Tag Archives: water resources

May 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

  • MIT says there is a critical long term decline in U.S. research and development spending, while spending is increasing in many other parts of the world.
  • Lake Mead, water supply for Las Vegas and several other major western U.S. cities, is continuing to dry up. The normal snowpack in Washington State is almost completely absent, while much of Oregon has declared a state of emergency. As the drought grinds on, recycled water (sometimes derided as “toilet to tap”) is becoming more common in Calfornia. This is not bad in itself – on the contrary it is an example of technological adaptation and closing the loop. It does have a cost in money and energy though, which are resources that are then not available for other things like education or infrastructure or whatever people need. In other words, drought makes us all a little bit poorer.
  • We’ve hit 400 ppm carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not just some places sometimes but pretty much everywhere, all the time.
  • There may be a “global shortage of aggregate demand“, and most countries are not dealing with it well. In many developed countries, increases in average longevity could lead to a trend of long-term deflation. This could eventually happen in almost all countries.
  • Climate change is going to make extreme weather more frequent and more damaging in U.S. cities. The 2015 El Nino could break records.
  • There just isn’t a lot of positivity or hope for better passenger rail service in the U.S.
  • Human chemical use to combat diseases, bugs, and weeds is causing the diseases, bugs and weeds to evolve fast.
  • Unfortunately there is no foolproof formula to make education work.

Positive stories:

  • Less leisure time could mean less sustainable outcomes, because people just have less time to think and act on their good intentions. I’m putting this in the positive column because although people in the U.S. and many other countries still work long hours, the trend so far is less work and more wealth for human population as a whole over very long periods of time. Obviously the transition is not smooth or painless for all workers all of the time.
  • I found a nice example of meta-analysis, which aggregates findings of a large number of scientific and not-so-scientific studies in a useful form, in this case in the urban planning field.
  • May is time to pull on the urban gardening gloves.
  • Melbourne’s climate change adaptation plan focuses on green open space and urban tree canopy.
  • Painless vaccines may be on the way.
  • The rhetoric on renewable energy is really changing as it starts to seriously challenge fossil fuels on economic grounds. Following the Fukushima disaster, when all Japan’s nuclear reactors were shut down, the gap was made up largely with liquid natural gas and with almost no disruption of consumer service. But renewables also grew explosively. Some are suggesting Saudi Arabia is supporting lower oil prices in part to stay competitive with renewables. Wind and solar capacity are growing quickly in many parts of the world. Lester Brown says the tide has turned and renewables are now unstoppable.
  • Commercial autonomous trucks are here.
  • The UK may have hit “peak car“.
  • Seattle is allowing developers to provide car share memberships and transit passes in lieu of parking spaces.

Washington State drought

Washington State has a snowpack problem.

“Snowpack is down to just 16% of normal,” Inslee said. “This is an unprecedented low. Several mountain areas have already melted out and have little to no measurable snow left…. On the Olympic Peninsula, where there would normally be 80 inches of snow today in the mountains, the glacier lilies are blooming.”

No mandatory rationing has been ordered, but because conditions recently worsened, Inslee took the step to declare the statewide emergency. Fellow Democratic Gov. Jerry Brown of California declared a statewide drought emergency in 2014, and last month ordered municipalities across the state to cut water use by 25%.

In Oregon, Gov. Kate Brown has declared a drought emergency in seven of the largest counties. Seven other counties have requested that an emergency be declared. Combined, that’s about two-thirds of the state.

April 2015 in Review

Negative stories:

Positive stories:

  • Mr. Money Mustache brought us a nice post on home energy efficiency projects. This was a very popular post.
  • Biotechnology may soon bring us the tools to seriously monkey with photosynthesis. (This is one of those stories where I struggle between the positive and negative columns, but clearly there is a potential upside when we will have so many mouths to feed.)
  • Donald Shoup, author of The High Cost of Free Parking, is retiring. That might sound bad, but his ground-breaking ideas are continuing on and actually seem to be going mainstream.
  • Lee Kuan Yew, who took Singapore “from third world to first” in one generation, passed away (in March, but I wrote about it in April. Let me be clear – I am an admirer and it is his life I am putting in the positive column, not his death.)
  • Donella Meadows explained how your bathtub is a dynamic system.
  • Robert Gordon offers a clear policy prescription for the U.S. to support continued economic growth.
  • I explain how a cap-and-trade program for stormwater and pollution producing pavement could work.
  • Joel Mokyr talks about advances in information technology, materials science and biotechnology.
  • Some U.S. cities are fairly serious about planting trees.
  • Edmonton has set a target of zero solid waste.
  • Saving water also saves energy. It’s highly logical, but if you are the skeptical type then here are some numbers. Also, urban agriculture reduces carbon emissions.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we can live forever. (positive, but do see my earlier comment about mouths to feed…)
  • A paper in Ecological Economics tries to unify the ecological footprint and planetary boundary concepts.
  • Philadelphia finally has bike share.

downscaling

Here is a useful (to me, at least) Hydrology and Earth System Sciences open article on spatial and temporal downscaling of climate change model output.

Information on extreme precipitation for future climate is needed to assess the changes in the frequency and intensity of flooding. The primary source of information in climate change impact studies is climate model projections. However, due to the coarse resolution and biases of these models, they cannot be directly used in hydrological models. Hence, statistical downscaling is necessary to address climate change impacts at the catchment scale.

This study compares eight statistical downscaling methods (SDMs) often used in climate change impact studies. Four methods are based on change factors (CFs), three are bias correction (BC) methods, and one is a perfect prognosis method. The eight methods are used to downscale precipitation output from 15 regional climate models (RCMs) from the ENSEMBLES project for 11 catchments in Europe. The overall results point to an increase in extreme precipitation in most catchments in both winter and summer. For individual catchments, the downscaled time series tend to agree on the direction of the change but differ in the magnitude. Differences between the SDMs vary between the catchments and depend on the season analysed. Similarly, general conclusions cannot be drawn regarding the differences between CFs and BC methods. The performance of the BC methods during the control period also depends on the catchment, but in most cases they represent an improvement compared to RCM outputs. Analysis of the variance in the ensemble of RCMs and SDMs indicates that at least 30% and up to approximately half of the total variance is derived from the SDMs. This study illustrates the large variability in the expected changes in extreme precipitation and highlights the need for considering an ensemble of both SDMs and climate models. Recommendations are provided for the selection of the most suitable SDMs to include in the analysis.

What is potentially useful to me is that they went to a one day time scale, and they defined an “extreme precipitation index” for storms expected to happen once a year or less on average. I am interested in how or whether these concepts can be applied to “typical” hydrologic conditions that happen at the more-than-once-a-year level. Drought and flooding are probably the two most concerning conditions impacted by climate change, but there are also questions being asked about water quality, and it is the “typical” conditions that most come into play.

drought, drought, and more drought

NPR has yet another story on how bad the drought is getting in the western U.S.

The historic four-year drought in California has been grabbing the headlines lately, but there’s a much bigger problem facing the West: the now 14-year drought gripping the Colorado River basin…

The snowpack in the Rocky Mountains, where the Colorado and much of the Southwest gets most of its water, is again at less than half of normal this year…

Some of the West’s biggest metropolises — Phoenix, Denver, Las Vegas, San Diego — all grew up during what scientists now believe was a wet period, a relative anomaly in the West.

 

March 2015 in Review

Better late than never – here’s my month in review post.

Negative stories:

  • The drought in California and the U.S. Southwest is the worst ever, including one that wiped out an earlier civilization in the same spot. At least it is being taken seriously and some policies are being put in place. Meanwhile Sao Paulo, Brazil is emerging as a cautionary tale of what happens when the political and professional leadership in a major urban area fail to take drought seriously. Some people are predicting that water shortages could spark serious social unrest in developing countries.
  • More evidence is emerging that published science skeptical of the mainstream climate consensus may have been influenced by fossil fuel industry propaganda, reminiscent of tobacco industry propaganda of the past. (By the way, tobacco industry propaganda is not a thing of the past – the industry is still up to its old tricks in developing countries that don’t stop it.)
  • El Nino has returned. Some are suggesting this is one mechanism whereby heat that has been absorbed by the ocean in recent decades could be re-released to the atmosphere. I don’t know enough to say whether this is a mainstream opinion or not.
  • Homework appears to be useless.
  • A Wall Street Journal op-ed predicts the imminent collapse of the Chinese government.
  • Farm animals, particularly pigs, are being given huge doses of antibiotics in developing countries. Beyond the risk of antibiotic resistance, it is a sign of the increasing intensification and industrialization of agriculture that is necessary as demand continues to rise.

Positive stories:

  • The concept of critical natural capital bridges the gap between strong and weak sustainability.
  • If we want to design ecosystems or just do some wildlife-friendly gardening, there is plenty of information on plants, butterflies, and pollinators out there. There is also an emerging literature on spatial habitat fragmentation and how it can be purposely designed and controlled for maximum benefit.
  • Innovation in synthetic drugs is quickly outpacing the ability of regulatory agencies to adapt. (I struggled whether to put this in the negative or positive column. Drugs certainly cause suffering and social problems. But that is true of legal tobacco and alcohol, and prescription drugs, as well as illegal drugs. The policy frameworks countries have used to deal with illegal drugs in the past half century or so, most conspicuously the U.S. “war” on drugs, have led to more harm than good, and it is a good thing that governments are starting to acknowledge this and consider new policies for the changing times.)
  • Deutsche Bank has joined the chorus predicting the coming dominance of solar power over fossil fuels.
  • There are more Uber cars than traditional taxis operating in New York City.
  • Global maternal mortality is down 40% since 1995.
  • “Germ-line engineering is much further along than anyone imagined.” This means basically editing the DNA of egg and sperm cells at will. I put this in the positive column because it can mean huge health advances. Obviously there are risks and ethical concerns too.
  • Somebody has invented an automated indoor compost bin that finicky urbanites might actually consider using.

saving energy by saving water

An article in Journal of Water Resources Planning and Management quantifies the energy savings that result from water conservation.

Saving water saves energy. Consequently, implementing integrated water management (IWM) measures that reduce potable water consumption, stormwater runoff, and wastewater generation can potentially translate into significant energy savings. In this paper, the energy savings associated with IWM measures of rainwater harvesting and gray-water reuse are estimated, both at national and local utility scales using published data. At the national scale, it is estimated in this paper that up to 3.8  billion kWh and $270 million can potentially be saved annually by replacing landscape irrigation and other outdoor water uses through rainwater harvesting alone, and up to 14  billion kWh and $950 million in combination with gray-water reuse. Similarly, in Charlotte, North Carolina, the local water utility can potentially save up to 31  million kWh and $1.8 million annually. However, annual energy and associated cost savings per household are low at either scale, ranging between 1 and 120 kWh with associated cost savings of less than $10. These results are discussed in terms of energy savings’ role in IWM policy considerations and promotion of sustainable water use in urban areas.

Oregon drought update

The drought is worsening in Oregon.

Look anywhere East of the Cascades, and the story is the same: No snow anywhere but the highest peaks, streamflows far below normal in a time of year when rivers should be rushing at peak strength, reservoirs nowhere near full and little hope for a rainy spring.

Nearly all of the state east of the Willamette Valley is already facing certain or likely drought this summer, and the valley is inching toward similar status. Southeastern Oregon is experiencing the worst effects, while higher snowpack levels have created slightly better conditions in parts of Northeastern Oregon.

parking craters

This video is about how surface parking lots have crowded out actual development in many U.S. downtowns. An interesting thing is happening in Philadelphia, where I live. Surface parking lots that have been here as long as I have (1999) are suddenly turning into development sites, all over turn. This tells me that they were being held in a holding pattern waiting for the next boom. This works in Philadelphia because there were never huge areas of parking in the central city, just smaller lots scattered here and there. But there must be some critical mass where you have so much parking that you no longer have a city at all, and maybe it is hard to recover from that.

The lots that are “temporary” for only a few decades still cause environmental problems of course. Philadelphia has the good sense to charge industrial and commercial landowners by the square foot of pavement for stormwater management, a good policy that more cities should consider (disclosure: I have some professional ties to this program). This general idea of tieing taxes and fees to external costs – in this case the environmental impact of building materials – is basic textbook economics and it works!

In theory, you could cap and trade the right to pave. Initially the credits could be sold to real estate development companies. Then, when the cap is hit, a new development would have to buy enough credits from somebody else who is willing to part with an equal amount of pavement. The alternative would be to use porous materials or low impact development techniques. Credits could be retired over time – either because the government or non-profit groups buy them and retire them, or they could be retired when an owner goes bankrupt or falls behind on property taxes. Maybe they could even be accepted as payment for certain fees or taxes (for example, fees that would have been spent on stormwater management anyway), then retired. Set up a system like this and entrepreneurs would find ways to get in on the game, putting the private sector to work on behalf of the environment.