ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

New observations from NASA/German Aerospace Center’s twin Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace) satellites reveal that massive amounts of groundwater are being sucked out of California’s Central Valley groundwater aquifers. The unsustainable withdrawals are unreported, unmonitored, and unregulated.

Between October 2003 and March 2009, more than 24 million acre-feet (30 cubic kilometers) of groundwater were pumped out of California’s Central Valley.  The withdrawals are more than 4.4 million acre-feet per year, more than three times previous estimates by California’s Department of Water Resources.

Preliminary studies show most of the water loss is coming from the more southerly located San Joaquin basin, which gets less precipitation than the Sacramento River basin farther north. Initial results suggest the Sacramento River basin is losing about 2 cubic kilometers of water a year. Surface water losses account for half of this, while groundwater losses in the northern Central Valley add another 0.6 cubic kilometers annually. The San Joaquin Basin is losing 3.5 cubic kilometers a year. Of this, more than 75 percent is the result of groundwater pumping in the southern Central Valley, primarily to irrigate crops.

Combined, California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin drainage basins have shed more than 30 cubic kilometers of water since late 2003. The overdrafts are leading to declining water tables, water shortages, decreasing crop sizes and continued land subsidence. The findings have major implications for the U.S. economy, as California’s Central Valley is home to one sixth of all U.S. irrigated land, and the state leads the nation in agricultural production and exports.

The California results come just months after a team of hydrologists led by Matt Rodell of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Md., found groundwater levels in northwest India have declined by 17.7 cubic kilometers per year over the past decade, a loss due almost entirely to pumping and consumption of groundwater by humans.

The twin Grace satellites monitor tiny month-to-month changes in Earth’s gravity field primarily caused by the movement of water in Earth’s land, ocean, ice and atmosphere reservoirs, thus directly ‘weighing’ changes in water content.

The first two months of 2009 are the driest start of any year since the USA began keeping records over a century ago, leading to severe drought in Texas and California and shrinking reservoir levels in Florida.

DROUGHT MAP

USA Today reports Richard Heim, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center, saying the 2.69-inch average rainfall across the U.S. in January and February is the least amount of moisture in those months since NOAA began keeping records in 1895.

The dry winter could mean a longer and more dangerous fire season in the summer as grasses will dry out sooner and forests will be parched.

Joseph Romm at Climate Progress points out that warming temperatures and drought are a deadly combination:

Temperature and annual precipitation are headed in opposite directions in the U.S. Southwest. Warm weather droughts are more devastating than cool weather droughts. Forest-killing warm eather droughts – the “global-change-type drought” – are the future.

And not just in the American Southwest.

Australia is experiencing the ‘big dry.” Indonesia’s tropical forests are being devastated by fire, particularly in drought years.

A new study predicts that global warming will overwhelm any efforts to save the Amazon rain forest. A 2C rise in temperatures could result in 40% of the forest being lost, and 85% of the forest would be killed by a 4C rise.

A 2C rise is pretty much baked into the cake. Global temperatures have already risen 0.8C, and carbon already in the system will carry that increase to 1.5C. Even with drastic cuts in emissions in the next decade, there is only be around a 50% chance of keeping global temperatures rises below 2C. And the odds of achieving drastic cuts in emissions are between slim and none.

Achieving any cuts at all would take a political miracle. In Lane County, it’s proving to be an impossible task to get two noncontroversial “good government” proposals enacted by a “progressive” Board of Commissioners, after several years of exhaustive prep work and coalition building. What would it take to get something really hard done, something that requires the agreement and cooperation of prickly nations around the globe?

A new study finds global warming could lead to larger changes in snowmelt in the western United States than was previously thought, increasing wildfire risk and creating new water management challenges for agriculture, ecosystems and urban populations. The study, “Future changes in snowmelt-driven runoff timing over the Western US“, will be published in an upcoming issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The researchers discovered that a critical surface temperature feedback is twice as strong as what had been projected by earlier studies. Noah Diffenbaugh, senior author of the paper and an associate professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue, explains:

“The heat trapping from elevated greenhouse gases triggers the warming, but the additional warming caused by the loss of snow is what really creates the big changes in surface runoff. Scientists have known about this general effect for years. The big surprise here is how much the complex topography plays a role, essentially doubling the threat to water resources in the West.”

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 A new IPCC report finds that the effects of climate change on the hydrological cycle are global in scope. Climate Change and Water, IPCC Technical Paper VI, warns we should be prepared for:

• Precipitation increases in high latitudes and parts of the tropics and decreases in some subtropical and lower mid-latitude regions.
• An increase in annual average river runoff and water availability  at high latitudes and in some wet tropical areas and a decrease over some dry regions at mid-latitudes and in the dry tropics.
• Increased precipitation intensity and variability, increasing the risks of flooding and drought in many areas.
• Declining water supplies stored in glaciers and snow cover.
• Higher water temperatures and changes in extremes, including floods and droughts, affecting water quality and exacerbating many forms of water pollution.

From Sunday’s New York Times:

“As California faces one of its worst droughts in two decades, building projects are being curtailed for the first time under state law by the inability of developers to find long-term water supplies.

“Water authorities and other government agencies scattered throughout the state, including here in sprawling Riverside County, east of Los Angeles, have begun denying, delaying or challenging authorization for dozens of housing tracts and other developments under a state law that requires a 20-year water supply as a condition for building.”

What’s stands out in this article is the fact that in California developers have to prove the availability of water, and development is denied if the water isn’t there.  In Oregon, cities are forced by law provide the services required to support development. Building moratoria can be declared only under severely limited circumstances, only for a short period of time, and only for the purpose of coming up with a plan to provide the necessary services.

A big difference is that in California housing developments can erupt outside of cities (urban growth boundaries don’t exist). But the idea that growth needn’t always be accommodated is one that we should take to heart.

From the Environmental News Service:

“Loss of glaciers in the Andes mountain range is threatening the water supply of 30 million people, and scientists say the lower altitude glaciers could disappear in 10 years.”

The article reports that one of the highest glaciers in South America – Chacaltaya in Bolivia – is expected to vanish this year. Although the glacier is over 18,000 years old, it is already 99% gone. Of the 18 currently existing mountain glaciers in Peru, 22% of the surface has been lost over the past 27 to 35 years. Models project that many of the lower-altitude glaciers will disappear during the next 10 to 20 years.

70% of the world’s tropical glaciers are in the high Andes Cordillera of Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador.

Shrinking water supplies will leave mountain communities, agriculture, and entire ecosystems high and dry.

Near the small community of Pucarumi in the foothills of the Peruvian Andes, indigenous potatoes can no longer be planted in lower elevation fields because there is no longer sufficient water.

The article quotes a local alpaca herder:

“We must seed them to greater height. But every year that happens, also we have less earth in mountains, Felipe says. “In few years more, no longer we will have a place to seed these potatoes.”

Large cities in the region depend on glacial runoffs for their water supply. Quito, Ecuador’s capital city, draws 50% of its water supply from the glacial basin, and Bolivia’s capital, La Paz, draws 30% of its water supply.

Power supplies also will be affected as most countries in the Andes are dependent on hydroelectric power generation. Peru gets 81 percent of its electricity from hydropower, Colombia generates 73% from hydropower, Ecuador is 72% hydro-dependent, and Bolivia, 50%.

One of the predicted consequences of global warming is increased drought. It looks like that prediction is already proving true.

Spain in general and Catalonia in particular are experiencing unprecedented drought. Water reserves across Spain have dropped to under 50% of capacity. In Barcelona, water reserves have dropped to less than 20% of capacity. If they drop below 15%, the water from the dams cannot be used. To cope with the crisis, the city is spending 22 million euros ($34.4 million) to bring five days worth of water in by boat from other parts of Europe.

Across the globe in China, Beijing and the surrounding area are experiencing the worst drought in 57 years. Drinking water supplies for millions of people and 19.4 million hectares of crops in the “breadbasket” of the country are at risk. To add to the problem, overtaxed aquifers in the area have been dropping by one to two meters in a year. As a consequence, 50,000 wells have gone dry.

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels has ordered the city to stop buying bottled water. No more bottled water at city facilities and events. The reason? Says Nickels:

“When you add up the tremendous environmental costs of disposable plastic bottles clogging our landfills, the better choice is crystal clear.”

Measures to reduce bottled water use are proliferating. The City and County of San Francisco banned bottled water in 2007. The UK government has banned its use. Santa Barbara has stopped buying bottled water. The mayors of Los Angeles and Salt Lake City have asked city employees not to use bottled water or have banned city spending on it. Ann Arbor urges residents to bring refillable bottles to city council meetings and has stopped buying bottled water for city functions. A proposal being considered in New York would ban individual bottles of water in state facilities.

Chicago imposes a 10 cent per bottle tax on bottled water – but calls it a tax on plastic, not water. Minneapolis also taxes bottled water, at sales tax rates.

A new article in Science (subs. req.) concludes that humans are responsible for most of the drying out of the West over the last 50 years – and warns that things are going to get worse.

Here’s the abstract:

“Observations have shown that the hydrological cycle of the western United States changed significantly over the last half of the 20th century. We present a regional, multivariable climate change detection and attribution study, using a high-resolution hydrologic model forced by global climate models, focusing on the changes that have already affected this primarily arid region with a large and growing population. The results show that up to 60% of the climate-related trends of river flow, winter air temperature, and snow pack between 1950 and 1999 are human-induced. These results are robust to perturbation of study variates and methods. They portend, in conjunction with previous work, a coming crisis in water supply for the western United States.”

The ethanol boom isn’t helping. A new article in Newsweek warns that overdrawing fossil aquifers to grow corn isn’t sustainable:

“We’re going to make the area a desert. It’s going to be uninhabitable.”

A new study concludes that Lake Mead could dry up by 2021 due to natural forces including evaporation and climate changes caused by global warming.

Along with Lake Powell, which is on the border between Arizona and Utah, Lake Mead supplies roughly 8 million people in the cities of Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and San Diego.  The system is currently only at half capacity thanks to a recent string of dry years.

The study pegs the probability of Lake Mead being dry by 2014 at 10%.  The odds rise to 50% by 2021. The odds are 50% that reservoir levels will drop too low for hydroelectric power generation even earlier – by 2017.

Several studies in recent years have predicted a prolonged period of drought in the Southwest as a result of global warming.

An article in LiveScience quotes study coauthor Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography of the University of California at San Diego:

“We were stunned at the magnitude of the problem and how fast it was coming at us. Make no mistake, this water problem is not a scientific abstraction, but rather one that will impact each and every one of us that live in the Southwest.”

Earlier this month Reuters reported  that Saudi Arabia has decided to stop all subsidies to agriculture:

“Saudi Arabia is abandoning a 30-year program to grow wheat that achieved self-sufficiency but depleted the desert kingdom’s scarce water supplies. . . The kingdom aims to rely entirely on imports by 2016.”

The article quoted an unnamed official:

“The reason is water resources.”

Saudi farmers used 1,300-1,500 cubic meters of water for every ton of wheat produced. As Ugo Bardi puts it at The Oil Drum: Europe, “the desert is going to win back the land it had ceded to agriculture.”

Bardi puts his finger on the problem:

“Saudi Arabian food production has been based on “fossil water.” It is water from ancient aquifers that can’t be replaced by natural processes in times of interest for human beings. Fossil water is non renewable, just as oil is, and it is unavoidable that it has to run out one day or another.”

Water production in Saudi Arabia reached a peak in the early 1990s, at more than 30 billion cubic meters per year. Today it is at around 15 billion cubic meters, less than half than the peak value.  At peak, 90% of the Saudi water came from non-renewable aquifers.

Saudi Arabia is not an isolated case in Middle East and North Africa. Several countries in the region, notably Libya, depend heavily on fossil water.