WaterWired

My Ten Cents: PPIC's 'Water and the California Economy'

Great way to close out May.

The California Water Blog's recent post on Water and California's Economy caught my eye. It provided a summary of a new publication (free download), Water and the California Economy, from the Public Policy Institute of California.

I've not read the entire report, I'm not an expert on California water management nor did I stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night but those shortcomings won't stop me from offering a comment or two.

The report proffers seven recommendations:

1. Modernize water measurement, accounting, and pricing with better estimates of water use and prices that reflect water’s economic value.
2. Reduce vulnerability to water supply interruptions, particularly for the large parts of the state that rely on water exported through the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, where supplies are susceptible to levee failures and measures to protect endangered species.
3. Strengthen water markets by clarifying and streamlining the approval process for the sale and lease of water rights and addressing infrastructure gaps.
4. Improve local groundwater management to facilitate groundwater banking and reduce overdraft.
5. Reduce exposure to catastrophic flood risk by targeting flood protection dollars and making better land use decisions.
6. Improve the effectiveness of environmental management through more integrated, coordinated, and accountable approaches.
7. Develop more reliable funding, especially for environmental management, flood protection, and statewide data collection and analysis.

I have no problems with any of the above and am especially glad to see numbers, 1, 4 and 7 there. But with respect to number 4, more oversight needs to be exerted by the State over its groundwater resources. I have no problem with local management groundwater management districts. However, since groundwater is generally not a 'local' resource there needs to be some overarching authority keeping a watchful eye on the local districts to ensure the actions of one district do not adversely impact the others and the overall health of California's water resources.

Perhaps the complete report addresses this issue.

The State of California does not generally have a stellar record when it comes to managing its groundwater resources on a staewide basin.

Oh, the picture? It was taken in the San Joaquin Valley in 1977, and it shows land subsidence of almost 30 feet at this location. The top sign on the pole indicates where the land surface was in 1925, the middle sign 1955. That's USGS hydrologist Joseph Poland providing the scale.   

Can California manage its groundwater? I rest my case. 

Time to go now. 

"When the Oakies left Oklahoma and moved to California, it raised the I.Q. of both states." - Will Rogers

Honorary Hoser: Taking Off Again To The Great White North

Yes, I am headed back to Canada in a few days, this time for the annual meeting of the Canadian Water Resources Association and the Canadian Geophysical Union.

I'll be up in Banff all next week, driving up in the MR2. 

Here is the program:

Download CWRA-CGU_program_2012

Looks very good.

I will be presenting on: 

Does the USA need a national water (fill in the blank) vision, strategy, policy, ethic...?

I hope to get some insight and pointers from the Canadians, who are ahead of us in the national water vision realm.

I will also be participating in a 'blue-sky' session with the CWRA's Board of Directors. So it will be a productive meeting, as long as I don't look out the window too much!

"Do not yell "dinner" until your knife is in the loaf." - Canadian proverb

An Online Community for Groundwater and IWRM? If Interested, Please Respond

It might be helpful to read an earlier post before continuing. 

 Earlier today I sent the following email out to a hundred or so of my closest groundwater friends. In it, I discuss my intention to establish an online community of all those interested in 'Groundwater and Integrated Water Resources Management'. My belief is that groundwater is often given short shrift when it comes to IWRM. My experience in Marseille leads me to believe that my opinion is shared by many others.

Dear Groundwater Friends,

Lest you wonder why you are receiving this email: I am finally getting around to contacting all of you who requested more information on IWRM and groundwater as a result of the 6WWF session

 Groundwater: Can We Put the ‘Integrated’ into Integrated Water  Resources Management?

at the Sixth World Water Forum. I have taken the liberty of adding other groundwater colleagues to this notice.

As I indicated in Marseille, as our session outcome I plan to establish an ‘online community’ so that information regarding groundwater and IWRM (including nonrenewable and transboundary groundwater) can be posted and exchanged. We need to keep this topic ‘on the table’ so that practitioners of IWRM remember groundwater.

I’d like to avoid a traditional email list if I can, perhaps by using Facebook or something similar. I will keep you informed of my efforts. I expect to have something up by the end of July 2012.

In the meantime, I have posted information and presentations from that session at my WaterWired blog.

Thanks to J.P. Lobo-Ferreira, Allyson Beall, Todd Jarvis, and Alice Aureli for their excellent presentations! And thank you for attending!

Comments and suggestions are welcomed. 

Thanks for your interest.

Michael

By the way, here is the description of the 6WWF session:

Approximately 30% of the world’s population depends upon groundwater, which comprises about 98% of the world’s liquid freshwater resources. It supplies and maintains ecosystems. Integrated Water Resources Management, with its emphasis on the watershed or river basin as the basic management unit, may suffice for surface water but can be inadequate for groundwater-dominated basins. Groundwater reservoirs may underlie several or more surficial watersheds, thereby complicating water management. Clearly, IWRM must be modified for certain situations involving groundwater. 

In addition, the perplexing topic of nonrenewable (‘fossil’) groundwater, by definition an unsustainable resource which technically falls outside IWRM but is heavily utilized, will be addressed. Nonrenewable groundwater is used for both human use and ecosystem maintenance; its human use may increase as the climate warms and surface waters desiccate.

This session will explore the aforementioned issues. 

I'm now asking my WaterWired readers if you are interested in becoming a member of this community. Please let me know by commenting directly to this post or emailing me at [email protected] (on the left sidebar below my picture you can click on 'Email Me'). Despite what I said above, this community may initially take the form of an email list to get things started. I would like to gauge the interest before I invest too much time in this endeavor.

Hope to hear from you.

“The village is coming back, like it or not.” - David Brin

WaterWired Says 'Thanks!' and Asks a Question

On this celebration of Memorial Day in the USA WaterWired takes a break from water today to say 'Thanks!' to all those who have given all or part of their lives in the service of our country.   

Perhaps all this will end one of these days.

 

"War hath no fury like the non-combatant." - Charles Montague

Mark Boslough to Heartland: Stop Using 'The Robinson Ruse' to Hide the Temperature Incline

Mark Boslough, one of the smartest guys in the room when it comes to atmospheric (or any kind of) physics and the like, recently posted over at Climate Progress and Skeptical Science regarding misuse of SST data, apparently dating back to a paper by Dr. Arthur B. Robinson et al.

The term 'The Robinson Ruse' is mine, not Boslough's. 

This misuse has been propagated throughout the global warming skeptics' community for about 15 years.  

Boslough is simply trying to get an answer/admission from Robinson but has not been successful. Boslough wanted to present his analysis of the Robinson et al. work at a recent Heartland Institute conference but was denied but was  not allowed to do so. So he posted it. 

Robinson lives up in my neck of the woods. According to his Wikipedia entry he has a BS in chemistry from Caltech (from where Boslough received his PhD), a PhD from UC-San Diego, and is the founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine (OISM). Robinson ran for Congress in my Fourth District in 2010 and will run again as a Republican this year, both times against Rep. Peter Defazio (D-OR).

Here is Part 1 (11 minutes) of a 2010 interview with Robinson by Rachel Maddow: Part 1 Here is Part 2, about 8 minutes long. Part 2 is even funnier than Part 1.

Give Boslough's post a read; it's spot-on.

"Do not waste your time with additional email. It will be shunted to the unopened file here." - Dr. Arthur Robinson, email to Mark Boslough (from the post)