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Thursday, May 29, 2008
N.M. Global (Water) Warming
By Ned Farquhar
In the West
Is the drought back? Wildfire is destroying forests and homes. It's only May and the year's precipitation is far below the annual average. After a winter full of snow in the mountains, and optimism as reservoirs started filling up again, there may be reason for concern.
A recent report by the Rocky Mountain Climate Organization, published in concert with the Natural Resources Defense Council (my employer), discusses current trends showing that the West is hotter and drier. Up and down the Rockies, there's a pattern of earlier, longer, hotter summers, more wildfire and drought, and less precipitation. This pattern is consistent with climate model predictions for the West as world temperatures steadily rise.
If these patterns persist, water managers will face a serious challenge. Reservoirs will fill up more gradually; evaporation will sharply increase. There might not be adequate water to top off community water supplies. Irrigation seasons will need to be longer but surface water supplies will be shorter.
Meeting water delivery demands stipulated in compacts drafted during water-rich years — the likes of which we may never see again — will be more difficult. In the major drought year of 2002, New Mexicans lost more than $200 million in livestock. That's a heavy financial hit for a lot of real people.
Beyond those basic human and economic concerns, of course, there are ecological issues associated with sustained drought and longer, hotter summers.
If drought persists, there will be long-term changes in western fisheries. Rivers and streams won't support cold-water species, such as trout, that many anglers value. It would take decades of restored flows for trout to reestablish, if they ever could. Warm-water species might not have adequate water supplies and their usual feed.
If the pattern of hotter, longer summers continues, plant species will die out in mountainous areas, crowded up slope and unlikely to reestablish in more northerly zones to which they would be better adapted. Opportunistic, invasive species will take advantage of changes that destroy habitat for long-established, familiar plants and animals. Elk habitat seems likely to diminish.
The observers at Mauna Loa in Hawaii say the concentration of atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide that cause global warming has been increasing faster than projected. We're at the highest concentrations of these gases in 650,000 years, and they are rising faster than they do except after epoch-making events like meteor strikes and supervolcanic eruptions.
New Mexico hasn't seen oceanfront in 70 million years, and won't for millions or billions more. We won't feel the impacts that coastal areas will experience as ice melts in the Antarctic and Arctic and sea levels rise. But our ranchers and farmers need water to survive economically, and our communities need water to provide a decent quality of life. In the interior west we won't lose ports and coastal roads and homes to rising seas and extreme storms, but we'll suffer our own economic stresses.
Some things aren't economic or environmental, like watching high school baseball on a warm spring afternoon. In some cases, the grass is green. The wind can be challenging but it makes the game more exciting, as pop flies shift in every direction. If the West gets hotter and drier, maybe we'll want to play baseball in winter. Wrestling and basketball could turn into spring and summer sports played in air-conditioned gyms. Albuquerque will feel more like Phoenix, without the domed and air-conditioned stadiums they build for the pros.
There are solutions on the horizon. We can stop importing and burning so much oil, for instance. The western states spend probably $400 million a day on foreign oil; we could develop local low-carbon resources instead. We can phase out the conventional coal plants built 30 and 40 years ago and replace them with better options. We can support regional and national proposals to reduce the amount of carbon pollution, such as the cap-and-trade program endorsed by all three presidential candidates. We must work with other nations to control their emissions, too.
The major issue, over time, is going to be water. The old water storage and management techniques will be less effective, perhaps inadequate and certainly more expensive. The forest fires are going to worsen. The baseball season might look different. Here in the interior west, water runs through everything — except when it doesn't.
Ned Farquhar is a former senior policy adviser to Gov. Bill Richardson. The views expressed are his own. E-mail: inthewest@comcast.net.
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