Palm Springs outstrips CA’s water use by 500 gllns a day

Typically detailed, thoughtful John Fleck piece on water consumption in California…and Palm Springs. 

A new report compiled by California’s Department of Water Resources (pdf) puts the Desert Water Agency’s consumption at 736 gallons per person per day. Here in Albuquerque, we’re at 150. Compare that to, say, Sydney, Australia, which is down to 83.

The Desert Water Agency number is part of the first phase of California’s “20 by 20“, an attempt to get water agencies to cut per capita use 20 percent by 2020. I’m guessing the Desert Water Agency isn’t going to have to break much of a sweat to get down to 589 gallons per person per day.

I wonder how much of that water is going to golf courses? There's more than 130 public golf courses in the Coachella Valley surrounding Palm Springs, and almost as many private ones. 

Cawater

Worst heat in 141 years: “It’s summer,” says George Will

The inability of climate change deniers to admit the possibility that the heat wave that baked the eastern U.S. for nearly two weeks might be connected to global warming has assumed absurd proportions. 

On Sunday, on ABC's "This Week," George Will waved off the possibility in his contemptuous way: 

“You asked us — how do we explain the heat? One word: summer. I grew up in central Illinois in a house without air conditioning. What is so unusual about this? Now, come the winter, there will be a cold snap, lots of snow, and the same guys, like E.J. [Dionne], will start lecturing us. There’s a difference between the weather and the climate. I agree with that. We’re having some hot weather. Get over it.”

What's unusual about nine days in a row when Washington D.C. topped 95 degrees? It's never happened before, in 141 years of record keeping. 

A few other records Washington set recently:

* The hottest two summers on record (2010 hottest and 2011 second hottest)

* Two of the top four hottest Junes on record (2010-warmest and 2011-tied for 3rd warmest with 1943)

* Hottest June day and tie for second hottest June day (2012 at 104, and 2010 at 102 tied with June 9, 1874)

* Hottest two Julys (2011 and 2010)

* Hottest month (July 2011)

* Most 90+ degree days in a month (July 2011, 25 days)

* Earliest 100-degree reading in a day (July 6 2010, before noon)

* Longest uninterrupted stretch of temperatures above 100 (July 6, 2010, 7 hours)

* Longest uninterrupted stretch of temperatures above 80 (July 21 to 24, 2011 – over four days)

* Most and second most nights above 80 degrees (7 in 2011 and 4 in 2010)

* Warmest low temperature (84 on July 23 and 24, 2011 tied with July 16, 1983)

The Post's best-known science writer, Joel Achenbach, agreed, snapping at Will's "Get over it."

I’m not sure that advanced the conversation. Yes, climate and weather are different, but E.J. didn’t argue that the heat wave is due to climate change, he merely argued that it would be prudent to assume that climate change is going to create problems for us and we should take precautions. You can argue solutions all you want, and there is abundant room for disagreement about how to respond most effectively to climate change. But to say it’s just summer is too much like the Black Night in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” saying it’s just a flesh wound.

But Will can't open his mind to the possibility that anything has changed since he was a kid.

The Disruptors: The plastic invasion of your body

Think this is the most complex story I've ever tried to report, and one of the biggest. Hope to stay on it. From the VC Reporter:

A revolutionary change overtook America beginning in the l960s, and it’s one that had nothing to do with the usual suspects — long hair, war, sex or rock and roll.

It was an environmental change, but American pop culture noticed it long before mainstream science and medicine awoke to its consequences.

A movie put it to us as succinctly as possible. In The Graduate, a naive, confused college grad, representing his generation, was given advice from a businessman named McGuire.

“Ben, come with me for a minute,” McGuire said, taking Ben (played by Dustin Hoffman) aside at his homecoming party. “I just want to say one word to you – just one word.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are you listening?”

“Yes, sir.”

 “Plastics.”

The scene always gets a big laugh, but 45 years later, environmental scientists, doctors and researchers who specialize in diseases of the hormonal system are not so amused. They know that the amount of plastic in our lives has exploded, and in countless peer-reviewed studies over the last 15 years, they have linked the result to alarming changes they see in our bodies, our lives and our environment.

Please see the rest of the story here. 

Killer heat wave breaks Dust Bowl-era records

It's "folly" to blame the killer heat wave blanketing the eastern United States under misery on global warming, says climate change denier Anthony Watts, because, after all, the entire globe isn't suffering a heat wave. No, seriously:

The is weather, not climate. It is caused by a persistent blocking high pressure pattern. In a day or two, that red splotch [denoting heat] over the eastern USA will be gone.

Countless scientists disagree. Leading the pack on-line is Dr. Jeff Masters, who offers Chicago in 2012 as an example of a persistent change, and not a hiccup in the passage of weather patterns:

Chicago, IL hit 103° Friday, which was just 2° shy of their official all-time high of 105° set on July 24, 1934 (the unofficial Midway Airport site recorded 109° on July 23, 1934, though.) Friday was the third consecutive day with a temperature of 100° or hotter in Chicago, tying the record for most consecutive 100° days (set on July 3 – 5, 1911 and Aug 4 – 6, 1947.) Historically, Chicago has 15 days per summer over 90° and 1 day every 2.3 years over 100°. Under a higher-emissions scenario, climate change models predict that Chicago could experience over 70 days above 90° by 2100 and 30 days over 100°. With summer less than half over, Chicago has seen 18 days over 90° and 4 over 100° in 2012. The record number of 100° days in Chicago is 8, set in 1988. The heat wave in Chicago comes at the end of a nine-month period of record warmth in the city, including the warmest March on record. As a result, Lake Michigan has heated up to the warmest levels ever seen this early in the year. Temperatures of 80°–fifteen degrees above average–were measured at the South Buoy on Lake Michigan on Friday. 

And he points out that if we don't reduce greenhouse gas emissions, it will get markedly worse: Chicagoextremeheat

[Graph from the Union of Concerned Scientists.]

Blogger/thinker/writer Matthew Iglesias puts it another way, on Twitter: 

There’s a conceptual error in asking whether global warming causes unusual heat waves when the issue is that it consists of them.

And then adds:

It’s like arguing about whether hurricanes cause high wind speeds.

Have we been thinking about this all wrong?

Futurist Alex Steffen, also young, is not so philosophical:

We are waging an undeclared war on the future. 

Can't help but note the irony here: For p.r. reasons, apparently, right-wing political action committees, or CAPs, routinely reference the future. It's so uniform that they've taken virtually all the obvious names: Restore Our Future (Romney), Winning Our Future (Gingrich). American Crossroads (Rove).

A duo of young Democratic political operatives, determined to start a PAC of their own, discovered this, as chronicled in a NYTimes magazine story:

It took several weeks for Burton and Sweeney to come up with a name for their start-up [PAC]. To their irritation, every slogan they considered had already been trademarked by Republicans. “We gave our lawyer 10 more names,” Burton recalls. “Then like 50. We’re literally trying every combination of whatever. You can’t come up with a name that has the word ‘future’ in it that the Republicans don’t control. Romney’s Restore Our Future — that doesn’t even make sense, and that’s probably why they were able to get it.”    

It's so perfectly Orwellian. If you wish to have a free hand to destroy our future, it's helpful to at first take the word itself hostage. 

Van Gogh: Harmonizing brutal extremes

An extraordinary exhibit appearing at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art this summer includes a strong Van Gogh still life, painted in Paris in 1887, reproduced here, called Lilacs. 

VanGogh-Lilacs-AH-90-80_t479

Given all the technology, it's actually not too bad a copy, via the Santa Barbara Independent. 

But even better than the painting might be the curator's note. He or she quotes Van Gogh as saying to a fellow artist that he wanted with his colors to "harmonize brutal extremes." 

Opens a whole new way of thinking about his work. Also in the exhibit is another, perhaps even better painting, new to me, called Outskirts of Paris: 

Outskirts-of-Paris

In this painting, the curator pointed out, Van Gogh pits the city and its changes against the country. Another form of harmonizing extremes. 

End of the world as we know it: Sierra register edition

A great story from the Los Angeles Times about the disappearance of registers atop Sierran peaks. Here's the first few graphs:

For generations, the book survived in a metal box on California's rooftop — a small khaki-colored volume whose pages held a story of ephemeral encounters with an enduring place.

The summit register on 13,765-foot Black Kaweah in the High Sierra, placed there in 1924 by a group of outdoor adventurers, offered a window onto California's rich mountaineering history.

The signatures of pioneering alpinists from the 1920s and '30s such as Norman Clyde, Francis Farquhar, Jules Eichorn and Glen Dawson evoked a time when the Sierra was lightly trampled by a small fraternity of explorers who were unwittingly creating a sport.

The name of Walter Starr Jr., written in his own blood and dated July 10, 1929, attested to the physical and mental effort it takes to scale one of the Sierra's most remote and challenging peaks.

So challenging that after nearly 90 years, the Black Kaweah register, its spine held together with duct tape, was only half full.

"Wonderful day, and a dandy climb!!" wrote a member of a party led by Clyde, considered the most famous of all Sierra mountaineers.

The news is that these historic registers are disappearing, and nobody knows why. Can I express some sadness about this?  Not only is it sad because the registers are irreplaceable, but it's also kind of incredible, because it's so difficult to climb peaks like Black Kaweah. You would think that mountain climbers would respect the skill of the pioneers who went first, and not steal their  legacy.  

Here's a picture of Black Kaweah, one of the most intimidating Sierra peaks I've ever seen. Climbing Whitney is a breeze compared to this pup. 

BlackKaweah

Pic by Pete Yamagata

The egoist and the altruist: Javier Marias

The Threepenny Review has fallen in love with the Spanish writer Javier Marias. Every issue for the last year has included an essay of his; this summer's issue begins with his startling piece on egoists.

Here's his conclusion. Note that he seems to consider all writers to be egoists:

…the great virtue and advantage of the egoist [is] his capacity to observe without experiencing any obligation to feel pity. It is said of generous, altruistic people that they are capable of putting themselves in other people's shoes and of understanding their needs, but this can inevitably give rise to a high degree of confusion: the altruist — who is, deep down, a stickler for the rules — ends up believing that everyone's desires and needs are the same, and thus performs a kind of leveling process, the effect of which is to make these individuals replace their possible previous desires with others that the altruist considers universal. Now, that is precisely what no one wants, since our most authentic desires are unique and untransferable and, often, unconfessable. The egoist, on the other hand, tends to know himself through and through and is never likely to confuse himself with someone else, still less usurp antoher's personality. And because he is not equipped to place himself in that other person's shoes, he will never cease to see other people as individuals with their own interests and desires, which he deems to be as worthy or respect as his own. The egoist will be able to discriminate because he doesn't compare or involve himself with others. The egoist weighs his words, his actions, and his power, and when he does so, even though his objective is always his own best interest, and although one might say that, as a whole, he lacks scruples, the advantage is that he will behave with urbanity, civility, and tact, and can at least calim to be free of the two gravest and most widespread sins of our age: proselyetism and messianism. This egoist is one of the few people who is not trying to convert or save someone, and is, therefore, one of the few capable of seeing the truth. 

Javier Marias

(Don't know if I agree: Don't some egoists — say, Bill Clinton — want to convert or save people? But it's certainly thought provoking. Wonder who Marias is really thinking of…himself?)