But, does it stick on the barn door?

 The tedious mixture of hyperbole and desiccated cliches politicians hurl at global-warming crises for which they have been unwilling to prepare the public remind us of a general comment about politicians from the 19th Century:

To delude others and by deluding them to delude yourself--this is parliamentary wisdom in a nutshell! -- Karl Marx, Sept. 8, 1872. in Istvan Meszaros, Beyond Capital, p. 679.
 

 -- blj
 

 
 
7-15-15
Cal;iforniawaterblog.com
Is California’s drought a ‘new normal’ ?
By Stephen Maples
http://californiawaterblog.com/2015/07/15/is-californias-drought-a-new-n...
Many are wondering whether the current drought is the harbinger of a drier California with more frequent and longer multi-year dry spells.
Some have already jumped to this conclusion.
“This is the new normal,” Gov. Jerry Brown declared during an April 1 press conference announcing mandatory urban water restrictions statewide, the first in state history. The news media amplified the pithy quote and several other elected officials have repeated the claim as their own.
Brown made the announcement at a snowless Sierra snow survey site. The water content of the mountain snowpack, so crucial to California’s water supply, was only 5 percent of the April 1 average, by far the lowest reading on record for that date.
The governor’s phrase surfaced the following week during a conference on water scarcity organized by UC Davis graduate students. The students asked more than a dozen the speakers, “Is increased water scarcity in the West the ‘new normal’?”
The responses were diverse, suggesting a lack of consensus among water experts. Several speakers answered unequivocally in the affirmative.
“At the end of the day the answer is yes,” said Pat Mulroy, a senior fellow with the Brookings Institution and former general manager of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “But I think what you’re (also) going to have is much more erratic precipitations. You’re going to have more rainfall, less snowfall. That change alone will make a huge difference and can contribute to the scarcity picture.”
Other speakers – experts in atmospheric science, climatology, history, hydrology and water policy – hesitated to characterize increased water scarcity as a “new normal” without adding qualifiers to their response.
“Climate-wise, the norm depends on what time period you’re looking at…10-year, 30-year, 100-year or a 500-year [or a] 5000-year [period]?” said David Easterling, chief of the Global Applications Division at the National Climatic Data Center.
Paleoclimate records show California has endured “mega-droughts”  that lasted more than 100 years. Increased water scarcity, Easterling said, is “probably not” a new norm given the “huge swings” in the Earth’s climate over the eons.
Several studies report conflicting findings on the link between the California drought and climate change. But there is scientific consensus that increasing temperatures under climate change can worsen effects of drought, increasing evaporation and transpiration of surface water and soil moisture.
A warmer atmosphere will take more water from the land, said Reed Maxwell, a hydrology professor at the Colorado School of Mines. “That means the amount of water going into the terrestrial system, going into streams, going into groundwater, going to lakes… it has to be less.”
Other speakers pointed out that water scarcity is driven by both supply and demand.
While it remains to be seen how climate change will affect California’s water supply, water demand is certain to increase, said Richard Howitt, a UC Davis professor emeritus of agricultural and resource economics.
“With or without climate change, environmental requirements, our agricultural crop impacts and our population growth all contribute to increasing scarcity,” Howitt said. “We can cope with it, but we have to be smart about it.”
If anything clear emerged from the “new normal” discussion, it’s that the catch-phrase raises more questions than it answers. The interplay between climate change and water supply at local and regional scales is still poorly understood.
Proclaiming the current drought as the “new normal” under climate change is premature, if not deceptive. But it may help sell Californians on water conservation and prepare them for future droughts, which is likely what the governor and other politicians have in mind.
Stephen Maples, a graduate student in hydrology, helped organize the Water Scarcity in the West conference as a 2014-2015 fellow with the Climate Change, Water and Society IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education Research and Traineeship) program at UC Davis. IGERT Fellows Alejo Kraus-Polk and Lauren Foster contributed to this blog.
 

The new Green Math of South Carolina
Submitted: Oct 05, 2015
By: 
Badlands Journal editorial board
 10-5-15
Democracy Now!
http://www.democracynow.org/2015/10/5/headlines#1054
Gov. Nikki Haley: "When you think about what we’re sitting in right now, we are at a thousand-year level of rain in parts of the Lowcountry. What does that mean? We haven’t seen this level of rain in the Lowcountry in a thousand years. That’s how big this is. That’s what South Carolina is dealing with right now. The Congaree River is at its highest level since 1936."

10-5-15
Santa Rosa Press Democrat
Sonoma County vineyard owners lauded for water conservation
Guy Kovner

http://www.pressdemocrat.com/news/4555747-181/sonoma-county-vineyard-own...
Two top state regulators came to Wine Country Friday to applaud 41 rural landowners, including the owners of seven vineyards, for signing voluntary agreements to conserve water or add water to coho salmon-rearing creeks in the Russian River watershed.
“I am stunned,” Chuck Bonham, director of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife, told a crowd of about 40 people at the Kendall-Jackson Wine Estate & Gardens in Santa Rosa, describing improved conditions for the thousands of juvenile salmon and steelhead trout trapped in four drought-diminished creeks until winter rain carries them to the river.
“I think we may actually make it,” he said. “Thank you from the big bad regulator at the Department of Fish and Wildlife.”
“What we have done here is the beginning,” said Karen Ross, secretary of the California Department of Food and Agriculture.
“Look at the future. It is going to build on what you’ve started here,” she said, referring to the challenge of coping with climate change. “This is what we’re going to have to do in this century,” Ross said.
The event came as a counterpoint to widespread resentment from the belief that vineyard expansion is largely to blame for creeks going nearly dry.
Katie Jackson, a vice president with Jackson Family Wines, said that her company, one of Sonoma County’s largest vineyard owners with 3,600 planted acres, has made water conservation a “priority for many years,” using wind machines instead of spraying vines with water for most frost protection and cutting water use in the winemaking process by 49 percent since 2008.
Jackson Family Wines signed agreements to conserve water at three vineyards in the Sebastopol area and a fourth agreement to pump up to 2.3 million gallons of water from a reservoir serving a pinot noir vineyard on Bones Lane into Green Valley Creek.
Since the release began in August, the creek refilled, connecting a series of pools in which coho were found, said Jordan Traverso, deputy director of the wildlife agency.
The wine company also donated $40,000 to a Trout Unlimited program to purchase rainwater collection tanks for rural residents.
Coho and steelhead are local species that spawn in fresh water, with juveniles spending their first year there before migrating to the ocean. Coho are listed as an endangered species in the Russian River system; steelhead are a threatened species.
Bonham also announced that an ad hoc group of 71 grape growers who farm about 1,900 acres of vineyards in the watersheds have collectively agreed to reduce water use by 25 percent this year.
Bob Anderson, executive director of the United Winegrowers for Sonoma County, was instrumental in putting together the agreement, along with Doug McIlroy of Rodney Strong Vineyards and Joe Dutton, a Sebastopol area grower, according to Carolyn Wasem, a senior vice president at Jackson Family Wines.
Two Santa Rosa area vineyard owners and two in the Healdsburg area also signed water conservation agreements with the state.
“We’re at ground zero,” said Sonoma County Supervisor James Gore, in what he called an effort to “stave off the extinction” of federally protected fish. “This is not green-washing. I don’t believe in it. You don’t either. Everybody in the state is watching us now.”
The Camp Meeker water system, which delivers water to about 350 homes, agreed to release more than 63,000 gallons of water a day into Dutch Bill Creek until the rains come, while Sebastopol area residents Chris Panym and Michael Paine committed to releasing up to 1.6 million gallons of water into Green Valley Creek.
Camp Meeker’s release, which amounts to just 44 gallons a minute, has boosted Dutch Bill Creek’s flow to .05 cubic feet per second at a flow gauge where the creek was dry at this time last year and was .012 cfs the two previous years, Corinne Gray, a Department of Fish and Wildlife environmental scientist, said in an interview.
David Hines of the National Marine Fisheries Service said that Green Valley and Dutch Bill creeks were wetter farther downstream, with cooler and more oxygenated water since the augmented flows started.
“It looks like conditions are way better than they were a couple of weeks ago,” Bonham said.
Supervisor Gore hailed the voluntary conservation commitments, also telling the crowd that the “biggest challenge is not to buy into villainization.”
 “No one is exempt from the drought,” he said.
Local activists and some landowners along the creeks have blamed the perilously low water levels on vineyard expansion, which has nearly doubled the acreage covered by grapevines in the last 25 years, reaching nearly 60,000 acres last year.
That angst was heightened when the State Water Resources Control Board in June imposed sweeping new water conservation rules, including bans on sprinkling lawns and washing cars, on thousands of landowners in the Dutch Bill, Green Valley, Mill and Mark West creek watersheds, but exempted vineyards from the rules.
At a public meeting held by the water board in July at Occidental, one man said the rules were “doomed to fail because the main culprits are not included.”
Asked about that concern, Bonham said, “All of us have contributed to where we are today,” including rural residents and vineyards.
As befits Modesto-based E & J Gallo Wine Co., tied with Jackson Family Wines for the largest vineyard holdings in the county (both over 3,200 acres), Gallo's spokespersons in Sonoma County must simply have been too modest to disclose what Gallo was doing to conserve water on the numerous vineyards large and small that it has accumulated there. -- blj