Details: Two-thirds of Americans say extreme weather events in the U.S. have been occurring more frequently than in the past, while only 28% said they’ve been taking place about as often, and just 4% perceiving a dropoff in frequency.
When it comes to extreme weather events in their backyards, 46% of U.S. adults say the area where they live has had an extreme weather event over the past year.
The area with the greatest number of people reporting an extreme weather event was the South Central Census Division. It includes Louisiana, a state hit hard by Hurricane Ida and heavy rainfall events.
Yes, but: Even on perceptions of extreme weather events, there is a partisan split, the survey found, with Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents more likely to report experiencing extreme weather than Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
The survey of 10,371 Americans took place from Sept. 13–19, 2021, and has a margin of error of plus or minus 1.6 percentage points.
What climate change and sea level rise will do to American cities
Ben Adler, Senior Climate Editor October 13, 2021
The space center in Houston surrounded by a moat; the famous beach in Santa Monica, Calif., completely submerged; a former sports stadium in Washington, D.C., turned into a bathtub — these are just some of the startling images of the future in America’s largest cities without action to limit climate change, according to new research by Climate Central, a research and communications nonprofit.
Because of greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels, average global temperatures have already risen 1.2° Celsius (2.2° Fahrenheit) above the preindustrial era, but as glaciers and polar ice caps melt, there is a decades-long lag for sea level rise. So a team of researchers from Climate Central projected how much the waters will rise if the world reaches only 1.5°C of warming, which is the goal world leaders set forth in the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Hover over and click/hold slider for before and after: https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/7520888/embed?auto=1
But even limiting temperature rise to 1.5°C will result in flooding in and around some key sites. Santa Monica, for example, will lose its beach at 1.5°C of warming, once sea level rise has caught up. The projections also show how much more the tide will rise in the heart of some of the world’s largest cities and most famous sites if that warming is doubled, which will happen within 100 years if nations take no action to combat climate change.
“We’re expecting, based on our current warming track, to reach something close to 3°C this century,” said Peter Girard, communications director at Climate Central. “It will take a long time for the seas to rise to match that temperature. It may be centuries in the future, but we can understand with relative precision where it will eventually settle.”
And that place will be unsettling to many. Whether it’s an international landmark like London’s Buckingham Palace or a more obscure site like the Texas Energy Museum being underwater, the images of city streets turned to rivers and once-inhabitable buildings sticking out of the water like piers are a striking warning of what may be to come. https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/7521374/embed?auto=1
Of course, in reality these buildings aren’t even necessarily going to be there if the world breaches 2°C of warming. Long before an area is actually underwater, it will face regular flooding from heavy rainfalls and storm surges — which are also becoming more frequent and severe because of climate change. Buckingham Palace in London and Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Stadium in Washington, D.C., will have to be abandoned due to rising waters unless dramatic action is taken to save them.
Even though the nation’s capital and other U.S. cities such as Philadelphia included in the study aren’t on the coastline, they are connected to the ocean by rivers, and their riverfront areas are projected to face much higher water levels.
The consequences of sea level rise will fall hardest in the developing world, where huge populations live in large coastal cities. According to a paper published on Oct. 11 in the journal Environmental Research Letters by the Climate Central researchers behind the project, if greenhouse gas emissions continue at a high level and warming reaches 4°C, “50 major cities, mostly in Asia, would need to defend against globally unprecedented levels of exposure, if feasible, or face partial to near-total extant area losses.” https://flo.uri.sh/visualisation/7522014/embed?auto=1
A major inflection point in the effort to prevent such catastrophic climate change is approaching when the successor to the Paris agreement is negotiated in early November in Glasgow, Scotland. Currently, nations have not pledged enough emissions cuts or climate finance to avert the warming scenarios that Climate Central explored, but the organization’s hope is to help spur more aggressive action.
“One of the opportunities to make decisions at an international level is coming up in Glasgow, and hopefully this work by visualizing the stakes contributing to a positive outcome,” Girard said.
A half-mile installation just took 20,000 pounds of plastic out of the Pacific – proof that ocean garbage can be cleaned
Aria Bendix October 15, 2021
An offshore Ocean Cleanup crew visiting the new device in the ocean. The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit organization, aims to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.
It recently debuted a device it said collected 20,000 pounds from the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
But some scientists worry the device still isn’t effective or environmentally friendly enough.
It’s been nearly a decade since Boyan Slat announced at age 18 that he had a plan to rid the world’s oceans of plastic.
Slat, now 27, is a Dutch inventor and the founder of the Ocean Cleanup, a nonprofit that aims to remove 90% of floating ocean plastic by 2040.
That goal has often seemed unattainable. The Ocean Cleanup launched its first attempt at a plastic-catching device in 2018, but the prototype broke in the water. A newer model, released in 2019, did a better job of collecting plastic, but the organization estimated that it would need hundreds of those devices to clean the world’s oceans.
What if we paved roads with plastic trash?
Scientists and engineers began to question whether the group could deliver on the tens of millions of dollars it had acquired in funding.
But over the summer, the organization pinned its hopes on a new device, which it nicknamed Jenny. The installation is essentially an artificial floating coastline that catches plastic in its fold like a giant arm, then funnels the garbage into a woven funnel-shaped net. Two vessels tow it through the water at about 1.5 knots (slower than normal walking speed), and the ocean current pushes floating garbage toward the giant net.
In early August, the team launched Jenny in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, a trash-filled vortex between Hawaii and California. The garbage patch is the largest accumulation of ocean plastic in the world, encompassing more than 1.8 trillion pieces, according to the Ocean Cleanup’s estimates.
Last week, Jenny faced its final test as the organization sought to determine whether it could bring large amounts of plastic to shore without breaking or malfunctioning. The Ocean Cleanup said the device hauled 9,000 kilograms, or nearly 20,000 pounds, of trash out of the Pacific Ocean – proof that the garbage patch could eventually be cleaned up.
“Holy mother of god,” Slat tweeted that afternoon, adding, “It all worked!!!”
Slat’s ocean-cleaning device has come a long way since the original prototype: a 330-foot-long floating barrier that resembled a long pipe in the water.
The newest version is U-shaped and more flexible, like the lane dividers in a pool. Once its attached net fills with plastic (every few weeks or so), a crew hauls it up out of the water and empties the garbage onto one of the vessels that pull it.
The Ocean Cleanup’s new plastic-catching system, nicknamed Jenny, in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. The Ocean Cleanup
Once it’s brought to shore, the plastic gets recycled. For now, the Ocean Cleanup is using the plastic to make $200 pairs of sunglasses, funneling the proceeds back into the cleanup efforts. Eventually, the organization hopes to partner with consumer brands to make more recycled products.
Slat estimated that the team would need about 10 Jennys to clean up 50% of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch in five years. A single device can hold 10,000 to 15,000 kilograms of plastic, he tweeted.
Concerns about the ocean-cleaning device linger
Plastic accumulating in a net, or “retention zone.” The Ocean Cleanup
The Ocean Cleanup system collects several types of floating garbage, including large containers, fishing nets, and microplastics just a few millimeters in size. But it captures only plastic floating near the ocean’s surface. A study published last year suggested that there may be upwards of 30 times as much plastic at the bottom of the ocean as there is near the surface.
The organization says large pieces of floating plastic will ultimately degrade into microplastics that are much harder to clean up.
The Jenny device, of course, doesn’t prevent plastic from entering oceans to begin with. Researchers have estimated that about 11 million metric tons of plastic are dumped into the ocean each year. By 2040, that figure could rise to 29 million metric tons. Ten Jenny devices would be able to collect 15,000 to 20,000 metric tons a year, according to the Ocean Cleanup.
An Ocean Cleanup member sorting plastic on one of the team’s support vessels. The Ocean Cleanup
What’s more, the boats that pull the Jenny device require fuel, meaning there’s an environmental cost. The device was originally designed to passively collect plastic using the ocean’s current, but that design led to it spilling too much of the trash it had collected. The Ocean Cleanup says it’s purchasing carbon credits to offset the towing vessels’ emissions.
“Once plastic has gotten into the open ocean, it becomes very expensive and fossil-fuel intensive to get it back out again,” Miriam Goldstein, the director of ocean policy at the think tank Center for American Progress, told Reuters last month.
But Slat tweeted on Saturday that there’s still time to address those concerns.
“Lots of things still to iron out,” he wrote of his group’s plastic-cleaning work, “but one thing we now know: deploy a small fleet of these systems, and one *can* clean it up.”
Lake Tahoe water level hits four-year low as drought pummels tourist spot
Dani Anguiano in Los Angeles October 13, 2021
Lake Tahoe’s water level dropped to a four-year low on Tuesday as gusty winds and the impacts of California’s devastating drought hit the popular tourist destination.
After days of high winds increased evaporation rates, water levels fell to the basin’s natural rim for the first time since 2017, the end of the state’s last drought. The lake normally sits above the rim, which allows for water to flow into the Truckee River. Levels will probably continue to drop, receding below the rim this week, sooner than expected.
Though the lake’s water levels have fallen to this point several times in recent years, this week’s drop concerns researchers like Geoffrey Schladow, the director of the UC Davis Tahoe Environmental Research Center.
“It’s a sign of change at the lake,” Schladow said. “Change is very difficult to manage … When we start seeing things we’ve never experienced before at a greater frequency, it’s challenging.”
Officials reported earlier this year that Lake Tahoe was experiencing its third-driest year since 1910. Between June 2020 and June 2021, the lake dropped about 3ft.
Once the lake falls below its natural rim, it will stop flowing into the Truckee River, cutting off a major source of water to the river, and the region will see more algae washing up on beaches. Winter weather will ultimately determine how long the low water levels will last, and the extent of the impacts in the region. Though snow has fallen in the area in the last month, water levels could fall below the rim again by next summer with even an average year of precipitation, Schladow said.
“To me the big danger is next summer,” he said.
Empty chairs stand on the beach with the sky obscured by the smoke of the Caldor fire, in South Lake Tahoe, California, in August. Photograph: Aude Guerrucci/Reuters
Declining lake levels are already affecting the shoreline, drying up coves and boat ramps and forcing tour boat operators to find new ways to get customers on to the water, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
“You can’t get within 150 yards of the normal shoreline” in South Lake Tahoe, Kelsey Weist, the owner of Clearly Tahoe, which runs tours around the lake, told the newspaper.
The entire region is grappling with impacts of the drought and the climate crisis. The US Forest Service cancelled Lake Tahoe’s annual fall salmon festival because low water levels meant Kokanee salmon would not spawn in nearby Taylor Creek.
Lake Tahoe saw unusually high water temperatures over the summer, a worrying development as warmer water makes the lake more hospitable to invasive species.
Meanwhile, the Caldor fire imperiled the region, forcing mass evacuations, upending the tourism industry and showering the area – and the lake – in thick ash. Smoke from the fire cooled the water temperature and reduced clarity in the lake, and researchers are still evaluating its impact.
The climate crisis will have major effects on the lake in the coming years, warming water, affecting oxygen levels and potentially increasing wind events that could further diminish water levels.
Schladow said combating climate change largely required action globally, but there were things that could be done locally to help the lake. Decreasing driving in the Tahoe Basin would help reduce the amount of algal growth in the lake, as would using fewer fertilizers on lawns and gardens.
“A lot of what we’ve been advocating is to try to build the resilience of the lake to climate change,” he said. “This is going to keep happening – how can we make the lake better able to withstand it?”
Flooding could shut down a quarter of all critical infrastructure in the U.S.
Andrew Freedman October 11, 2021
About 25%, or 1 in 4 units of critical infrastructure, such as police stations, airports and hospitals, are at risk of being rendered inoperable due to flooding, a comprehensive new report finds. The report points to climate change for heightening risks.
Why it matters: The new national inventory of flood risk during the next thirty years, which takes into account climate change-driven increases in sea levels and heavy precipitation events, is the first of its kind.
The report, from the First Street Foundation, a nonprofit flood research and communications group, presents a stark warning to communities of all sizes — the U.S. simply isn’t ready for the climate of today, let alone the extreme weather and climate events that are coming in the next few decades.
Specifically, during the next 30 years as the climate continues to warm, the flood risk situation will grow more dire, the report warns.
By the numbers: Consider these aggregate statistics from the “Infrastructure on the Brink” report:
About 2 million miles of road are currently at risk of becoming “impassable” due to flooding.
Nearly a million commercial properties, 17% of all social infrastructure facilities, and 12.4 million residential properties also have “operational risk,” according to the First Street analysis.
Over the next 30 years, the typical lifetime of a home mortgage, about 1.2 million residential properties, and 2,000 pieces of critical infrastructure (airports, hospitals, fire stations, hazardous waste sites and power plants) will also be at risk of becoming inoperable due to flooding from sea level rise, heavy rainfall, and in some cases a combination of the two, the report finds.
Infrastructure at risk of becoming inundated due to flooding in today’s climate. Courtesy: First Street Foundation
Context: The report comes during a year that has already featured a record 18 separate billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the first nine months of the year, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
According to the First Street analysis, which uses an open-access flood model that incorporates coastal and inland flooding, the most at risk county in the U.S. for flood risk is tucked into the extreme southwestern corner of Louisiana. Cameron Parish is sparsely populated, with just 5,600 people as of the 2020 Census, but it’s a hotbed of flood risks.
Of note: In Cameron Parish, the report shows that nearly 99% of residential properties, and similarly sky high counts of commercial and critical infrastructure structures, are already at risk of flooding so severe that it would knock them out of service.
Six of the seven top counties for risk are in the New Orleans area, Jeremy Porter, head of research and development at First Street, told Axios.
The communities most at risk are located in Louisiana, Florida, Kentucky and West Virginia, with 17 out of the 20 most at-risk counties in the country located in those states, the analysis concluded.
The city slated to see one of the biggest jumps in vulnerability between now and 2050 is Norfolk, Virginia, which is home to the world’s largest naval base, among other military installations.
How it works: Human-caused climate change is increasing sea levels around the world, but seas are rising especially quickly in the Mid-Atlantic region due largely to peculiarities in ocean currents.
In addition, Warming ocean and air temperatures are also translating into added water vapor in the atmosphere that can fuel stronger storms with heavier downpours.
The most recent report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found increasing evidence tying global warming to more extreme precipitation events.
What they’re saying: “Our nation’s infrastructure is not built to a standard that protects against the level of flood risk we face today, let alone how those risks will grow over the next 30 years as the climate changes,” said Matthew Eby, founder and executive director of the First Street Foundation, in a statement.
Why the American west’s ‘wildfire season’ is a thing of the past – visualized
Gabrielle Canon and Rashida Kamal – October 11, 2021
It’s only October, and 2021 has already been a horrendous year for wildfires in the American west. The Dixie fire leveled the town of Greenville. The Caldor fire forced the evacuation of tens of thousands in Lake Tahoe. Some fires sent plumes so high into the atmosphere that the toxic air reached the east coast thousands of miles away.
Fire is an important part of life in the American west and essential for the health of the landscape, but as the climate has changed so have wildfires in the region.
What the US Forest Service once characterized as a four-month-long fire season starting in late summer and early autumn now stretches into six to eight months of the year. Wildfires are starting earlier, burning more intensely and scorching swaths of land larger than ever before. Risks for large, catastrophic fires like the Camp fire that leveled the town of Paradise in 2018 are rising. Area charts showing the acres burned by wildfires in California since 2010.
Firefighters can still recall a time when battling a so-called megafire – a blaze that torches more than 100,000 acres – was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. These days, it’s far more common for fires to stretch across enormous spans of land.
More than half of the 20 largest fires in California history burned in just the last four years. Eight of the top 20 fires in Oregon occurred in that time frame too. Last year, Arizona saw the most acres burned in its history. California’s August Complex fire, which consumed more than 1m acres alone, became the first-ever giga-fire in 2020. The Dixie fire this year came close to becoming the second, burning through more than 963,200 acres.
It’s hard to know what the past few years of exceptional blazes will mean in the long term, said Neil Lareau, an atmospheric scientist and professor at the University of Nevada. But the changes point to the dominant role of heat and a warming climate, he said.
“It’s lengthening fire season. It’s giving us more days that are burning at higher intensity. And the result of that is massive fires. They’re more intense, and they’re producing more extreme fire weather,” Lareau said.
Why this is happening
The conditions that set the stage for a staggering escalation in wildfire activity in the American west are layered and complicated, but the climate emergency is a leading culprit.
The climate crisis has amplified drought and heat, two factors that have always been natural parts of western landscape, but play crucial roles in driving bigger blazes.
As early as spring this year, when the landscape is typically still lush from winter rains, there were signs of the historic drought settling in across the region. Hillsides had already started to brown, shrubbery was shriveling, and the dense layer of duff, the damp vegetation that collects and decomposes on the forest floor, was quickly drying. The landscape was prone to burn much earlier than in typical years, increasing the risks that small ignitions could quickly turn into infernos.
Then came the heat. With the landscape already drying rapidly, devastatinglyhottemperatures baked even more moisture out of the environment and helped summer deliver on the dire warnings: thousands of fires burned hot and fast.
Fueled by the desiccation and heat, the blazes behaved erratically, shooting sparks and embers over miles of containment lines and crossing terrain once believed less burnable.
Firefighters experienced conditions they had never encountered before, making the fires harder to fight and in some cases nearly impossible to stop.
“We have crossed some thresholds where fire is increasingly hard to control,” said Eric Knapp, a research ecologist for the US Forest Service fires and fuels program. “It is kind of controlling us at this point.”
In the first nine months of 2021, the US has already recorded 11 wildfires reaching more than 100,000 acres in size.
The combination of drought, ample fuel, and wind conditions have made these fires harder to control, leading them to burn longer and cover more ground.
Some of the fires performed never-before-seen feats. The Dixie and Caldor fires crossed the granite ridges in the Sierra Nevada, traveling over one side of the mountainous range to the other.
Some burned so hot they formed pyrocumulus clouds, enormous cloud formations visible from space. In the Bootleg fire, the volatile atmospheric conditions produced a “fire tornado” that reached as high as 30,000 to 40,000ft and was powerful enough to tear the pavement off roads, according to Lareau.
While global heating exacerbated the conditions that helped create the bigger blazes, it didn’t act alone. Decades of mismanagement, with limited prescribed burns and thinning of the overgrowth has also played a role. Forests are now littered with too many dead and dying trees, old stumps and dried underbrush that act as tinder to spark fires faster and farther.
Meanwhile, the early start of the fire season means the window for proven fire mitigation efforts is shorter and shorter. “The fall prescribed burning window doesn’t exist in some years,” said Knapp.
What’s ahead
The summer has already been brutal, but the highest danger for fire may not yet have passed.
More than 95% of the west remains mired in drought, with more than half of the region classified in extreme or exceptional conditions. It’s the most “expansive and intense” drought seen in this century, according to the US Drought Monitor.
Higher than normal fire threats also remain in Oregon and Washington, in the Great Basin, and Rocky Mountain areas according to the National Interagency Fire Center. While the Pacific north-west could see some relief in the coming months, problems in California are sure to mount.
As southern California braces for hot, dry, gusty winds typical in autumn, researchers fear that the rains needed to replenish the parched landscapes won’t come. Moisture levels are so low, even a strong storm won’t be enough to quell the flames of tomorrow.
“We are really concerned about what the fall is going to look like,” said AccuWeather’s chief meteorologist, Johnathan Porter. “It is hard to imagine it being any drier than it is now in southern California – it is a real extreme.”
Strong dry winds are expected to continue episodically over the next three months. And the rains that once signalled the end of the season are more and more erratic.
“The precipitation that used to end the fire season is becoming more variable and less reliable,” said LeRoy Westerling, a professor at University of California Merced who studies how the climate crisis affects wildfires.
Bigger blazes are increasing the burdens carried by firefighters, who are experiencing higher rates of suicide, depression and fatigue. Firefighters are leaving the force in large numbers, adding to the crunch. At the start of this summer the USFS reported that 725 vacant firefighting positions went unfilled.
There are still solutions and mitigations that could slow the shift in intensity – but researchers say that window is closing.
“The trends that are driving this increase in fire risk, fire size, fire severity over time are continuing – that’s climate change.”
The first visualization in this story has been corrected to reflect that at least 4 million acres burned in last year’s wildfire season in California, and that the Camp fire started in November 2018 and not the summer of 2018.
Column: Up to 1 million gallons of water … a night? That’s par for some desert golf courses
Steve Lopez – October 9, 2021
Ecologists Robin Kobaly and Doug Thompson are concerned about the amount of water used to irrigate golf courses in the Coachella Valley. (Gina Ferazzi / Los Angeles Times)
Doug Thompson couldn’t believe what he’d just been told. His wife, a botanist, was advising a Coachella Valley country club on drought-resistant landscaping, and Thompson, who got to talking with the groundskeeper, asked how much water it takes to irrigate a golf course.
“He proudly said they had just computerized their system and they were down to 1.2 million gallons a night,” recalls Thompson, an ecologist who leads natural history expeditions. “I thought I didn’t hear him correctly, so about 30 minutes later I asked again, and he said the same thing.”
That conversation took place a few years ago. But in the midst of a prolonged drought that has prompted a first-ever federal declaration of a water shortage in the Colorado River Basin and brought calls for greater conservation throughout California, Thompson and his wife, Robin Kobaly, became more keenly aware of all the lush green golf courses set against the parched landscape of the Coachella Valley.
How many golf courses?
About 120, many of them shoulder to shoulder across the desert floor, complete with decorative ponds, fountains and streams. It’s one of the highest concentrations of golf courses in the world.
“From the homework we have done … the smaller courses use at least several hundred thousand gallons a night, but the larger courses are in the 1-million-gallon range or more,” Thompson said.
“It’s not only an outrage,” he added, “but many months of the year, it’s too hot to play golf in the desert, yet the watering continues.”
When I met with Thompson and Kobaly in the desert, they told me they’re not trying to shut down the golf industry, and I’m with them on that. There’d be no Palm Springs without golf, just as there would have been no Rat Pack without Sinatra. The industry employs several thousand people, drawing hordes of snowbirds and pumping as much as $1 billion into the local economy.
But the planet now spins on a rotisserie, roasted and toasted in ways that are transforming landscapes and forcing us to adapt. Thompson and Kobaly wonder why golf courses aren’t doing more to conserve.
“This water crisis is huge,” Thompson said. “They’ll ask us to do things like don’t leave the water running when you brush your teeth, and it’s illegal to wash your car unless you turn off the valve on the hose. That might save 10 gallons of water, and meanwhile a million gallons a night are being used on every golf course in the Coachella Valley.”
When I put these observations to Craig Kessler, director of governmental affairs for the Southern California Golf Assn., he was more than happy to respond, as well as to share his considerable knowledge of state water policy.
And he threw me a curve.
Kessler said Coachella Valley golf courses are in much better shape in terms of water supplies than golf courses in California’s wetter climates. That’s because the desert, which had less than an inch of rain in the last season, has much more water to draw from, including a vast aquifer that sits beneath the desert floor.
“It’s complicated and counterintuitive,” Kessler said, but many coastal golf courses that rely on the state’s melted snowpack and rain have been harder hit by the drought than those in the desert.
The Coachella Valley Water District (CVWD), which serves 105 of the golf courses, draws from the California Water Project, the Colorado River and the aquifer. Kessler, who heads up the Coachella Valley Golf and Water Task Force, said much of the water used to irrigate golf courses is non-potable.
And yet, those 120 golf courses do indeed use massive amounts of precious, increasingly scarce water. Kessler said the valley has less than 1% of Southern California’s population, but 28.6% of its golf courses. Golf, he said, consumes less than 1% of all water used in California, but nearly 25% of Coachella Valley water.
So what are they doing about it? A lot, Kessler said, and the conservation effort goes back several years. Golf courses have been removing turf, narrowing fairways, installing more sophisticated irrigation systems, researching less thirsty grasses and scaling back on the practice of “overseeding,” which has kept courses green in winter months, when Bermuda grass goes dormant.
Jim Schmid, director of operations at Palm Desert’s Lakes Country Club, told me he has a weather station on site to help manage and reduce irrigation. And much of the water he uses, Schmidt said, is recycled water the “district needs to get rid of because they haven’t treated it to a standard where it can be used for potable purposes.”
Josh Tanner, general manager of Ironwood Country Club in Palm Desert, said Ironwood pumps its water out of the ground and pays a fee to the water agency to replenish the aquifer with imported water. The club has reduced its water consumption by 20% in recent years, Tanner said, largely by replacing turf with native landscaping.
But it doesn’t appear that every golf course is pulling its weight. And the CVWD, as Doug Thompson told me, doesn’t provide data on water use by individual golf courses. When I asked why, Katie Evans, CVWD’s director of communications and conservation, told me the district does not share information about individual customers. In fact, the water agency was sued for release of the information, but prevailed in court.
Pro golfers walk past a water feature at the Pete Dye Stadium Course at PGA West in La Quinta in January. (Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press)
The Desert Sun reported in 2018 that the golf industry had not met its own goal — set in 2014 — of reducing water use by 10% below 2010 levels. Kessler told me that golf courses used 9% less water in 2020 than in 2013 when using a complicated calculation that takes evaporation into account, but just 5.6% less in total volume.
In the Coachella Valley, years of growth severely depleted the aquifer, just as agricultural irrigation has drained Central Valley water tables to the point where the ground is sinking. Gov. Jerry Brown signed legislation in 2014 requiring communities to develop groundwater sustainability strategies, and the CVWD has touted its progress in stabilizing and increasing underground water levels.
But that’s partly because the valley is able to recharge the aquifer with water from the Colorado River and the water pumped down from Northern California. However, current allotments won’t last if drought trend lines continue and water wars escalate.
One of Thompson and Kobaly’s pet peeves is that residential water bills are based on a tiered pricing system that encourages conservation, but golf and agriculture pay flat rates.
They have an ally in Mark Johnson, former director of engineering for the CVWD and a frequent critic of the agency. The retired Johnson said residential users have conserved far more than agriculture, which uses roughly half the district’s water, and significantly more than the golf industry, which uses short of 25%.
“Absolutely, there is an inequity,” said Johnson, and that, in effect, residential users “subsidize the infrastructure used to get water to golf courses.” Johnson, a golfer, said he used to play at a La Quinta course where “they were irrigating areas that weren’t even in play,” and watering sand traps, as well.
So why not institute tiered pricing for golf and ag, same as for residential users?
The CVWD’s Evans said such pricing is prohibited by the state water code, but it might be possible to implement “a different pricing structure” in the future.
I’ll be watching to see how that goes, but it’s worth noting that three of the five members of the agency’s board of directors are in the agriculture industry. Water and oil don’t mix, but in California, water and politics always do.
“I agree that more can be done to conserve,” Evans said. “At this time, we are pushing out new conservation advertisements and continuing to offer a broad range of programs. … To be sustainable, we need to be water wise.”
Kessler, despite defending golf’s record on conservation, said that if drought and higher temperatures continue, maintaining the recent rate of conservation “won’t be enough moving 10-25 years forward.”
Unless it starts raining again like it used to, everyone in California is going to have to get by with less water in the very near future, not 10 or 25 years down the road.
Thompson and Kobaly, who aren’t golfers, have a suggestion. They’ve been looking into links-style golf courses, which are common in other countries and use far less water. You tee off on a patch of green and you putt on a patch of green, but most of the area in between is natural and not irrigated.
“I’ve got nothing against golf,” Thompson said. “But they’ve got to find a different way of doing it.”
Ancient groundwater: Why the water you’re drinking may be thousands of years old
Kevin M. Befus, Assistant Professor of Hydrogeology, University of Arkansas, Marissa Grunes, Environmental Fellow, Harvard University, and Alan Seltzer, Assistant Scientist in Marine Chemistry and Geochemistry, Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.
October 7, 2021
Some of North America’s groundwater is so old, it fell as rain before humans arrived here thousands of years ago. Maria Fuchs via Getty Images
Communities that rely on the Colorado River are facing a water crisis. Lake Mead, the river’s largest reservoir, has fallen to levels not seen since it was created by the construction of the Hoover Dam roughly a century ago. Arizona and Nevada are facing their first-ever mandated water cuts, while water is being released from other reservoirs to keep the Colorado River’s hydropower plants running.
If even the mighty Colorado and its reservoirs are not immune to the heat and drought worsened by climate change, where will the West get its water?
What many people don’t realize is how old – and how vulnerable – much of that water is.
Most water stored underground has been there for decades, and much of it has sat for hundreds, thousands or even millions of years. Older groundwater tends to reside deep underground, where it is less easily affected by surface conditions such as drought and pollution.
As shallower wells dry out under the pressure of urban development, population growth and climate change, old groundwater is becoming increasingly important.
Drinking ancient groundwater
If you bit into a piece of bread that was 1,000 years old, you’d probably notice.
Water that has been underground for a thousand years can taste different, too. It leaches natural chemicals from the surrounding rock, changing its mineral content. Some natural contaminants linked to groundwater age – like mood-boosting lithium – can have positive effects. Other contaminants, like iron and manganese, can be troublesome.
Older groundwater is also sometimes too salty to drink without expensive treatment. This problem can be worse near the coasts: Overpumping creates space that can draw seawater into aquifers and contaminate drinking supplies.
Illustration of layers of groundwater below the surface
Ancient groundwater can take thousands of years to replenish naturally. And, as California saw during its 2011-2017 drought, natural underground storage spaces compress as they empty, so they can’t refill to their previous capacity. This compaction in turn causes the land above to crack, buckle and sink.
Yet people today are drilling deeper wells in the West as droughts deplete surface water and farms rely more heavily on groundwater.
What does it mean for water to be ‘old’?
Let’s imagine a rainstorm over central California 15,000 years ago. As the storm rolls over what’s now San Francisco, most of the rain falls into the Pacific Ocean, where it will eventually evaporate back into the atmosphere. However, some rain also falls into rivers and lakes and over dry land. As that rain seeps through layers of soil, it enters slowly trickling “flowpaths” of underground water.
Some of these paths lead deeper and deeper, where water collects in crevices within the bedrock hundreds of meters underground. The water gathered in these underground reserves is in a sense cut off from the active water cycle – at least on timescales relevant to human life.
In California’s arid Central Valley, much of the accessible ancient water has been pumped out of the earth, mostly for agriculture. Where the natural replenishment timescale would be on the order of millennia, agricultural seepage has partially refilled some aquifers with newer – too often polluted – water. In fact, places like Fresno now actively refill aquifers with clean water (such as treated wastewater or stormwater) in a process known as “managed aquifer recharge.”
Average turnover times for groundwater in the U.S. Alan Seltzer, based on data from Befus et al 2017, CC BY-ND
In 2014, midway through their worst drought in modern memory, California became the last western state to pass a law requiring local groundwater sustainability plans. Groundwater may be resilient to heat waves and climate change, but if you use it all, you’re in trouble.
One response to water demand? Drill deeper. Yet that answer isn’t sustainable.
First, it’s expensive: Large agricultural companies and lithium mining firms tend to be the sort of investors who can afford to drill deep enough, while small rural communities can’t.
Second, once you pump ancient groundwater, aquifers need time to refill. Flowpaths may be disrupted, choking off a natural water supply to springs, wetlands and rivers. Meanwhile, the change in pressure underground can destabilize the earth, causing land to sink and even leading to earthquakes.
Pumping accelerates groundwater flow to a well, delivering dissolved chemicals. USGS
Third is contamination: While deep, mineral-rich ancient groundwater is often cleaner and safer to drink than younger, shallower groundwater, overpumping can change that. As water-strapped regions rely more heavily on deep groundwater, overpumping lowers the water table and draws down polluted modern water that can mix with the older water. This mixing causes the water quality to deteriorate, leading to demand for ever-deeper wells.
Reading climate history in ancient groundwater
There are other reasons to care about ancient groundwater. Like actual fossils, extremely old “fossil groundwater” can teach us about the past.
Envision our prehistoric rainstorm again: 15,000 years ago, the climate was quite different from today. Chemicals that dissolved in ancient groundwater are detectable today, opening windows into a past world. Certain dissolved chemicals act as clocks, telling scientists the groundwater’s age. For example, we know how fast dissolved carbon-14 and krypton-18 decay, so we can measure them to calculate when the water last interacted with air.
Younger groundwater that disappeared underground after the 1950s has a unique, man-made chemical signature: high levels of tritium from atomic bomb testing.
The various components and properties of an unconfined aquifer. USGS
Other dissolved chemicals behave like tiny thermometers. Noble gases like argon and xenon, for instance, dissolve more in cold water than in warm water, along a precisely known temperature curve. Once groundwater is isolated from air, dissolved noble gases don’t do much. As a result, they preserve information about environmental conditions at the time the water first seeped into the subsurface.
The concentrations of noble gases in fossil groundwater have provided some of our most reliable estimates of temperature on land during the last ice age. Such findings provide insight into modern climates, including how sensitive Earth’s average temperature is to carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. These methods support a recent study that found 3.4 degrees Celsius of warming with each doubling of carbon dioxide.
Groundwater’s past and future
People in some regions, like New England, have been drinking ancient groundwater for years with little danger of exhausting usable supplies. Regular rainfall and varied water sources – including surface water in lakes, rivers and snowpack – provide alternatives to groundwater and also refill aquifers with new water. If aquifers can keep up with the demand, the water can be used sustainably.
Out West, though, over a century of unmanaged and exorbitant water use means that some of the places most dependent on groundwater – arid regions vulnerable to drought – have squandered the ancient water resources that once existed underground.
Cross section of California showing rivers, groundwater and wells, including recharge wells
A famous precedent for this problem is in the Great Plains. There, the ancient water of the Ogallala Aquifer supplies drinking water and irrigation for millions of people and farms from South Dakota to Texas. If people were to pump this aquifer dry, it would take thousands of years to refill naturally. It is a vital buffer against drought, yet irrigation and water-intensive farming are lowering its water levels at unsustainable rates.
As the planet warms, ancient groundwater is becoming increasingly important – whether flowing from your kitchen tap, irrigating food crops, or offering warnings about Earth’s past that can help us prepare for an uncertain future.
Pipeline developer charged over systematic contamination
Michael Rubinkam October 5, 2021
Gas Pipeline Investigation 1-9
Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, at podium, speaks during a news conference at Marsh Creek State Park in Downingtown, Pa., Tuesday, Oct. 5, 2021. Shapiro filed criminal charges Tuesday against the developer of a problem-plagued pipeline that takes natural gas liquids from the Marcellus Shale gas field to an export terminal near Philadelphia. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke)
The corporate developer of a multi-billion-dollar pipeline system that takes natural gas liquids from the Marcellus Shale gas field to an export terminal near Philadelphia was charged criminally on Tuesday after a grand jury concluded that it flouted Pennsylvania environmental laws and fouled waterways and residential water supplies across hundreds of miles.
Attorney General Josh Shapiro announced the sprawling case at a news conference at Marsh Creek State Park in Downingtown, where Sunoco Pipeline LP spilled thousands of gallons of drilling fluid last year. The spill, during construction of the troubled Mariner East 2 pipeline, contaminated wetlands, a stream and part of a 535-acre lake.
Energy Transfer, Sunoco’s owner, faces 48 criminal charges, most of them for illegally releasing industrial waste at 22 sites in 11 counties across the state. A felony count accuses the operator of willfully failing to report spills to state environmental regulators.
Shapiro said Energy Transfer ruined the drinking water of at least 150 families statewide. He released a grand jury report that includes testimony from numerous residents who accused Energy Transfer of denying responsibility for the contamination and then refusing to help.
The Texas-based pipeline giant was charged for “illegal behavior that related to the construction of the Mariner East 2 pipeline that polluted our lakes, our rivers and our water wells and put Pennsylvania’s safety at risk,” said Shapiro, speaking with Marsh Creek Lake behind him.
Messages were sent to Energy Transfer seeking comment. The company has previously said it intends to defend itself.
The company faces a fine if convicted, which Shapiro said was not a sufficient punishment. He called on state lawmakers to toughen penalties on corporate violators, and said the state Department of Environmental Protection — which spent freely on outside lawyers for its own employees during the attorney general’s investigation — had failed to conduct appropriate oversight.
In a statement, DEP said it has been “consistent in enforcing the permit conditions and regulations and has held Sunoco LP accountable.” The agency said it would review the charges “and determine if any additional actions are appropriate at this time.”
Residents who live near the pipeline and some state lawmakers said Mariner East should be shut down entirely in light of the criminal charges, but the administration of Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf has long ignored such calls to pull the plug.
The August 2020 spill at Marsh Creek was among a series of mishaps that has plagued Mariner East since construction began in 2017. Early reports put the spill at 8,100 gallons, but the grand jury heard evidence the actual loss was up to 28,000 gallons. Parts of the lake are still off-limits.
“This was a major incident, but understand, it wasn’t an isolated one. This happened all across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” said Shapiro, a Democrat who plans to run for governor next year. He said that spills of drilling fluid were “frequent and damaging and largely unreported.”
The pipeline developer continued to rack up civil violations even after Mariner East became one of the most penalized projects in state history. To date, DEP said Energy Transfer has paid more than $20 million in fines for polluting waterways and drinking water wells, including a $12.6 million fine in 2018 that was one of the largest ever imposed by the agency. State regulators have periodically shut down construction.
But environmental activists and homeowners who assert their water has been fouled say that fines and shutdown orders have not forced Sunoco to clean up its act. They have been demanding revocation of Mariner East’s permits.
Carrie Gross, who has been living with the roar of Mariner East construction in her densely packed Exton neighborhood all day, six days a week, for much of the last four years, fears that criminal charges will be just as ineffectual as DEP’s civil penalties.
“I would say this is just another example of Energy Transfer paying to pollute, and that’s part of their cost of doing business. Until somebody permanently halts this project, our environment and our lives continue to be in danger,” Gross said.
The dental hygienist lives about 100 feet from the pipelines and works about 50 feet from them. She said she worries about the persistent threat of sinkholes, a catastrophic rupture or an explosion even after construction is over.
Shapiro’s news conference was originally rescheduled for Monday, but was abruptly postponed after the state environmental agency provided last-minute information to the attorney general’s office. The new information led to the filing of two additional charges, Shapiro said.
Energy Transfer acknowledged in a recent earnings report that the attorney general has been looking at “alleged criminal misconduct” involving Mariner East. The company said in the document it was cooperating but that “it intends to vigorously defend itself.”
The various criminal probes into Mariner East have also consumed DEP, which has spent about $1.57 million on outside criminal defense lawyers for its employees between 2019 and 2021, according to invoices obtained by The Associated Press.
The money was paid to five separate law firms representing dozens of DEP employees who dealt with Mariner East. Together, the firms submitted more than 130 invoices related to Mariner East investigations, performing legal work such as reviewing subpoenas and preparing clients to testify, the documents show.
“If we have a system where … the punishment, the fines, are basically seen as just a price of doing business, then we’ll continue to have violations in the commonwealth,” said David Masur, executive director of Philadelphia-based PennEnvironment.
State officials “have a huge stick they could wield,” he added. “Maybe they just have to stop hesitating and use it.”
The Mariner East pipeline system transports propane, ethane and butane from the enormous Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale gas fields in western Pennsylvania to a refinery processing center and export terminal in Marcus Hook, outside Philadelphia.
Energy Transfer also operates the Dakota Access oil pipeline, which went into service in 2017 after months of protests by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and others during its construction.
In battle to restore power after Ida, a tent city rises
Rebecca Santana September 24, 2021
1 / 21
APTOPIX Hurricane Ida Restoring Electricity
Bryan Willis, of Stilwell, Okla., an electrical worker for Ozarks Electric, looks at his phone before going to bed in a tent city for electrical workers in Amelia, La., Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021. When Hurricane Ida was brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, the grass was chest high and the warehouse empty at this lot in southeastern Louisiana. Within days, electric officials transformed it into a bustling “tent city” with enormous, air-conditioned tents for workers, a gravel parking lot for bucket trucks and a station to resupply crews restoring power to the region. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)MoreREBECCA SANTANASeptember 24, 2021
AMELIA, La. (AP) — When Hurricane Ida was brewing in the Gulf of Mexico, the grass was chest high and the warehouse empty at this lot in southeastern Louisiana. Within days, electric officials transformed it into a bustling “tent city” with enormous, air-conditioned tents for workers, a gravel parking lot for bucket trucks and a station to resupply crews restoring power to the region.
In the wake of hurricanes, one of the most common and comforting sites is the thousands of electric workers who flow into a battered region when the winds die down to restore power and a sense of normalcy. They need to sleep somewhere. They need to eat. Their trucks need fuel. They need wires, ties and poles. And occasionally they need cigarettes. Power providers build tent cities like this to meet those needs.
“There’s three things a lineman wants: good food, cold bed, hot shower. If you can get those three, you can work,” says Matthew Peters, operations manager for South Louisiana Electric Cooperative Association, which built the tent city to house a peak of about 1,100 workers helping restore power to the cooperative’s customers.- ADVERTISEMENT -https://s.yimg.com/rq/darla/4-6-0/html/r-sf-flx.html
When Ida came ashore on Aug. 29, it knocked out power to about 1.1 million customers in the state. The vast majority have seen their power restored, but in a sign of the storm’s extent, thousands are still in the dark while downed lines are righted and substations repaired.
SLECA provides electricity to about 21,000 customers, including many in the hard-hit bayou regions. Power has been restored to about 81% of their coverage area with the remaining 19% in areas with the most catastrophic damage, said Joe Ticheli, general manager of the cooperative. After initially fearing full restoration of power could take months, estimates are now that it could happen by next week, Ticheli said.
Over a few short days, SLECA and a consulting firm transformed the location that used to be a hub for oil field manufacturer McDermott International into a temporary home for workers from across the country. Ticheli even appointed a mayor to make sure things run smoothly.
In one massive white tent, hundreds of cots are spread out; experienced workers bring their own inflatable mattresses. Another tent houses a cafeteria that serves hot breakfast starting about 5 a.m., dinner and boxed lunches that can be eaten out in the field. Tons of gravel was packed down on top of a grassy field so bucket trucks and other equipment — many flying American flags — can park.
At sunset, after workers park their trucks and head in to eat, shower and sleep, gasoline trucks drive up and down the rows, fueling the vehicles so no time is lost in the morning. Special treats — like cigarettes or steak night — help ease 16-hour workdays. Out-of-state crews are teamed with a local employee dubbed a “bird dog” who helps them.
Across the street is a warehouse where supplies such as transformers and wires are available. Outside, long wooden replacement poles wait to be loaded onto trucks.
Jordy Bourg, who runs the warehouse, said that right after the storm they had some supplies but immediately had to start ordering more. But like many things in the pandemic era, it’s been a challenge after Ida to get certain supplies.
Many people coming in to help have covered other disasters: Hurricane Michael, Hurricane Laura, ice storms in Arkansas and Texas. It’s good money, but more than that, they say it’s the feeling of restoring normalcy to someone who’s had everything stripped away from them. And many point out that the next disaster could easily be in their own backyard. Last year crews from SLECA went to southwest Louisiana when another Category 4 hurricane, Laura, slammed ashore there. This year, crews from southwest Louisiana came east to help.
“We’ve had a few storms hit back home and you kind of know how it is when you’ve been out of power,” said Robbie Davis, a lineman from Georgia. So many people in southeast Louisiana have no where to go, he said: “Out here, these folks’ homes got destroyed, businesses got destroyed.”
It can be dangerous work — two men believed to be electrocuted died helping restore power in Alabama.
The Louisiana terrain presents special challenges. In some areas, lines thread through thick swamps that can be accessed only by air boat or marsh buggy, which looks like a cross between a tank and a pontoon boat. Workers don waders to climb into muddy, chest-high waters home to alligators and water moccasins.
“You only work in this kind of area when you’re in south Louisiana. I can assure you, you don’t get this anywhere else,” says Jon Hise, a Sparks Energy foreman working with a crew in Houma to reset power lines. “It’s nasty. It’s chest deep. You can’t walk because the growth.”
As SLECA staff work to restore power to their slice of southeastern Louisiana, they have also been struggling with hurricane damage themselves. The general manager wears clothes from the Salvation Army after his home was severely damaged and looted. Coworkers have helped each other tarp damaged roofs. The company is operating out of trailers in their Houma headquarters after Ida peeled off the roof. Bourg is living in a trailer with his wife and two Boston terriers — his kids are staying with his in-laws — after Ida wrecked his house.
There’s also the toll of seeing large swaths of their coverage area so utterly destroyed. For many, getting power is just the first step in a long rebuilding process. Peters gets emotional when he talks of the dedication of his staff as well as the damage he’s seen among longtime customers.
“We’ve had storms before,” he said. “But the devastation was nothing of this magnitude.”
