KSL: La Niña is about to take the West's drought from bad to worse

[Rainbowbridge]

That’s awesome. I’m like Alice in Wonderland under a sink.

be careful going down the 'rabbit drain'.......

 

[Sherrie (prev MB 2000)]

Full disclosure: I am a tenured university professor and fund three months of my salary with external competitive grants in different areas of atmospheric science. Among those are building an understanding of the mechanisms that determine regional precipitation in the current climate. The rest of my job is teaching and running the university. I make less in salary than a good plumber.

Taxpayer-funded federal agencies like NOAA, NASA, DOE and NSF invest millions into climate research. Why? Because knowledge generated by the resulting science is the only concrete basis we have to make informed decisions on things like public safety, infrastructure resilience, and natural resource management. My role as a scientist is to help build a knowledge base. Who makes those decisions and who profits from them is a reflection of societal values as well as political institutions and economic structure. If there is a 'scam' in the resource stream one might look to those arenas.

Of course, science is not the only tool our society uses to base decisions. It's just the tool with - by far - the best track record. Science helps us move toward a complete understanding of the way the world works. We'll never get there, but in some areas we judge that the risk-benefit assessment moves us to act on that incomplete knowledge. Harnessing the energy in fossil fuel to power the global economy is an example. Developing a COVID vaccine to end a global pandemic is another. Science is a self-refining tool, guided by actual results.

In climate science, that modern global warming is driven by human activity is a robust, actionable theory. And yet, the year-to-year variation in regional precipitation in the western US is an important detail in that broad theory that has less predictive capability than the global trend. There are many stakeholders that would benefit from better knowledge of that important detail. Our best avenue at expanding that knowledge base is scientific inquiry. Opinion, political affiliation, industry special interest, or the Farmer's Almanac are of little use to us if we are serious about making progress on those important questions that I think really matter to those in this forum. When another tool is demonstrably better at building an actionable knowledge base, democracy and market forces will change our strategy away from using science. Then I will switch to plumbing.

Oregon, awesome post. I’m grateful for what you do and for you sharing your knowledge here with us.

 

[gianni]

I truly appreciate the participation of Oregon and JFRCalifornia in this discussion. I prefer to think that objectivity is the objective pursuant to data based solutions. Also appreciate the healthy skepticism expressed by others, which also can be addressed logically.

 

[Eagle Rock]

One of the issues with costs is the guaranteed lawsuit by environmental groups to stop the construction of a desal plant which ties up the project for years before being able to proceed. One of the groups that has been involved with several lawsuits is the sierra group. Im trying to find the article by the la times or ny times, if i remember correctly, that stated all the lawsuits the sierra club was involved in along with the cost to the taxpayers. The most interesting part in the article is a statement from the sierra club that said we can get rid of dams because we can desalinate sea water with no impact to minimal environmental impact then they turn around and sue to stop the development because desal isnt environmentally friendly and causes to much harm to ecosystems.

Hello Alex,

You said you were trying to find an article from the LA Times or NY Times about Sierra Club lawsuits. I have a NY Times full-price subscription that allows me to search their archives. I tried numerous searches for "Sierra Club" plus the words "cost" or "lawsuits" or "desalination" and found nothing back to 2005 that matched your recollection. I conclude that the article you recall was not a NY Times article, at least not in the last 16 years. Can't speak for the LA Times.

A Google search for "Sierra Club lawsuit cost" turned up GAO-11-650, Environmental Litigation: Cases against EPA and Associated Costs over Time, a GAO report from 2011 on the cost of environmental litigation against the EPA from 1995-2010. Could that be what you are remembering? That government report, which may have in turn been reported on by the LA Times, said the EPA spent about $3.3 million/year defending itself in environmental litigation, with no trend over time, plus another $1 million/year in paying legal fees in cases it lost. But that GAO report certainly did not contain anything about the Sierra Club taking opposite positions in cases involving dams versus cases involving desalination.

What have you done to try and find this article you remember? I have to say that in my personal professional experience involving both dams and desalination projects, I don't recall ever seeing a Sierra Club claim that we can replace dams with minimal impact desalination, but I have definitely seen desal projects get sued for their environmental impacts. Maybe your memory is only 1/2 right?

 

[nzaugg]

What have you done to try and find this article you remember? I have to say that in my personal professional experience involving both dams and desalination projects, I don't recall ever seeing a Sierra Club claim that we can replace dams with minimal impact desalination, but I have definitely seen desal projects get sued for their environmental impacts. Maybe your memory is only 1/2 right?

My professional experience backs up yours. Typically the desalination hold up is due to a) intake design and location and b) brine disposal. It is easy to dismiss these lawsuits as frivolous, but the National Environmental Protection Act requires stakeholder input concerning potential impacts. It is easy for me as an engineer to dismiss the potential impacts from my projects or to determine that what we are doing is better than the current situation anyway so it should be acceptable. However, impacts are not always proportional and the group doing the design work may not have a full understanding of all the concerns. When inappropriate attention is paid to the environmental review, these other stakeholders are given little choice but to file a lawsuit. While it wouldn't surprise me if the Sierra Club had been involved in a lawsuit to block a desalination project, they have limited resources and typically pick projects to sue when their input has not been received at all or where they have been excluded from the process. They have also sued to push communities to discontinue outdated practices and to modernized to reduce their impacts on the environment. While sometimes I personally disagree with their conclusions and reasoning, I do admire the way they stick to their mission and attempt to make projects better from and environmental standpoint, which while frustrating because it can delay projects, eventually results in what is often a better (though more expensive) project.

 

[JFRCalifornia]

My professional experience backs up yours. Typically the desalination hold up is due to a) intake design and location and b) brine disposal. It is easy to dismiss these lawsuits as frivolous, but the National Environmental Protection Act requires stakeholder input concerning potential impacts. It is easy for me as an engineer to dismiss the potential impacts from my projects or to determine that what we are doing is better than the current situation anyway so it should be acceptable. However, impacts are not always proportional and the group doing the design work may not have a full understanding of all the concerns. When inappropriate attention is paid to the environmental review, these other stakeholders are given little choice but to file a lawsuit. While it wouldn't surprise me if the Sierra Club had been involved in a lawsuit to block a desalination project, they have limited resources and typically pick projects to sue when their input has not been received at all or where they have been excluded from the process. They have also sued to push communities to discontinue outdated practices and to modernized to reduce their impacts on the environment. While sometimes I personally disagree with their conclusions and reasoning, I do admire the way they stick to their mission and attempt to make projects better from and environmental standpoint, which while frustrating because it can delay projects, eventually results in what is often a better (though more expensive) project.

Agree with all that, and it's been my experience too. Sierra Club picks and chooses based on limited resources, and where they think they can have the biggest influence on outcome. I also agree that their input is important, even if frustrating at times, because in the end you have a better project. At times, they've actually been supportive of projects I've been involved in, especially if its seen as contributing to an overall improvement to the status quo.

In CA, the other layer of environmental review is the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), which is much bigger deal in this state than NEPA, but it in general has really been a useful law in terms of getting public input to end up with a better project. And full disclosure here: I've been a CEQA consultant for 30 years or more, so I know that law pretty well...for better or worse...