Kit Stolz

La Nina is Back: Drought Ahead?

According to experts surveyed by the Sacramento Bee, the weather pattern known as La Niña is back again this year, and it's likely to bring us a third year of drought.

This year's La Niña looks stronger and longer-lasting, said Bill
Patzert, a climatologist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
Pasadena.

"The
dice are pretty loaded here against a big snowpack and a heavy
rainfall," said Patzert. "But you know, this is one of those things
where I really love to be wrong."

Last year in Southern California the rainfall officially was in the "normal" range, but that's deceptive — virtually all the rain we received came during a period of three weeks in January, and that followed the driest water year in Los Angeles history. The New York Times alluded to this in a story yesterday:

“The worry is that La Niña does again what it did last year,” [said the state meterologist, Elissa]
Lynn, noting that the rainy season, which often lasts
through April, ended in February last year. “When we missed March and
April, we lost 20 percent of the normal precipitation.”

In 2008, runoff from the Sierras was 57 percent of normal flows; in 2007, it was 53 percent of normal.

Two or three good "Pineapple Express" storms could change everything for this year, but right now the soil maps are alarming. Here's a projection for April based on current conditions, from NOAA's soil moisture experts. The "ground truth" is that we're entering a drought now, with a correspondingly increased chance of high temps ahead.

Maybe that will change, but…

The Privilege of the Grave: essay of the year

Today David Brooks nominated some worthy magazine pieces to remember from 2008, but surely all living writers of 2008 were trumped by the magnificent essay published in last week's New Yorker by Mark Twain, The Privilege of the Grave, the opening to which you can read below.

No short writing could be more to the point, or better stated, richer, or more true. If Twain's greatness was in question, which it is not, this essay would redeem him.

Although written in 1905, it's never been published before.

ABSTRACT:
ANNALS OF DEMOCRACY about exercising free speech from the grave. Its
occupant has one privilege which is not exercised by any living person:
free speech. The living man is not really without this
privilege-strictly speaking-but as he possess it merely as an empty
formality, and knows better than to make use of it, it cannot be
seriously regarded as an actual possession. As an active privilege, it
ranks with the privilege of committing murder: we may exercise it if we
are willing to take the consequences. There is not one individual who
is not the possessor of dear and cherished unpopular convictions which
common wisdom forbids him to utter. When an entirely new and untried
political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled,
anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal.
Free speech is the privilege of the dead, the monopoly of the dead.
They can speak their honest minds without offending. We may disapprove
of what they say, but we do not insult them, we do not revile them, as
knowing they cannot now defend themselves. If they should speak, it
would be found that in matters of opinion no departed person was
exactly what he had passed for in life. They would realize, deep down,
that they, and whole nations along with them, are not really what they
seem to be-and never can be.

The New Yorker hasn't posted the full piece, unfortunately, but you can find it in the last issue of the year, for the 22nd and 29th. Here's a nice pic of the writer…

A Day for Firewood

A chore I secretly enjoy is gathering firewood. Especially at this time of year, during dry periods, when it's relatively warm, bug-free, gorgeous amidst the fallen leaves and the weathered stones.

Spent the day stomping around the creekbed, sectioning a fallen sycamore trunk with brief bursts from a roaring chainsaw, carrying the sections up into the wheelbarrow, and trundling it down the bank to be sorted out in various wood piles, inside and out.

A small accomplishment, but a real one.

Church of England Invests in Al Gore

And not a token amount, either — more than $200 million, according to Religous Intelligence:

The
Church of England’s Church Commissioners have gone green, investing
£150 million with former US Vice-President Al Gore’s environmentally
minded investment firm, Generation Investment Management.

The First Church Estates Commissioner, Andreas Whittam Smith
reported that in late September the Commissioners had placed the funds
with Gore’s boutique management firm which follows an “environmentally
sustainable global equities mandate.” Funding for the investment came
from “cash and Treasury bills”, he said, and not from the sale of UK
equities as initially planned.

The full story has a lot more details, but we don't find out how well Al Gore and David Blood's "socially responsible" investment fund, which has an asset pool of $5 billion, did during the sudden downturn since September in this year's recession. (The fund has never released its returns.)

A New York Times post from 2007 said the fund's biggest investment was in Novo Nordisk, the world's largest manufacturer of insulin, which at least at that time had advanced over thirty percent for the year.

And one has to figure the fund must have weathered the stormy economy decently, if the Anglicans are willing to sell Treasury funds to invest in it.

This news came via Drudge. It's rare to find on that ugly site an encouraging word, but Drudge even gave the story a picture of Gore speaking out, which was enjoyable to see.

Let Gore's successes gall his enemies. He deserves every bit of his fame, and in the pic below, appears to have enjoyed it with his wife Tipper when they were in Oslo (via JurgisU).

Dick Cheney vs. Laura Bush: Who Will Win Bush’s Vote?

Okay, so according to Juliet Elperin, the Wa-Po's top-notch enviro reporter, the Prez is considering designating a vast area of the Pacific, stretching more than 2,000 miles across the Marianas, for "no-take" protection as a "marine monument."

Interestingly, Laura Bush likes the idea, and has even requested briefings on the matter from scientists, but — predictably — Dick Cheney hates the idea. In an editorial, the Los Angeles Times argues:

Bush should designate these monuments, and impose the maximum allowable
protections, because it's the right thing to do — enhancing
biodiversity and helping to ward off the threats of overfishing and
pollution to our oceans. But if that's not enough to convince him, he
should consider that he doesn't have to sleep next to Cheney for the
rest of his life.

Ah, editorial boards. By their profession, they must pretend to believe that the powers that be want to do the right thing. But we've heard this tune before, and we know how it'll probably end.

In Angler, Barton Gellman recounts how Cheney scuttled Christie Whitman's efforts as head of the EPA early in Bush's first term to reduce CO2 emissions. Even though Bush had specifically promised in a major speech on the campaign trail in 2000 to regulate CO2, and even though Whitman had confirmed that promise with the White House before repeating it to a conference in Italy, she returned to D.C. to find that Cheney had somehow walked Bush back from his own pledge.

How Cheney brought the president around on global warming was a mystery to most of Bush's lieutenants. It did not hurt, officials said, that Cheney and the energy task force portrayed the scientific debate as complex, unresolved. Bush hated wading into that sort of thing, and usually told experts to come back when they had hammered out their facts.

That's our Prez: a man who hates to think for himself. Here's Toles on his exit…

Time and the Sea

From Rachel Carson’s notebooks, collected in Lost Woods:

Saw tracks of a shore bird — probably a sanderling, and followed them a little, then they turned toward the water and were soon obliterated by the sea. How much it washes away, and makes as though it had never been. Time itself is like the sea, containing all that came before us, sooner or later sweeping us away on its flood and washing over and obliterating the traces of our presence, as the sea this morning erased the footprints of the bird.

An appropriate end of the year thought, no?

Drought in the Southwest Can Last for Decades — or Centuries

One of the interesting reports coming out of the American Geophysical Union conference this year was on "abrupt" climate change. For a long time the Dust Bowl droughts of the l930's, which were indeed severe, were considered the worst the Southwest could expect. But now, based on tree-ring and pollen "proxy" studies, scientists can with confidence state that the past two millenia suffered droughts considerably worse than we saw in the Dust Bowl. Even if we choose to ignore the 18 out of 19 general circulation models that forecast a poleward shift of the winds that bring the Southwest rains, we have reason to believe that droughts in our region can last for decades — or centuries.

Here's a brief discussion from the paper (released by the US Climate Change Research Program) with a helpful graphic to follow [pp172]:

…a period of elevated aridity was found in the A.D. 900-1300 period that included four particularly widespread and prolonged multi-decadal megadroughts (Fig. 3.8). This epoch of large-scale elevated aridity was corroborated by a number of independent, widely scattered, proxy records of past drought in the West (Cook et al., 2004). In >addition, the four identified megadroughts agreed almost perfectly in timing with those identified by Woodhouse and Overpeck (1998), which were based on far fewer data.

These findings were rather sobering for the West because they (1) verified the occurrence of several past multidecadal megadroughts prior to 1600, (2) revealed an elevated background state of aridity that lasted approximately four centuries, and (3) demonstrated that there are no modern analogs to the A.D. 900-1300 period of elevated aridity and its accompanying megadroughts. This is clearly a cause for concern because the data demonstrate that the West has the capacity to enter into a prolonged state of dryness without the need for greenhouse gas forcing.

Why This Global Warming Book is Different: A Review of Dire Predictions

More books on global warming have been published in the last couple of years than anyone in their right mind (or even, anyone in the field) would want to read. Many of them are very good: Australian biologist Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers tells the story from an evolutionist's point of view with great passion — and impeccable science.

But global warming — which many scientists prefer to call climate change, knowing that the warming will not be uniform around the planet, and its effects will not be predictable — is arguably a story best presented not in words but with data. Keeping that in mind, this year two eminent scientists from Pennsylvania State University, Michael Mann and Lee Kump, published a different kind of global warming book.

Working with the "information architects" at the innovative DK Publishing, they brought out Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming (large file).

This could be described as a book written by two particularly thoughtful experts for National Geographic. Not only does the slim volume of 207 pages rely mostly on brilliantly executed visuals to get its ideas across, but the prose is simple and honest.

Let me give you an example that deals with a point often raised by those who question global warming. Skeptics often point out that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere do not always precede rising temperatures and ask: How can there be a cause and effect relationship between CO2 levels and global temperatures? Mann and Kump reply:

Data from ice cores demonstrated that fluctuations in CO2 and temperature have gone hand in hand for at least the last 400,000 years. Feedback loops in the carbon cycle make the question of whether CO2 is driving climate changes or vice versa virtually impossible to answer [but] computer models only simulate the observed cooling when input with low atmospheric CO2 levels.

This kind of honesty makes the book trustworthy. The authors don't try to skew the data, but dig into the details. At the same time, they take a sane, no-nonsense approach particularly well-suited to educators, insisting we need to change, and not just to reduce energy consumption, but also to save life-giving resources, such as water. They call for "no-regrets" changes in dealing with water management, such as replenishing ground-water supplies, increasing storage capacity, and expanding rainwater storage — music to the ears of my pals at TreePeople.

Here's an example of a page from the book. Highly recommended.

Climate Change in CA: What Has Happened Already

From the California Department of Water Resources White Paper, pdf, dated 10/08:

While the exact conditions of future climate change remain uncertain, there is no doubt about the changes that have already happened. Analysis of paleoclimatic data (such as tree-ring reconstructions of streamflow and precipitation) indicates a history of naturally and widely varying hydrologic conditions in California and the west, including a pattern of recurring and extended droughts. The average early spring snowpack in the Sierra Nevada decreased by about 10 percent during the last century, a loss of 1.5 million acre-feet of snowpack storage (one acre-foot of water is enough for one to two familes for one year). During the same period, sea level rose seven inches along California’s coast. California’s temperature has risen 10 F, mostly at night and during the winter, with higher elevations experiencing the highest increase. A disturbing pattern has also emerged in flood patterns; peak natural flows have increased on many of the state’s rivers during the last 50 years. At the other extreme, many Southern California cities have experienced their lowest recorded annual precipitation twice within the past decade. In a span of only two years, Los Angeles experienced both its driest and wettest years on record.

And here's one (just one) of the central problems forecast for the state's future:

Okay, enough ominousity for one year…on to happier topics in the days remaing ahead.

It’s Too Late to Turn Back Now (Cheap Oil mix)

From Toles, of course,