plot using the nClimGrid data, which is a better source than PRISM for long-term trends. Of course, the combined reservoir contents increase from last year, but the increase is less than 2011 and looks puny compared to the ‘hole’ in the reservoirs. The blue Loess lines subtly change. Last year those lines ended pointing downwards. This year they end flat-ish. 2023 temps were still above the 20th century average, although close. Another interesting aspect is that the 20C Mean and 21C Mean lines on the individual plots really don’t change much. Finally, the 2023 Natural Flows are almost exactly equal to 2019. (17.678 maf vs 17.672 maf). For all the hoopla about how this was record-setting year, the fact is that this year was significantly less than 2011 (20.159 maf) and no different than 2019” — Brad Udall
A plan from water officials in Arizona, Nevada and California to cut back on the amount of water those states use from the Colorado River in exchange for money with hopes of saving 3 million acre-feet of water over three years is meeting conservation goals, a top water official said Wednesday. The 2023 agreement has already seen 1.7 million acres of improvement less than one year into the effort, Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Camille Touton said. She says she believes the states are on pace to reach their original goal.
“There is proof here that we can take on these hard moments, but we have to do it together,” said Touton, who spoke during a summit hosted by U.S. Rep. Susie Lee, D-Nev., at Springs Preserve. “We’ve been able to stabilize the system in the short term, and now we are focused on what this river looks like for the future.”
[…]
The $1.2 billion plan in 2023 called for half of the cuts to be made by the end of 2024 — a benchmark that has already been hit. The agreement runs through 2026, when the 100-year legal document about how Colorado River water is shared will expire, and negotiations could bring deeper cuts in water usage based on climate modeling and future warming in the West.
“We really were on the brink of catastrophe in this basin if we got another dry year,” said Colby Pellegrino, Southern Nevada Water Authority’s deputy general manager of resources, of the Colorado River prior to the agreement. “Mother Nature was kind to us, and Congress was very kind to us. And those two things together are what enabled us to get there voluntarily.”
Atmospheric rivers (ARs) reaching high-latitudes in summer contribute to the majority of climatological poleward water vapor transport into the Arctic. This transport has exhibited long term changes over the past decades, which cannot be entirely explained by anthropogenic forcing according to ensemble model responses. Here, through observational analyses and model experiments in which winds are adjusted to match observations, we demonstrate that low-frequency, large-scale circulation changes in the Arctic play a decisive role in regulating AR activity and thus inducing the recent upsurge of this activity in the region. It is estimated that the trend in summertime AR activity may contribute to 36% of the increasing trend of atmospheric summer moisture over the entire Arctic since 1979 and account for over half of the humidity trends in certain areas experiencing significant recent warming, such as western Greenland, northern Europe, and eastern Siberia. This indicates that AR activity, mostly driven by strong synoptic weather systems often regarded as stochastic, may serve as a vital mechanism in regulating long term moisture variability in the Arctic.
In a decision that could end a years-long battle over commercial extraction of water from public lands, the U.S. Forest Service has ordered the company that sells Arrowhead bottled water to shut down a pipeline and other infrastructure it uses to collect and transport water from springs in the San Bernardino Mountains. The Forest Service notified BlueTriton Brands in a letter last month, saying its application for a new permit has been denied. District Ranger Michael Nobles wrote in the July 26 letter that the company “must cease operations” in the San Bernardino National Forest and submit a plan for removing all its pipes and equipment from federal land. The company has challenged the denial in court.
Environmental activists praised the decision.
“It’s a huge victory after 10 years,” said Amanda Frye, an activist who has campaigned against the taking of water from the forest. “I’m hoping that we can restore Strawberry Creek, have its springs flowing again, and get the habitat back.”
She and other opponents say BlueTriton’s operation has dramatically reduced creek flow and is causing significant environmental harm. The Forest Service announced the decision one month after a local environmental group, Save Our Forest Assn., filed a lawsuit that alleged agency was illegally allowing the company to continue operating under a permit that had expired.
Painting by Henry C. Pitz showing John Wesley Powell and his party descending the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, presumably during the historic 1869 expedition. (Image credit: Smithsonian Institution, Bureau of American Ethnology)
Intensifying extreme weather events and an insurance crisis are likely to cause significant economic and political disruption in the U.S. sometime in the next 15 years.
The words of explorer John Wesley Powell on the eve of his departure into the unexplored depths of the Grand Canyon in 1869 best describe how I see our path ahead as we brave the unknown rapids of climate change:
Powell’s expedition made it through the canyon, but the explorers endured great hardship, suffering near-drownings, the destruction of two of their four boats, and the loss of much of their supplies. In the end, only six of the nine men survived.
Likewise, we find ourselves in an ever-deepening chasm of climate change impacts, forced to run a perilous course through dangerous rapids of unknown ferocity. Our path will be fraught with great peril, and there will be tremendous suffering, great loss of life, and the destruction of much that is precious.
It is inevitable that climate change will stop being a hazy future concern and will someday turn everyday life upside down. Very hard times are coming. At the risk of causing counterproductive climate anxiety and doomism, I offer here some observations and speculations on how the planetary crisis may play out, using my 45 years of experience as a meteorologist, including four years of flying with the Hurricane Hunters and 20 years blogging about extreme weather and climate change. The scenarios that I depict as the most likely are much harsher than what other experts might choose, but I’ve seen repeatedly that uncertainty is not our friend when it comes to climate change. This will be a long and intense ride, but if you stick through the end, I promise there will be a rainbow.
By late this century, I am optimistic that we will have successfully ridden the rapids of the climate crisis, emerging into a new era of non-polluting energy with a stabilizing climate. There are too many talented and dedicated people who understand the problem and are working hard on solutions for us to fail.
Figure 1. America is about as unprepared for a dangerous trip down the rapids of climate change as this group would have been going down the rapids of the Colorado River in Grand Canyon. Photo taken at the Colorado River crossing at Hite Ferry, Utah, in 1946. (Image credit: Utah Historical Society)
The 1974 made-for-TV movie Hurricane included a subplot loosely based on the hurricane party that allegedly occurred during the 1969 landfall of category 5 Hurricane Camille in Mississippi. The predictable catastrophic end to the party is depicted at 0:05-second mark of the trailer above. Though the party never happened, legendary TV anchorman Walter Cronkite perpetuated the hurricane party story during one of his broadcasts after the hurricane. As the camera panned over the cement slab littered with debris that marked the former location of the Richelieu Apartments, Cronkite narrated: “This is the site of the Richelieu Apartments in Pass Christian, Mississippi. This is the place where 23 people laughed in the face of death. And where 23 people died.”
Although there is a major climate change hurricane approaching, we’re busy throwing a hurricane party, charging up our planetary credit card to pay for the expenses, with little regard to the approaching storm that is already cutting off our escape routes. This great storm will fundamentally rip at the fabric of society, creating chaos and a crisis likely to last for many decades.
The intensifying climate change storm will soon reach a threshold I think of as a category 1 hurricane for humanity — when long-term global warming surpasses 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial temperatures, a value increasingly characterized over the last decade as “dangerous” climate change.
Assuming that we don’t work exceptionally hard to reduce emissions in the next 10 years, the world is expected to reach 2 degrees Celsius of warming between 2045 and 2051. In my estimation, that will be akin to a major category 3 hurricane for humanity — devastating, but not catastrophic.
Allowing global warming to exceed 2.5 degrees Celsius will cause category 4-level damage to civilization — approaching the catastrophic level. And warming in excess of 3 degrees Celsius will likely be a catastrophic category 5-level superstorm of destruction that will crash civilization.
We must take strong action rapidly to rein in our emissions of heat-trapping gases to avoid that outcome — and build great resilience to the extreme climate of the 21st century that we have so foolishly brought upon ourselves.
According to the Carbon Action Tracker (see tweet below), we are on track for 2.7 degrees Celsius of warming; if the nations of the world meet their targets for reducing heat-trapping climate pollution, warming will be limited to 2.1 degrees. There’s a big difference between being hit by a Cat 4 versus a Cat 3, and every tenth of a degree of warming that we prevent will be critical.
Two years on from Glasgow and our warming estimates for government action have barely moved. Governments appear oblivious to the extreme events of the past year, somehow thinking treading water will deal with the flood of impacts? https://t.co/fbM4xY9OJepic.twitter.com/MekGIeU1Z3
As climate scientist Michael Mann explains in his latest book, “Our Fragile Moment,” great climate science communicator Stephen Schneider once said, “The ‘end of the world’ or ‘good for you’ are the two least likely among the spectrum of potential [climate] outcomes.” So forget sci-fi depictions of planetary apocalypse. That will not be our long-term climate change fate.
But the impacts of climate change will be apocalyptic for many nations and people — particularly those that are not rich and White. People and communities with the least resources tend to be the first and hardest hit by climate change, not only because poorer people and communities are inherently more vulnerable to the impacts of any disaster, but also because the extremes induced by climate change tend to be worse in the tropics and subtropics, home to many poor nations.
In the U.S., climate change has already turned life upside down for numerous communities. For example, in North Carolina, the financially strapped, Black-majority towns of Fair Bluff and Princeville are in danger of abandonment from hurricane-related flooding (from Hurricane Floyd in 1999, Matthew in 2016, and Florence in 2018). Seven Springs, North Carolina (population 207 in 1960, now just 55) is largely abandoned.
Climate change was a key contributor to these floods; a 2021 study found that about one-third of the cost of major U.S. flood events since 1988, totaling $79 billion, could be attributed to climate change. And for the town of Paradise, California — utterly destroyed by the devastating Camp Fire of 2018, which killed 85 and caused over $16 billion in damage — climate change has been apocalyptic.
In the U.S., the most likely major economic disruption from climate change over the next few years might well be a collapse of the housing market in flood-prone and wildfire-prone states. Billion-dollar weather disasters — which cause about 76% of all weather-related damages — have steadily increased in number and expense in recent years and would be even worse were it not for improved weather forecasts and better building codes. The recent increase in weather-disaster losses has brought on an insurance crisis — especially in Florida, Louisiana, California, and Texas — which threatens one of the bedrocks of the U.S. economy, the housing and real estate market.
In California, the insurer of last resort, the FAIR plan, had only about $250 million in cash on hand as of March 2024.
“One major fire near Lake Arrowhead, where the Plan holds $8 billion in policies, would plunge the whole scheme into insolvency,” observed Harvard’s Susan Crawford, author of “Charleston: Race, Water, and the Coming Storm.”
It is widely acknowledged that higher weather disaster losses result primarily from an increase in exposure: more people with more stuff moving into vulnerable places, including those at risk of floods. Martin Bertogg, Swiss Re’s head of catastrophic peril, said in a 2022 AP interview that two-thirds, perhaps more, of the recent rise in weather-related disaster losses is the result of more people and things in harm’s way.
But this balance will likely shift in the coming decades. Increased exposure will continue to drive increased weather disaster losses, but the fractional contribution of climate change to disaster losses — at least for wildfire, hurricane, and flood disasters — is likely to increase rapidly, making the insurance crisis accelerate.
Figure 2. County-level overvaluation of property from flood risk. Florida had the highest property overvaluation — about $50 billion. In 2021, Florida’s real estate industry accounted for $294 billion, or 24% of the gross state product, according to a report from the National Association of Realtors. (Image credit: Gourevitch et al., 2023, Unpriced climate risk and the potential consequences of overvaluation in US housing markets, Nature Climate Change volume 13, pages 250–257)
A 2023 study (Fig. 2) drew attention to a massive real estate bubble in the U.S.: the vast number of properties whose purported value doesn’t account for the true costs of floods. The study estimated that across the U.S., residential properties are overvalued by a total of $121-$237 billion under current flood risks. This bubble will likely continue to grow as sea levels rise, storms dump heavier rains, and unwise risky development continues.
Likewise, U.S. properties at risk of wildfires are collectively overvalued by about $317 billion, according to David Burt, a financial guru who foresaw the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis. Insurers are already pulling out of the areas most at risk, threatening to make property ownership too expensive for millions and posing a serious threat to the economically critical real estate industry.
Climate futurist Alex Steffen has described the climate change-worsened real estate bubble this way:
Something brittle is prone to a sudden, catastrophic failure and cannot easily be repaired once broken. The popping of the real estate Brittleness Bubble will potentially trigger panic selling and a housing market collapse like a miniature version of the Great Financial Crisis of 2008 but focused on the 20% of American homes in wildfire and flood risk zones. In his 2023 Congressional testimony, Burt estimated that a wildfire and flood-induced repricing of risk of the U.S. housing market could have a quarter to half the impact of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis.
However, the 2008 crisis was relatively short-lived, as fixes to the financial system and a massive federal bailout led to a rebound in property values after a few years. A climate change-induced housing crisis will likely be resistant to a similar fix because the underlying cause will worsen: Sea levels will continue to rise, flooding heavy rains will intensify, and wildfires will grow more severe, increasing risk.
Science writer Eugene Linden wrote in 2023, “as we saw in 2008, a housing crisis can quickly morph into a systemic financial crisis because banks own most of the value, and thus the risk, in housing and commercial real estate.”
Crawford of Harvard recently wrote: “Because insurance can help communities and households recover more quickly from disasters, and because so much of the U.S. economy is driven by spending on housing, the inaccessibility and unaffordability of insurance poses a threat to the stability of the entire economy.”
As Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, said earlier this year, “The thing about economic crises is that they come on slowly, until they come on fast.”
How the insurance crisis may play out: the “Wholly irrational and completely ad-hoc pirate capitalism” solution
In his blunt 2023 essay, “Insurance Politics at the End of the World,” journalist Hamilton Nolan offers these thoughts on the potential ways this climate change-induced insurance crisis could be addressed:
When will the Brittleness Bubble pop?
When might this “crash into the wall of reality” happen and the Brittleness Bubble pop? Politicians are working extremely hard to keep their jobs by delaying this day of reckoning, artificially limiting insurance rate rises and offering state-run insurance plans of last resort. This approach — the equivalent of giving a blood transfusion to the injured, without stopping the bleeding — does not fix the underlying problem and all but guarantees that the pain of the eventual national reckoning will be much larger. Insurance is designed to transfer risk, but risk is rising everywhere. [ed. emphasis mine]
As the hurricane season is set to begin soon and wildfire risk gradually increasing, private insurers in some states are fleeing areas considered at high risk.
Crawford addressed the issue in a 2024 essay, “Who ends up holding the bag when risky real estate markets collapse?” Citing financial guru Burt, she concluded: “2025 or 2026 is when things give way and it becomes very difficult to offload houses and buildings in risky places where mortgages are suddenly hard to get, much less insurance.” When asked in an interview with Marketplace if the market is due for another correction, as homeowners in places with growing risk of flooding and wildfire have to pay more for insurance, Burt said:
In the same Marketplace story, though, Ben Keys, a professor of real estate and finance at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said, “The idea that we would expect there to be a huge wave of defaults or delinquencies feels relatively unlikely.”
But like Burt, climate change futurist Steffen predicts the real estate Brittleness Bubble will pop within five years (10 at the most).
People are beginning to grasp the seismic implications of a widespread loss of home insurance. Good.
But the economic shocks created by finally being forced to acknowledge that our society is unprepared for the realities of climate chaos won't end there.
This reckoning could come sooner for Florida if another $100-billion hurricane hits. The Florida insurance and coastal property market did manage to withstand the $117-billion cost of Category 4 Hurricane Ian of 2022, but another blow like that might well cause a severe downward spiral in the Florida real estate market from which it might never fully recover. This vulnerability was underscored by Florida Gov. DeSantis during a 2023 radio interview with a Boston host, when DeSantis suggested homeowners should “knock on wood” and hope the state didn’t get hit by a hurricane in 2024.
But “knocking on wood” is not an effective climate adaptation strategy for Florida. Because of climate change, Mother Nature is now able to whip heavier bowling balls with more devastating impact down Hurricane Alley. It’s only a matter of time before she hurls a strike into a major Florida city, causing an intensified coastal real estate and insurance crisis. And the odds of such a strike are higher than average in 2024 because of record-warm ocean temperatures in the tropical Atlantic, combined with a developing La Niña event.
Like this hyper-strike rolling robot, Mother Nature is now able to whip heavier bowling balls with more devastating impact down hurricane alley because of the extra heat energy in the oceans from human-caused global warming.
Watch out for increased coastal flooding in the mid-2030s
We may manage to avoid a coastal real estate market crash in the next 10 years if we get lucky with hurricanes and if our politicians continue to pump huge amounts of money to bail out the failing system.
But it will become increasingly difficult to keep the coastal property market propped up beginning in the mid-2030s, because of accelerating sea level rise combined with an 18.6-year wobble in the moon’s orbit. Thus, I expect that the longest we might stave off the popping of the coastal real estate Brittleness Bubble is 15 years.
Figure 3. Predicted change in minor flooding days (>1.74 feet above high tide) in St. Petersburg, Florida, under an “intermediate-high” sea level rise scenario (5.33 feet of sea level rise in 2100 compared to 2000). (Image credit: NASA sea level rise tool)
As I wrote in my 2023 post, 30 great tools to determine your flood risk in the U.S., beginning in 2033, the moon will be in a position favorable for bringing higher tides to locations where one high tide and low tide per day dominate. This will bring a rapid increase in high tide flooding to the coasts of the Gulf of Mexico, the Southeast, the West Coast, and Hawaii. This expected acceleration in the mid-2030s is obvious for St. Petersburg (Fig. 3), plotted using NASA’s Flooding Analysis Tool and Flooding Days Projection Tool. The rapid acceleration in coastal flooding simultaneously along a huge swathe of heavily developed U.S. coast in the mid-2030s will be sure to significantly stress the coastal housing market. And according to the Coastal Flood Resilience Project, the nation is flying blind on the possible impacts: There are no national assessments of the potential loss of major, critical infrastructure assets to coastal storms and rising seas.
Another immediate danger: a series of global extreme weather events affecting agriculture, causing global economic turmoil.
In my 2024 post, “What are the odds that extreme weather will lead to a global food shock?” I reviewed a 2023 report by insurance giant Lloyd’s, which modeled the odds of a globally disruptive extreme food shock event bringing simultaneous droughts in key global food-growing breadbaskets. The authors estimated that a “major” food shock scenario costing $3 trillion globally over a five-year period had a 2.3% chance of happening per year (Fig. 4). Over a 30-year period, those odds equate to about a 50% probability of occurrence — assuming the risks are not increasing each year, which, in fact, they are.
Figure 4. The 2023 ‘Extreme weather leading to food and water shock’ scenario from Lloyd’s. (Image credit: modified from this image)
Yet another concern for the U.S. is the risk of wholly unanticipated “black swan” extreme weather events that scientists didn’t see coming. As Harvard climate scientists Paul Epstein and James McCarthy wrote in a 2004 paper, “Assessing Climate Instability”: “We are already observing signs of instability within the climate system. There is no assurance that the rate of greenhouse gas buildup will not force the system to oscillate erratically and yield significant and punishing surprises.”
One example of such a punishing surprise was Superstorm Sandy of 2012, that unholy hybrid spawn of a Caribbean hurricane/extratropical storm that became the largest hurricane ever observed and one of the most damaging, costing $88 billion. And who anticipated that a siege of climate-change-intensified wildfires in western North America beginning in 2017, causing multiple summers of horrific air quality that would significantly degrade the quality of life in the West? Or the jet stream experiencing a sudden increase in unusually extreme configurations over the past 20 years, leading to prolonged periods of intense extreme weather over multiple portions of the globe simultaneously? As the late climate scientist Wally Broecker once said, “Climate is an angry beast, and we are poking at it with sticks.”
Just as concerning might be future “gray swan” events — extreme weather events that climate models anticipate could happen but exceed anything in the historical record. (“Gray swan” is an expression first coined by hurricane scientist Kerry Emanuel in his 2016 paper, “Grey swan tropical cyclones.”) Several potential gray swan events I have written about include a $1 trillion California “ARkStorm” flood, the potential failure of the Old River Control Structure during an extreme flood that allows the Mississippi River to change course, or a storm like 2015’s Hurricane Patricia, with winds over 200 mph, hitting Miami, Galveston/Houston, Tampa, or New Orleans. The risk of gray swan events is steadily increasing.
I’m often asked if the absurdly extreme weather events we’ve been experiencing recently are the new normal. “No!” I reply. “Heat is energy, so the energy to fuel more intense extreme weather events will increase until we reach net-zero emissions. At that time, the climate will finally stabilize at a new normal with a highly dangerous level of extreme weather events.”
Barring a series of extraordinary volcanic eruptions or a major geoengineering effort, even under an optimistic “low” emissions climate scenario, the earliest the climate might stabilize is in the mid-2070s (Fig. 5); thus, the weather will grow more extreme, on average, for at least the next 50 years. Considering that CO2 emissions have not yet peaked and may be following the “Intermediate” pathway shown below, there is considerable danger that the weather will still be growing more extreme when today’s children are very old early next century. But even when net zero emissions are reached, sea level rise will continue to occur at a pace difficult to adapt to, and the climate crisis will continue to intensify.
Figure 5. Wishful thinking: We’ve reached a “new normal” of extreme weather. In reality, the weather will keep growing more extreme until net-zero emissions are reached. Under the optimistic “Low” scenario presented here, that will not occur until the mid-2070s. (Image credit: 2023 U.S. National Climate Assessment, with annotation added)
The high probability that the weather will grow more extreme throughout the lifetime of everybody reading this essay means that we have to take seriously some very bad long-term threats. As I wrote in my 2022 post, “The future of global catastrophic risk events from climate change,” a global catastrophic risk event is defined as a catastrophe global in impact that kills over 10 million people or causes over $10 trillion (2022 USD) in damage. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there have been only three such events: World War I, World War II, and the COVID-19 pandemic. But climate change is a threat multiplier, increasing the risk of five types of global catastrophic risk events:
Drought
War
Coastal flooding from sea-level rise and land subsidence
Collapse of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), the powerful currents that circulate warm water in the tropical Atlantic Ocean to the Arctic and back (an August 2024 study gave a 59% chance of an AMOC collapse occurring before 2050)
The likeliest of these is a global catastrophic risk event from sea level rise, which is highly likely to occur by the end of the century. For example, a moderate global warming scenario will put $7.9-12.7 trillion dollars of global coastal assets at risk of flooding from sea level rise by 2100, according to a 2020 study, “Projections of global-scale extreme sea levels and resulting episodic coastal flooding over the 21st century.” Although this study did not take into account assets that inevitably will be protected by new coastal defenses, neither did it consider the indirect costs of sea level rise from increased storm surge damage, mass migration away from the coast, increased saltiness of fresh water supplies, and many other factors. A 2019 report by the Global Commission on Adaptation estimated that sea level rise will lead to damages of more than $1 trillion per year globally by 2050.
Furthermore, sea level rise, combined with other stressors, might bring about megacity collapse — a frightening possibility when infrastructure destruction, salinification of freshwater resources, and a real estate collapse potentially combine to create a mass exodus of people from a major city, reducing its tax base to the point that it can no longer provide basic services. The collapse of even one megacity might have severe impacts on the global economy, creating increased chances of a cascade of global catastrophic risk events. One megacity potentially at risk of this fate is the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, with a population of 10 million. Land subsidence of up to two inches per year and sea level rise of about an eighth of an inch per year are causing so much flooding in Jakarta that Indonesia is constructing a new capital city in Borneo.
Is the #AMOC approaching a tipping point? Here's my take after researching this topic for over 30 years. Open access, peer-reviewed, in full colour & understandable for non-experts.https://t.co/gMu6Zw5mR7pic.twitter.com/mrgzO9NMxR
— Prof. Stefan Rahmstorf 🌏 🦣 (@rahmstorf) April 11, 2024
I also expect one or more climate change-amplified global catastrophic risk events from drought will occur this century. Mexico City, with a metro area population of 22 million, has suffered record heat over the past year, is in danger of its reservoirs running dry, and is drilling ever-deeper wells to tap an overtaxed aquifer. Though the city will muddle through the crisis now that the summer rains have come this year, what is the plan for 30 years from now, when the climate is expected to be drier and much, much hotter? Although Mexico City can greatly improve its water situation by fixing a poorly maintained system that has a 40% loss rate, it is unclear how the city will be able to survive the much hotter and drier climate of 30 years from now. And at least 10 other major cities are in a similar bind.
Technology can help us adapt to a hotter climate by providing air conditioning (if you are rich enough), but technological solutions to create more water availability when the taps run dry are much more difficult to achieve. I believe water shortages will drive a partial collapse of and mass migration out of multiple major cities 20-40 years from now, significantly amplifying global political and economic turmoil. For example, a 2010 study, “Linkages among climate change, crop yields and Mexico-US cross-border migration,” found that a 10% reduction in crop yields in Mexico leads to an additional 2% of the population emigrating to the United States.
In his frightening 2019 book “Food or War,” science writer Julian Cribb documents 25 food conflicts that have led to famine, war, and the deaths of more than a million people — mostly caused by drought. Since 1960, Cribb says, 40-60% of armed conflicts have been linked to resource scarcity, and 80% of major armed conflicts occurred in vulnerable dry ecosystems. Hungry people are not peaceful people, Cribb argues.
Though climate change itself is not accelerating faster than what climate scientists and climate models predicted, devastating impacts from climate change do seem to be accelerating. That is because the new climate is crossing thresholds beyond which an infrastructure designed for the 20th century can withstand. These breaches are occurring in tandem with an increase in exposure — more people with more stuff living in harm’s way — which is the dominant cause of the sharp increase in weather-disaster losses in recent years. It’s sobering to realize that the current U.S. insurance crisis has primarily been driven by increased exposure and foolish insurance policies that promote development in risky places — not climate change — and that climate change’s relative contribution to the crisis is set to grow significantly.
Accelerating sea level rise alone is sure to cause a massive shock to the U.S. economy; according to a 2022 report from NOAA, sea level along the U.S. coastline is projected to rise, on average, 10-12 inches (0.25-0.30 meters) in the next 30 years (2020-2050), which will be as much as the rise measured over the last 100 years (1920-2020). At this level, 13.6 million homes might be at risk of flooding by 2051, triggering a mass migration of millions of people away from the coast.
If we add to sea-level-rise-induced migration the additional migration that will result from climate change-intensified wildfires, heatwaves, and hurricanes, we are forced to acknowledge the reality that a nation-challenging Hurricane Katrina-level climate change storm has already begun in the U.S., one which has the potential to cause catastrophic damage. As I wrote in my June post, The U.S. is finally making serious efforts to adapt to climate change, there have been some encouraging efforts to prepare for the coming mass migration. But, as I argued in my follow-up post, The U.S. is nowhere near ready for climate change, we remain woefully unprepared for what is coming.
And my subsequent post, Can a colossal extreme weather event galvanize action on the climate crisis?, argues that we should not expect that any future extreme weather event or breakdown of the climate system will galvanize the type of response needed — we’ve already had at least 13 events since 1988 that should have done so, yet have not. Even if such an event did prompt strong, transformative change, it’s too late to avoid having life turned upside-down by climate change. It’s like we’ve waited until our skin started getting red before seeking shade from the sun, and we’re only now taking our first stumbling steps toward shade. Well, it’s a long hike to shade, and a blistering sunburn is unavoidable.
Given the unprecedented nature and complexity of this planetary crisis, there is huge uncertainty on how this drama may unfold; there are climate scientists who offer a more optimistic outlook than I do (for example, Hannah Ritchie, author of “Not the End of the World”), and those who are more pessimistic (James Hansen).
I suggest that you make the most of the current “calm before the storm” and prepare for the chaotic times ahead, which could begin at any time. I will offer my recommendations on how to do this in my next post in this series, “What should you do to prepare for the climate change storm?”
The urgency to rapidly deal with the climate crisis was succinctly summarized by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its latest summary report: “There is a rapidly closing window of opportunity to secure a livable and sustainable future for all.”
But taking advantage of that window of opportunity is difficult because of human psychological and political realities. In climate scientist Peter Gleick’s 2023 book, “The Three Ages of Water,” he quotes Harvard’s E.O. Wilson, father of sociobiology, who perhaps said it best: “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
The boat of civilization has already hit multiple rocks along the rapids of climate change and is taking on water. Perilous rapids with even more dangerous rocks and waterfalls lie before us, but the course of our boat cannot be so easily altered to avoid the rocks, because of our Paleolithic emotions and medieval institutions. As a result, we may have only a few more years — or perhaps as long as 15 years — of relative normalcy in our everyday lives here in the U.S. before the approaching climate change storm ends our golden age of prosperity. But this “golden age” was made of fool’s gold, paid for with wealth plundered from future generations.
Figure 6. The North Rose window of Chartres Cathedral, France, 1190-1220 CE. The stained glass window shows scenes of Jesus Christ, the prophets and 12 kings of Judah. (Image credit: Walwyn) Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC.
Though this essay has dwelt on some grim realities, I am optimistic that we will prevent climate change from becoming a civilization-destroying category 5-level catastrophe. But we must fight extremely hard to correct the course of our boat and not allow its inertia to carry us into the rocks that stud the rapids of climate change. This is not a task that can be accomplished in our lifetimes.
Susan Joy Hassol, the climate communication veteran who served as a senior science writer on three National Climate Assessments, put it this way in an interview with Yale Climate Connections contributor Daisy Simmons: “This is the fight of our lives, and it’s a multigenerational task. We need what’s been called ‘cathedral thinking.’ That is, the people who started working on that stone foundation, they never saw the thing finished. It took generations to get these major works done. This is that kind of problem. And we have to all do our part. The more I act, the better I feel, because I know I’m part of the solution.”
Actions we take now will yield enormous future benefits, and the faster we undertake transformative actions to adapt to the new climate reality, the less suffering will occur. The Global Commission on Adaptation says that “every $1 invested in adaptation could yield up to $10 in net economic benefits, depending on the activity.” We should work to build our cathedral of the future with the thought that each action we take now will multiply by a factor of 10 in importance in the future.
An excellent @nytimes article on rapid growth of wind, solar, & EVs, including factories, in the US. Costs are below fossil and nuclear (see graphs). Reasons why, graphs with how fast, pictures of it happening. https://t.co/uglQDnE97tpic.twitter.com/oIpLmlp28v
But some of the hardest work has been done: The cornerstone of this cathedral of the future has already been laid. The clean energy revolution is here and has progressed far more rapidly than I had dared hope. Passage of the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and 2023 Inflation Reduction Act has been instrumental in getting this cornerstone laid. Solar energy is now the cheapest source of energy in world history, and the costs of wind power and battery technology have also plummeted. Two recent reports were optimistic that climate-warming carbon dioxide emissions had finally peaked in 2023, and GDP growth has decoupled from carbon dioxide emissions in recent years, giving hope that economic growth can still occur without making the planet hotter.
At its heart, the root of the climate crisis is humanity’s spiritual inharmoniousness: We overvalue the pursuit of material wealth and we worship billionaires but undervalue growing more connected to our spiritual selves and acting to preserve and appreciate the natural systems that sustain us. Making yourself more peaceful and loving through quiet spiritual pursuits and time spent in nature will help counteract the anxiety and fear sparked by the climate crisis. But in tandem with your increased peace must come a righteous anger to “throw the money changers out of the temple” and topple the might of the fossil fuel industry and its enablers.
So put your shoulder to an oar! Help us power the boat of civilization through the rapids of climate change. All of humanity shares the same boat, and you have the opportunity to make your own unique and valuable contribution to the effort.
We're loving this exercise created by @AyanaEliza & shared by @allwecansave for figuring out what you should do about the climate crisis:
Make a Venn diagram and notice what's at the center: 1. What brings you joy? 2. What is the work that needs doing? 3. What are you good at? pic.twitter.com/m0uVd6ctug
Figure 7. A portion of a 360-degree rainbow seen from a NOAA P-3 hurricane hunter aircraft as it flew through a rain shower near South Florida in 1988. (Image credit: Jeff Masters)
As promised, here is the rainbow at the end. It’s the intro image from my first and last Weather Underground blog posts, “The 360-degree Rainbow,” and “So long, wunderground!” My unique and valuable contribution to building our new cathedral has not yet reached the end of the rainbow, for a rainbow has no end — it is a full circle. One just has to fly high in a rainstorm where the sun is shining to see it.
I will continue to make my voice heard as long as climate science-denying politicians, corporations, media pundits, and wealthy individuals continue to row the boat of civilization into the rocks of climate-change catastrophe. I encourage those of you who have learned about extreme weather and climate change from me to do the same. To get started, learn from one of the best communicators in the business, climate scientist Katherine Hayhoe:
A grassland in an area formerly dominated by boreal forest. Photo credit: Dawn Magness, U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Click the link to read the article on the NOAA website (Wynne E. Moss):
August 5, 2024
Alaska’s boreal forests are declining, as increasing drought stress and fire kill off the next generation of conifer trees. Where boreal forest has disappeared, new plant communities—like grasslands and aspen forests—have begun to take its place.
Elsewhere, in the southeastern United States, droughts have decimated saltmarsh vegetation, turning saltmarshes into mudflats or open water.
In the Southwest, pinyon pines have experienced widespread die-offs during extreme droughts. Meanwhile, junipers and grasses have expanded.
Across the globe, natural resource managers now face the reality of stewarding such landscapes with vastly different species and functions. These are just three examples of drought-triggered ecological transformation, a growing phenomenon that is highlighted in a new paper in the journal BioScience.
Research on ecological drought demonstrates that while many species are tolerant of water shortages, others may experience declines, with recovery taking years or even decades after drought ends. The new study, funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) National Climate Adaptation Science Center, discussed an even more extreme possibility—that some ecosystems will never recover from drought. Instead of returning to pre-drought conditions, some ecosystems may undergo transformation, or a shift into a new, persistent state, dominated by different forms of vegetation.
Ecosystem transformations represent a major challenge for natural resource agencies. Those caused by drought can be particularly rapid and surprising. To aid preparedness, researchers synthesized science on the mechanisms involved in drought-triggered transformation. Their work provides a broad overview of this phenomenon and highlights three major points about drought’s ability to cause long-term ecological change:
1. Drought-triggered transformations are happening across the globe.
The paper highlights a dozen examples of transformations triggered by drought. They occur in many types of ecosystems, including temperate and tropical forests, grasslands, and woodlands. This suggests the risk of transformation is not limited to arid ecosystems or forests, which have received the bulk of scientific attention.
2. Shifting drought regimes are eliciting more extreme ecosystem responses.
As the climate warms, many regions of the planet are expected to experience novel and more extreme drought regimes. This is true even where annual precipitation is increasing. Certain forms of drought, including hotter droughts, snow droughts, and flash droughts, are becoming more common. Plant communities in a location may not be adapted to the changing character of drought, which may have greater impacts and exacerbate the risk of transformation.
3. Drought interacts with stressors that reduce ecosystem resilience.
Increasing drought severity is not the only factor causing transformation. The ability of ecosystems to recover from drought is also changing in the 21st century. Stressors like habitat loss, invasive species, and fire are increasingly likely to occur alongside or after drought and disrupt recovery after drought. Although managers have little control of the severity of drought, they may be able to reduce the likelihood of transformation by addressing these stressors.
Twelve locations where drought has caused a significant and permanent change in ecosystem composition. Examples occur across an aridity gradient and involve multiple different mechanisms. Figure modified from Moss et al. 2024. Base Map: World Terrestrial Ecosystems 2020.
The Next Challenge: Preparing for the Future
Translating this information into readiness is the next challenge. Many managers are already aware that climate change can trigger large shifts in the systems they manage. But they may not be aware that these changes could happen quite rapidly—after the next severe drought. Syntheses such as this can help managers develop both proactive and reactive strategies to respond to drought. A better understanding of the mechanisms involved also aids in developing predictive science to tell us what systems are most vulnerable. However, some aspects of ecosystems are just not predictable. Rather than aiming to perfectly predict the future, managers could prepare for a range of potential outcomes and consider how their actions could steer the recovery of ecosystems towards preferred conditions after drought.
Denver’s City Ditch is celebrating its 150th anniversary in 2017. Learn about the Ditch’s important role in Denver’s history and how Denver Water helps out.
August 14, 2024
Long before Denver was established, residents of the area drank water directly from the South Platte River and Cherry Creek.
But the surface wells and buckets of water used as a delivery system were not an adequate means of providing the one thing these early travelers needed for survival: water. Irrigation ditches were the next step forward for the growing population spurred by the city’s Gold Rush of 1859.
But the surface wells and buckets of water used as a delivery system were not an adequate means of providing the one thing these early travelers needed for survival: water. Irrigation ditches were the next step forward for the growing population spurred by the city’s Gold Rush of 1859.
Crews work on City Ditch in this 1935 photo. Photo credit: Denver Water
“City Ditch first started flowing in 1867,” said Sarah McCarthy, Washington Park community member. “It’s a huge part of the Denver community.”
City Ditch was the vision of the Capitol Hydraulic Company, which saw an opportunity to bring more water to Denver from the South Platte River system, explained Holly Geist, Denver Water’s records management analyst.
“The Kansas Territorial Legislature allowed the company to build a ditch and use water for agricultural, mining, mechanical and city purposes,” Geist said.
The company’s first attempt to build the ditch failed in the early 1860s in part because the slope wasn’t high enough for water to flow to Denver.
According to Geist, surveyor and engineer Richard Little — the man for whom Littleton is named — was brought in to build a new flow path for the ditch that was farther up the river, closer to Waterton Canyon. Businessman John W. Smith was brought in to complete building the ditch and water began flowing into the city in 1867.
“There really was nothing in the area but scrub where Washington Park is today,” McCarthy said. “The ditch brought water for farms and homes and helped transform City and Washington parks into the urban gardens they are today.”
The city of Denver took control of the ditch in 1875, and by 1898 nearly all of the ditch within city limits had been placed in pipes. Denver Water acquired the ditch in 1918.
Community members “christen the monument with water balloons” during a celebration at Washington Park in Denver on Aug. 12, for the 150th anniversary of City Ditch. Photo credit: Denver Water
City Ditch continues to flow today, but in two sections. The southern section is managed by the city of Englewood and the northern section by Denver Water.
Denver Water’s portion of the open ditch can still be found flowing through Denver’s Washington Park. City Ditch’s primary function now is to irrigate and fill the lakes in Washington and City parks.
In an effort to conserve more river water supplies, Denver Water began using water from its Recycling Plant in 2004 for the northern section of the ditch. Stormwater also flows through it. Washington Park and the open section of City Ditch were listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1976 and designated a Denver Landmark in 1977.
McCarthy hopes people will visit a monument at Washington Park that honors John W. Smith and the people who helped build City Ditch. The monument is located south of the playground near Smith Lake.
“If John W. Smith were here today, he’d be very proud that City Ditch is still supplying water that’s vital to our community,” McCarthy said. “We hope the anniversary raises awareness about the ditch and its history and increases our community’s pride in the city.”
Colorado River “Beginnings”. Photo: Brent Gardner-Smith/Aspen Journalism
Click the link to read the article on the InkStain website (Kathryn Sorensen, Sarah Porter and John Fleck):
August 16, 2024
Colorado River Basin governance is increasingly struggling with a deep question in water management: When we reduce our use of water, who gets the savings?
If I install more efficient irrigation equipment, should I get credit for the saved water to expand my acreage, or save the water in an upstream reservoir as a hedge against next year’s drought? If I tear out lawns, can I use the saved water to help build the next subdivision, or save the water in an upstream reservoir as a hedge against that next year of drought?
Or should the savings contribute, not to my own resilience and well-being, but to the resilience and the well-being of the system as a whole by simply reducing overall water use?
In a deeply insightful 2013 book, British scholar Bruce Lankford bestowed the unfortunately wonky name of “the paracommons” to this question, and it dogs water policy management around the world.
This issue has been lurking in Colorado River management for a long time. Should we create legal structures that allow users to bank the savings for their own use later? Or should the reductions benefit the health of the system as a whole? There are advantages and disadvantages to both approaches, and we need to design new rules for managing the Colorado River with our eyes open on this question.
Assigned Water
In a new paper, we explore the implications of the two paths for the management of a post-2026 Colorado River.
One is to incentivize conservation by giving water users the chance to bank saved water for later use. Known most commonly as Intentionally Created Surplus (ICS), and more broadly in a series of increasingly creative implementations as “Assigned Water,” this creates short term savings.
The other involves permanent reductions – “System Water.” Water use is reduced for the benefit of the Colorado River as a whole.
In more than a decade of experimentation with these policy tools, we have seen the results. Investment in Assigned Water, attractive to water managers because of the allure of getting their water back, has crowded out investment in the more durable System Water reductions that will be needed to bring the Colorado River into balance.
As we develop new operating rules for the river, we need to be mindful of the differences involved.
Assigned Water does not solve the problem of overallocation because when it is deployed we are borrowing against our own bank. Enduring solutions on the river can only be found by addressing overallocation.
Assigned Water creates critically important operational flexibility; it allows its owner to either forgo water deliveries in one year—or pay someone else to—and take delivery of that water during another potentially desperate time.
Assigned Water is generally insulated from shortage, forfeiture and abandonment.
Protection from shortage and forfeiture has value; Assigned Water creates individual resiliencefor its owner. Because of this, the availability of Assigned Water appears to crowd out investment in collective resilience in the form of System Water.
In conversations about post-2026 operations negotiators are contemplating extending, enlarging and/or enhancing Assigned Water and/or creating an operationally neutral form called Top Water. In any form, Assigned Water lives outside of the existing priority system. In this regard, the conversation involves the reallocation of water in Lakes Powell and Mead.
Critics of the West’s priority system of water delivery can rejoice—nearly 40% of the water in Mead in 2023 was Assigned Water, meaning that Assigned Water is replacing priority to a significant degree. But is the priority system like capitalism in that it has its warts but the alternatives are far worse? As the expansion of the rights of municipal water providers, irrigation districts, foreign nations and tribes to own even more and different kinds of Assigned Water is contemplated for a post-2026 world, consideration should also be given to how these changes may also inure to the benefit of environmental non-governmental organizations, hedge funds and water speculators. Those who share John Wesley Powell’s fears will understand the implications because the expansion of Assigned Water in Lakes Powell and Mead may bring about the ultimate divorce of priority-based water rights from arid lands in the Colorado River Basin.
There are important elements of transparency and fairness at play. The large, powerful players on the River received Assigned Water through negotiations not available to others—meaning, there was no open bidding process or invitation to smaller entities to acquire this valuable water. Apparently, there still isn’t. Thought ought to be given to those other stakeholders—smaller cities, farmers, tribes and others—who have made investments and built economies based on the priority system. Imagine a restaurant that operates on a first-come-first-serve basis and a hungry patron who waits patiently in line for the doors to open only to be told that the rules changed while he was waiting and all of the reservations have been claimed through a process from which he was excluded.
It is helpful to continue to deploy a tool as flexible and alluring as Assigned Water, particularly in the form of operationally neutral Top Storage, so there’s no need to throw the baby out with the bath water. A reasonable path forward may be to allow the creation of Top Storage with appropriate guardrails while including a 50% cut for System Water. Post 2026, Assigned Water will be so valuable that entities likely will be willing to take a big haircut to get it, and such a required contribution solves the problem of developing enduring funding for System Water to a significant degree. Maybe ultimately environmental non-governmental organizations, hedge funds and water speculators get a piece, but if so, it will be at the price of protecting and respecting the priority system upon which so many depend.
a Schematic fold-bifurcation diagram of a model tipping element with global mean temperature (GMT) as a forcing parameter and two stable states separated by the unstable manifold. The red arrows indicate the feedback direction of the entire system if a forcing occurs. This means, that if the system is pushed across the unstable manifold, it will move towards the opposite stable equilibrium state. b Illustrative time-evolution of one sample model run of each tipping element: Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS), West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), Amazon Rainforest (AMAZ), including the threshold for state evaluation (dashed grey line). Credit: Nature Communications
Under current emission trajectories, temporarily overshooting the Paris global warming limit of 1.5 °C is a distinct possibility. Permanently exceeding this limit would substantially increase the probability of triggering climate tipping elements. Here, we investigate the tipping risks associated with several policy-relevant future emission scenarios, using a stylised Earth system model of four interconnected climate tipping elements. We show that following current policies this century would commit to a 45% tipping risk by 2300 (median, 10–90% range: 23–71%), even if temperatures are brought back to below 1.5 °C. We find that tipping risk by 2300 increases with every additional 0.1 °C of overshoot above 1.5 °C and strongly accelerates for peak warming above 2.0 °C. Achieving and maintaining at least net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2100 is paramount to minimise tipping risk in the long term. Our results underscore that stringent emission reductions in the current decade are critical for planetary stability. [ed. emphasis mine]
Opening ceremony Summer Olympics Paris 2024. Photo credit: Olympics.com
Click the link to read the article on the Heated website (Emily Atkin). Here’s an excerpt:
August 1, 2024
I haven’t had time to analyze media coverage of the 2024 Olympic Games. So I’m not sure how many stories about Tuesday’s dangerous heat in Paris mentioned that the high temperatures were fueled by climate change. But just in case you didn’t see, here’s an important stat: Fossil fuels, deforestation, and animal agriculture made outdoor temperatures at Tuesday’s Olympics about 5.2°F degrees hotter than they would have normally been.
The reason we know this is because of incredible recent advancements in attribution science, which uses observational data and statistical methods to figure out how likely and severe an extreme weather event would be today, compared to how it would have played out in a world un-warmed by human activities. Specifically, the 5.2°F number comes from a “super rapid analysis” published Wednesday by World Weather Attribution (WWA), an international group dedicated to conducting and communicating attribution science. It found the heat wave that’s plagued France and other Mediterranean countries this July would have been anywhere from 4.5°F (2.5°C) to 5.9°F (3.3°C) cooler in a pre-climate-changed world. The average of that range is 5.2°F.
I spell all this out because I want to make it clear: If we want the summer Olympics to continue to exist and be safe for athletes, we need to rapidly reduce emissions from these sectors. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: It’s not enough to say that “climate change” is screwing with the things we love. Communicators have to also be clear about why climate change is happening, so it’s equally clear what must be done.
Editor’s note: Kyle Hilburn, a research scientist in the Department of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University, wrote this piece for The Conversation in August 2024. Colorado State University is a contributing institution to The Conversation, an independent collaboration between editors and academics that provides informed news analysis and commentary to the general public. See the entire list of contributing faculty and their articles here.
Wildfire blowups, fire whirls, towering thunderstorms: When fires get large and hot enough, they can actually create their own weather.
In these extreme fire situations, firefighters’ ordinary methods to directly control the fire don’t work, and wildfires burn out of control. Firefighters have seen many of these risks in the enormous Park Fire burning near Chico, California, in summer 2024.
But how can a fire create weather?
Satellite images shows how the Park Fire near Chico, Calif., created intense pyrocumulonimbus plumes, visible in white, in July 2024. CSU/CIRA and NOAA
I’m an atmospheric scientist who uses data collected by satellites in weather prediction models to better anticipate extreme fire weather phenomena. Satellite data shows fire-produced thunderstorms are much more common than anyone realized just a few years ago. Here’s what’s happening.
The wildfire and weather connections
Imagine a wildland landscape with dry grasses, brush and trees. A spark lands, perhaps from lightning or a tree branch hitting a power line. If the weather is hot, dry and windy, that spark could quickly ignite a wildfire.
When vegetation burns, large amounts of heat are released. This heats the air near the ground, and that air rises like a hot air balloon because hot air is less dense than cool air. Cooler air then rushes in to fill the void left by rising air.
Fires create their own wind patterns and weather as their heat rises. The illustration is based on a coupled fire-atmosphere computer model, WRF-SFIRE-CHEM. Adam Kochanski/San Jose State University/WIRC
What happens next depends on the stability of the atmosphere. If the temperature cools rapidly with elevation above the ground, then the rising air will always be warmer than its surroundings and it will keep rising. If it rises high enough, the moisture will condense, forming a cloud known as a pyrocumulus or flammagenitus.
If the air keeps rising, at some point the condensed moisture will freeze.
Once a cloud has both liquid and frozen water particles, collisions among these particles can lead to electrical charge separation. If the charge buildup is large enough, an electrical discharge – better known as lightning – will occur to neutralize the charges.
Whether a fire-induced cloud will become a thunderstorm depends on three key ingredients: a source of lift, instability and moisture.
Dry lightning
Wildfire environments typically have limited moisture. When conditions in the lower atmosphere are dry, this can lead to what’s known as dry lightning.
No one living in a wildfire-prone environment wants to see dry lightning. It occurs when a thunderstorm produces lightning, but the precipitation evaporates before reaching the ground. That means there is no rain to help put out any lightning-sparked fires.
Fire whirls
As air rises in the atmosphere, it may encounter different wind speeds and directions, a condition known as wind shear. This can cause the air to spin. The rising air can tilt the spin to vertical, resembling a tornado.
These fire whirls can have powerful winds that can spread flaming ash, sparking new areas of fire. They usually are not true tornadoes, however, because they aren’t associated with rotating thunderstorms.
Timelapse footage shows ‘fire tornado’ form in California wildfire. Timelapse video from 25 July captured California’s Park fire creating what appears to be a ‘fire tornado’. Subscribe to Guardian News on YouTube ► http://bit.ly/guardianwiressub The fire, burning northeast of Chico California, forced thousands of residents in Butte County, about 100 miles northeast of Sacramento, to evacuate their homes. The fire, which stretched over four counties, was believed to be caused by arson, after authorities say a man was seen pushing a burning car into a ravine. Firefighters battle California’s seventh largest wildfire on record as thousands under threat ► https://www.theguardian.com/world/art… The Guardian publishes independent journalism, made possible by supporters. Contribute to The Guardian today ► https://bit.ly/3uhA7zg
Decaying storms
Eventually, the thunderstorm triggered by the wildfire will begin to die, and what went up will come back down. The downdraft from the decaying thunderstorm can produce erratic winds on the ground, further spreading the fire in directions that can be hard to predict.
When fires create their own weather, their behavior can become more unpredictable and erratic, which only amplifies their threat to residents and firefighters battling the blaze. Anticipating changes to fire behavior is important to everyone’s safety.
Satellites show fire-created weather isn’t so rare
Today, these satellites can alert firefighters to a new blaze even before phone calls to 911. That’s important, because there is an increasing trend in the number, size and frequency of wildfires across the United States.
As more people move into fire-risk areas in this warming climate, the risk of fires starting is also rising. With fires come cascading hazards that persist long after the fire is out, such as burn-scarred landscapes that are much more susceptible to landslides and debris flows that can affect water quality and ecosystems.
It’s important to remember that fire is a natural part of the Earth system. As fire scientist Stephen J. Pyne writes, we as humans will have to reorient our relationship with fire so we can learn to live with fire.
For the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe, the Northeastern Indian Water Rights Settlement Act means more than water — it means finally claiming land they can call home. Although the tribe has lived in their current home base for hundreds of years, they were only federally recognized in 1989, and the land they lived on, in northern Arizona and southern Utah, was incorporated into the Navajo Nation. The Paiutes are the only federally recognized tribe in Arizona without a reservation or land.
In 2000, leaders from the Navajo Nation and the San Juan Southern Paiute Tribe signed a historic treaty, the first intertribal treaty in 160 years. The treaty granted the Paiutes approximately 5,400 acres of land, divided into two parcels, that was occupied by Paiute families. The treaty has never been ratified by Congress, and nearly a quarter century later, the land still has not been granted to the Paiutes. That could change if Congress approves and President Joe Biden signs the water settlement, which would finally allocate these parcels to the San Juan Paiute Tribe…
“With this water settlement, of course water being a precious commodity to this day and it is worth everyone fighting for, what this settlement will actually helps us do get our reservation secured,” said San Juan Paiute President Robbin Preston Jr., “so that all our tribal members can say ‘yes, i do have a home.’”
The science behind the city of San Diego’s multibillion dollar effort to recycle wastewater into drinking water.
Try driving up Morena Boulevard in Mission Valley, or north through Bay Park and Clairemont, and chances are you’ll be bottlenecked by an army of orange traffic cones demarking a huge construction project that will consume northern San Diego for years to come.
The city of San Diego is currently building a massive wastewater-to-drinking water recycling system – but it must tear up the streets to do it. The new pipe route tunnels from Morena Pump Station near the San Diego International Airport, then 10 miles north to University City and then another 8 miles to Miramar Reservoir, the final stop for all our transformed toilet water.
But wait – why is San Diego drinking its own sewage in the first place? And how is that even possible?
That’s why San Diego is very proud of its recycling project, called Pure Water, which will turn 42 million gallons of wastewater into 34 million gallons of drinking water per day once the first phase is complete around 2027. But the project is actually a compromise the city made after years of wrangling over sewage, of which unlike drinkable water, the city often has too much.
A bit of history: In the 1930s, San Diego dumped its sewage into San Diego Bay which began to corrode the hulls of Navy ships and drove tourists away. In 1963, the city, with support from neighboring cities, opened the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant which cleaned wastewater one way, but soon fell short of what the 1972 Clean Water Act required.
San Diego was on the hook to make billions of dollars in upgrades to Point Loma, even though it argued dumping treated wastewater should be OK because, as the saying goes, “the solution to pollution is dilution.” Congress agreed to give the city a pass on the Clean Water Act requirements for a decade until it failed to reapply for a waiver, setting off a wave of litigation. That’s about the time San Diego offered to do something different: Make its wastewater drinkable.
Filtration membranes at the city of San Diego’s new wastewater-to-drinking water facility on June 11, 2024. / MacKenzie Elmer
That seemed to settle qualms from environmentalists angered by Point Loma’s ocean pollution and the feds that were upset over continued Clean Water Act waivers. And here we are.
Pure Water officials told me the water produced on the other side of the multi-step recycling process is so clean, the city must add minerals back in at the end. And there’s the added bonus of San Diego having to buy less imported water – one of the city’s biggest monthly bills. Pure Water is supposed to provide over half the city’s water needs when it’s complete.
So instead of billions in upgrades to Point Loma, the city’s spending billions on Pure Water, about $1.5 billion just for the first of its two phases.
Beyond the miles of new pipeline and pumps yet to be built to round out the system, an expansion of the existing North City Water Reclamation Facility in Miramar is the heart of the purification process. Juan Guerreiro, the director of the city of San Diego’s Public Utilities Department, gave me and our social media journalist, Bella Ross, a tour of the construction.
The North City reclamation plant, and its sister plant in South Bay, were built about 25 years ago to divert some of the waste being sent to Point Loma, clean it, and use it for irrigation. The massive expansion effort is underway while the North City plant is still doing its 24/7 job.
Juan Guerreiro, the director of the city of San Diego’s Public Utilities Department, points to the new Pure Water North City facility under construction on June 11, 2024. / MacKenzie Elmer
“It’s like open heart surgery. You’re running the plant producing recycled water while it’s being expanded,” Guerreiro said.
That plant already strains out all the solids, adds bacteria to eat up bad gunk, chlorinates and then runs water through coal filters – like a big Brita filtration system. You could probably drink the end product, but it wouldn’t pass California’s drinking water standards. Pure Water adds five extra treatment steps, including shooting every water molecule through a filter membrane with pores that are 500,000 times smaller than a human hair.
After all that energy-intensive cleaning, the city dumps the purified water in the Miramar Reservoir where San Diego stores much of its untreated drinking water already. But wait, isn’t it kind of a shame to dump that extra-purified water into a reservoir filled with yet untreated drinking water, then treat it again?
In an abundance of caution, California requires the treated wastewater-turned-drinking water be stored in an “environmental buffer” like a reservoir or an underground aquifer, instead of pumping it straight to public taps. It’s a kind of “just in case” measure for a lot of these new recycling projects. Orange County built a similar wastewater-to-drinking water system in 2008 that injects the treated water into underground aquifers. San Diego doesn’t have many aquifers so the next best buffer is the reservoir.
City of San Diego digging a megatrench to transport treated water from its new Pure Water facility on June 11, 2024. / MacKenzie Elmer
Building Pure Water is a massive undertaking that involves building what officials called a “mega trench” artery connecting the North City Reclamation facility and the new Pure Water facility underneath Eastgate Mall road. But the city is also building a Pure Water education center on site to cure any skeptics of their suspicion of the process.
Now, students, don your lab goggles and learn how Pure Water is done:
How it works now: Someone in the city of San Diego flushes their toilet. The waste flows through pipes in a building then out to the street into a large sewer main. Eventually it hits a pump station which shoots the sewage to its traditional final destination: The Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant.
How it will work once Pure Water is complete: Everything is the same at the start, except a new pump station off Morena Boulevard and north of Interstate 8 will be responsible for diverting 32 million gallons of wastewater away from Point Loma and sending it northward to the reclamation plant.
Workers erect a massive retaining wall at the city of San Diego’s new Pure Water facility on June 11, 2024. / MacKenzie Elmer
Once it makes its miles-long journey to the plant, the sewage moves through the first steps of a typical treatment process, starting with what’s called primary. That phase gets rid of the most obvious gross stuff. The water sits still in a settling tank so fats, oils, grease and plastic float to the top where that gunk is skimmed off and sent to disposal. Organic solids (fecal matter, etc.) sink to the bottom and separate from the water.
That water is not ready to drink yet. Its next stop is secondary treatment, where the wastewater moves into huge concrete bathtubs and pumped through with air and microbes that eat up a lot of the organic stuff still floating around. The microbes burp out ammonia, carbon dioxide gases and water. If that bacteria begins to die during this process, it’s a signal to treatment plant staff that something toxic and unusual may have been illegally dumped into the sewage system. (That happened once back in 2016 when a port-a-potty company called Diamond Enviornmental Services got caught dumping its outhouse contents into the city’s wastewater system. The FBI raided the company’s offices. Some of its executives got prison time.)
The wastewater moves to more settling tanks where that well-fed bacteria clump together, die and sink to the bottom. Cleaner water remains at the top inch of the surface, which then flows out onto the city’s prized Pure Water, five-step purification process – and reportedly exceed — drinking water standards.
The reclaimed water first goes through ozone and biologically active carbon filtration. Any pharmaceuticals or personal care products one might worry survived the primary and secondary treatment get broken down by ozone and become food for additional biology in the carbon filter. Ozone, when dissolved in water, turns into a kind of biocide that kills bacteria, parasites, viruses and other bad stuff.
By this stage, the water is ready to be shot at high speed through a membrane filter, which looks like a large PVC pipe filled with straws that contain ultra-small pores. The idea is any microscopic grime or grit still floating around won’t be able to make it through those pores.
Juan Guerreiro, director of the city’s Public Utilities Department, holds a piece of the new Pure Water filtration system at the North City Water Reclamation Facility in Miramar. Ally Berenter and Anna Vacchi Hill with the city of San Diego on June 11, 2024. / MacKenzie Elmer
Next, the water goes through reverse osmosis, another kind of filter with even smaller pores, about the size of a water molecule. This helps remove any excess salts or minerals. “The water that comes through reverse osmosis is some of the cleanest we’ve seen compared to distilled water quality,” said Doug Campbell, the assistant director of the city’s Public Utilities Department’s wastewater branch. It cleans the water so well, Campbell said, minerals must be added back to the water later.
A filtration membrane that’s part of the city of San Diego’s wastewater-to-drinking water system called Pure Water on June 11, 2024. / MacKenzie Elmer
There’s one more step, the water gets flashed by ultraviolet light at the most lethal wavelength for germs or microorganisms. “UV light is really good at harming organic things. So if any viruses, parasites or bacteria make it through the other steps, then the UV light will quickly destroy it,” said Campbell said.
