Great lakes follow up

The Toronto Star writes up an argument for paying the real price of water. The idea is that water pollution is an externality to the economic pricing of goods and services. If we raise the price of using water to better reflect the cost of using it, the theory is that the quality (and quantity?) of water will improve.

The story is adapted from the soon to be published book, “Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America” by Chris Wood. I’ve not read the book yet so I can’t comment on it but when a journalist writes stuff like this, “… the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET)” I get mildly annoyed. Evapotranspiration is one of the advanced topics of thermodynamics and part of an engineering hydrology course. It isn’t insidious in any way but fundamental to the hydrologic cycle. Without evapotranspiration, we’re screwed. So when a journalist describes fundamental science phenomena using language that inflames the reader’s unease, it isn’t serving anyone’s interest. There is a key word in there and that is amplification. Evapotranspiration is one of those things that is pretty tricky to measure accurately. It can also vary significantly within short distances and depends on a great many variables. So extrapolating from single measurements is very inexact. What we do know is that evapotranspirtation is proportional to degree days (to non corn growers out there, a degree day is a measure of heat for growing crops. Hmm wikipedia has a more general and better description than that). So as warmer temperatures are anticipated so too could evapotranspiration. However, as I said this is a not a simple process and we don’t know exactly how this will change.

Guess I’ll have to read the book to see where the argument goes.

A Brighter Shade of Green: Rebooting Environmentalism for the 21st Century

This is a longish piece by Ross Robertson that is a very interesting read. I like the idea of Bright Green vs. Dark Green.

Here is a small sample to whet your appetite.

That future will also be significantly more urban. “Manhattanites use fewer resources and less energy than anyone else in America,” writes Steffen—even people living in super-efficient green homes in the country. In fact, urban density is not only one of the best drivers of sustainable consumption but one of the best strategies for preserving wild nature as well. Rejecting the lavish inefficiency of the suburbs and learning how to integrate densely orchestrated urban communities with agricultural greenspace and healthy natural habitats will be essential to building a one-planet society. “The environmentalist aesthetic is to love villages and despise cities,” wrote Stewart Brand in MIT’s Technology Review:

My mind got changed on the subject a few years ago by an Indian acquaintance who told me that in Indian villages the women obeyed their husbands and family elders, pounded grain, and sang. But, the acquaintance explained, when Indian women immigrated to cities, they got jobs, started businesses, and demanded their children be educated. They became more independent, as they became less fundamentalist in their religious beliefs. Urbanization is the most massive and sudden shift of humanity in its history. Environmentalists will be rewarded if they welcome it and get out in front of it.

Everywhere that we see the rural-to-urban demographic swing around the world, Brand ex-plains—about two hundred thousand people a day leave the countryside for life in the city, and the planet just passed the fifty percent urban point this year—birthrates plummet and population growth stabilizes. That’s good news for developing nations being crushed under economic, environmental, and social pressures never before seen on Earth, because hand in hand with the challenges of urbanization comes an unprecedented explosion of opportunity.

Great lakes water levels

Yes, anyone that’s been to the great lakes this past fall can bear witness to the low levels.
Story here.

But how low are they?
Here and here.

One thing to consider is that the great lakes drainage basin is not a particularly deep one.
.

Compare to the Fraser River in BC.
“The Fraser River watershed is almost as large as California and accounts for over 25% of the land in British Columbia.”

What you see in comparison to the Great Lakes are fed by a myriad of relatively small and large rivers that are not very long in comparison to the long rivers like the Fraser. The great lakes basin is mostly about short duration contributing streams that are very affected by available rainfall and snowfall. The lakes themselves have a 25 year turnover, (different for each one of course).

I was of the opinion that September was a very low precip month and that was true for all of the stations in the Great Lakes but for Superior. The result is that across all the Great lakes precipitation for September was pretty much right on average.

G.L. Basin      3.48            3.41

more on precip. data is here.

So yes the precipitation this past fall has been lower for most of the Great Lakes but not necessarily lower in the extreme. Can the lower levels be a double whammy of low precip. and high evaporation? Maybe.

Climate change guide

Greg Wilson’s Third Bit points to this interesting guide.

Grist reports on the effciency of electric vs. combustion fuel cars

But even though the engines are more efficient, that doesn’t mean electric cars are more efficient overall. When you consider the fuel source, the calculations get tricky, because the source of electricity for an electric car can vary quite a bit. In a paper Tesla Motors published [PDF] recently, the company calculates that when the source of electricity is an efficient combined-cycle natural-gas generator, the fuel efficiency of the Roadster, even taking into account the power lost during transmission, is nearly twice that of the Prius. When the actual average energy mix of the U.S. grid was considered, the Roadster still beat all the other gasoline and diesel vehicles (even hybrids), though not by nearly as much. As far as pollution goes, check out this handy lifecycle assessment (hooray) to get a better sense of how different types of power sources affect the CO2 produced by different types of cars.

On the Tesla, you have to like this bit, “let’s look at the new “it” car for greens with means: the 250-mile-range, 0-to-60-in-four-seconds Tesla Roadster.”

Planet under pressure

The beeb provides a collection of stories, articles and pictures on climate change. Here is the intro and the main page.
The pictures of glaciers having changed is quite dramatic.

Water policies are failing to deliver adequate access to clean drinking water to millions of people around the world.

BBC carries a story on the UN World Water Report.

A nice map showing cubic meters of water used per capita per year.

Clean Water Act Brouhaha

Lot’s to link to on this one but I thought Judith Lewis had the best blurb that I’ve read, so far.

Hot year on record

The highest global surface temperature in more than a century of
instrumental data was recorded in the 2005 calendar year in the GISS
annual analysis. However, the error bar on the data implies that 2005
is practically in a dead heat with 1998, the warmest previous year.
From here.