Price Sewer Fairly: Petition to the Grants Pass City Council

(Petition Statement, Signature Side)

We, the undersigned residents and business owners of Grants Pass, want our sewer service to be priced fairly, as a subscription service, without unit rates.  Debt service would be a separate, fixed fee and end when the debt is paid.  Rates would rise only by actual inflation of the previous year’s expenses from the year before, not the Consumer Price Index.

This is an advisory petition to the Grants Pass City Council, to request that this matter be discussed and acted upon at a City Council Meeting.  It is not a petition for the ballot. 

Signers must be city residents, landlords, or business owners.

(Statement of Points, backside)

Price Sewer Fairly

Council, please eliminate unit charges on our sewer service, raise the rate only by actual expenses of the previous year over the year before, and assign the plant’s debt service to a fixed fee that ends when the debt is paid.

          We are currently charged unit charges for sanitary sewer service, also known as wastewater treatment, based on the average number of units of water per month used the previous winter.  We should be charged only a subscription base rate, without unit charges, and any inflation of the rates should be based on a rise in actual expenses of the plant of the previous year from the year before, not the Consumer Price Index.

Unit charges are unfair to large households, many of whom are poor and must share housing expenses, and/or are young families with children.  People who can afford to live alone or as couples generally do so. 

Charging unit prices only subsidizes the rich and punishes the poor and those with more children for the water we use for household uses.  It is more just and better for the workings and finances of the plant to have the well-off subsidize sewer for poor people and for larger families who raise children who will pay taxes to Social Security and Medicare.

This service benefits all people equally, so households should pay equally, as should businesses and governments, depending on their water service size class.  Cities provide sanitary sewer service and mandate the use thereof within city limits to control the diseases that can result from contact with sewage.  We treat our wastewater to drinking water standards set by the federal government before returning that water to the river for the same reason and to protect the life in our river. 

We cannot control the amount of bodily waste we produce, and there is no reason why we should.  We have some control over the amount of water we use, and that can be a problem for sewage treatment if people are charged high sewage bills for winter water use.  Our waste requires a lot of water to carry it down the pipe to the wastewater treatment plant.  If people are using the toilet several times before they flush it and otherwise being very careful about their water use, the pipes can clog, interrupting service, causing trouble, and creating extra expense.  Having more concentrated waste may also make it harder and cost more to clean it to drinking water level.

Likewise, if people become very careful about their water use because of high water unit charges and wastewater unit charges on top of that, the city will collect less money from unit charges and have to raise the sewer rates on everyone.  Everyone will have to pay more for the same service. 

To start paying for the debt service on the ongoing renovation of our sewage treatment plant, the City raised the rates 7% on both the base rate and unit charges, assigning half of a fixed cost to variable revenue, dependent on winter water use.  It is set to be raised 7% again next year and the year after.  That debt service should be paid with a fixed fee for a very fixed cost, which is not affected by inflation.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040            rycke@gardener.com

Price Water to Sell: Petition to the Grants Pass City Council

(Petition Statement, signature side)

We, the undersigned, want our city water to be priced to sell it, not to ration it, so we can use all that we need for all beneficial uses at a low price that stays low.  We would assign all fixed overhead costs into fixed base rates.  Debt service would be paid by a fixed fee and sunset when the debt is paid.  Only marginal unit costs would be assigned to a single unit rate.  Base and unit rates would rise only by actual inflation of costs of the previous year from the year before, not the Consumer Price Index.

This is an advisory petition to the Grants Pass City Council, to request that this matter be discussed and acted upon at a City Council Meeting.  It is not a petition for the ballot. 

Signers must be city residents, landlords, or business owners.

(Back side statement of points)

We Must Price Water to Sell

Council, please pay our water overhead costs with a fixed base rate and debt service fee, and pay only marginal unit costs, those that vary with the number of units produced, in unit rates.  This would provide the lowest, most stable rates, and allow us to use as much water as we need to maintain our properties and keep us all safe from wildfire.

Water is not precious, it is vital.  Precious things are rare and are considered luxuries.  Water is the most abundant resource on Earth.  It is a basic necessity, the basis of life and source of biological wealth.  With high-priced water, there is less life in our city and we have less wealth.

Cleaned fresh water is vital for public health and safety. We must stop rationing it by price.  Water must be priced for all to be able to use for the benefit of all, at the lowest rates that will pay for providing water to each customer for all good uses, particularly watering.

West of the Rockies, we need to water our cities to keep them and the country around them safe to live in.  We live in natural semi-desert, with a cold ocean that doesn’t readily evaporate.  Semi-desert is far more dangerous than real desert, as it grows more fuel to dry out and burn, creating firestorms.  Green grass doesn’t burn; nor do cities full of it.

Low-priced water made Grants Pass clean, green, and safe from wildfire for decades, by allowing everyone with property to grow food and maintain property for beauty and safety.  Into the ‘80s, water service was cheap and we used it freely, as did most cities around the developed world.

Grants Pass city water kept the surrounding countryside moister and safer in summer as well, as the whole city pumped millions of gallons out of our river, into the air and all over plants and the ground, with sprinklers.  Much of it evaporated, to spread outward through the countryside, blowing uphill and upstream with our prevailing west wind, sharing it with other places downwind, making rain to fill our creeks, rivers, and aquifers, making the whole area green and safe from wildfire. 

In the ‘80s, we started being told that fresh water is a scarce, precious resource which we must save--by all means, in all places.  We bought it at the time, never thinking about fire.  Activists talked to city councils, and cities started rationing water by price, lowering base rates, hiking unit prices and even creating tiered rates, higher unit prices for higher use, the opposite of normal unit pricing.

This system is designed to save water, not to sell it.  It doesn’t pay the whole overhead, the fixed costs of owning and running the plant, with a fixed base rate. It pays much of the overhead with high unit rates.  The easiest use to cut is watering.  Less watering doesn’t pay the overhead, so the city raises base and unit rates, further suppressing use, and raises both prices again, in a continual upward-ratcheting spiral of every household paying more to use less water. 

California cities led the way in price rationing, going brown first, sowing drought and reaping wildfire in the last decade, as dry forests, scrub and grassland burn right through dry cities.  We are only 10 years behind them in ratcheting our water prices ever upward, following them into the inferno.

We must stop this upward spiral of water rates and dangerous dry ugliness, and reform our water rate system closer to how we paid in the 1980s.  

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener         541-955-9040            rycke@gardener.com

Water stops fires, tames climate

             Humans change climate.  We have changed our climate twice over the last 70 years.  First, we made the climate wetter, cooler, and safer with sprinkler irrigation.  It became noticeable in the ‘70s and ’80, but we didn’t notice; we thought it was natural.  Since the ‘80s, we have been returning California, Southern Oregon, and other Mediterranean climates to dangerous semi-desert conditions by trying to save water everywhere, without good reason.  This summer, parts of California and Oregon were burning, as has happened for the last 10 years, and in many parts of California last winter.  Choking on smoke is the new summer normal in Southern Oregon, but it doesn’t have to be.

            The ‘80s was the decade when water alarmists started telling us that we have to save fresh water, no matter the local conditions, because only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh.  They say that evaporation from sprinklers is waste.  Activists talk to city councils; cities follow each other, and states follow their cities. California cities led the way in rationing by price with low base rates and high unit prices and even tiered rates, oppressing the poor and middle class, most of whom stopped watering their yards, the intended effect.  We and many other cities around the world have followed them, drying out their cities and the countryside around them, making them drier, hotter, colder, stormier and fire-prone.  These are symptoms of drying, not greenhouse warming--desert conditions.

Evaporation is not waste; it is part of the water cycle.  We who live west of the Rockies are blessed with rivers that run into the prevailing wind and blow our water vapor uphill and upstream to make rain, filling our creeks and rivers and sending moisture over the mountains, when we make enough of it by watering our cities fully.

Water tames climate.  At 1%-4% of the atmosphere, water vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas, holding heat by its sheer thermal mass and the blanketing effect of clouds. Yet it also cools the air during the day, by cloud shading; rain; transpiration; and evaporation, which can bring wet objects down to 40 degrees F, the temperature at which it starts evaporating.

Water stops fires.  Summer thunderstorms made rain, not dry lightning, when given moisture from sprinklers on nearly all the properties in cities and suburbs.  It is harder for fires to start and burn when the air is moister, and they are easier to put out.  This is what happened in the ‘80s, a wet decade we are told, when practically everybody in cities watered because clean water was cheap. 

I did a small study of summer rainfall in the 97526 zip code, covering 1983 to 2012.  In the ‘80s, we had bigger rain events in Grants Pass in July and August than in June and September.  In the ‘90s, that reversed and reversed further in the 2000s.  Our midsummer rainfall has dropped 0.9 inches per decade, as our water bills have climbed, along with our monthly high temperatures.

Thousands of single-family homes in a single subdivision in Santa Rosa, California burned in Santa Anna winds last winter, while thin strips of green grass and trees out front of those homes did not. Their top water rate is $6.50 per 1000 gallons.  600 homes burned in Redding this summer, while everyone paid $1.425 for every 750 gallons.  Our top rate is $1.40.

We need to stop following other cities to perdition and return to water that is cheap to use after paying a base that fully covers the overhead, and make our city clean, green, and safe again!

Email the Grants Pass City Council and Mayor: mayorcouncil@grantspassoregon.gov

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener               541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Ask the Council to Wait

          The City of Grants Pass is planning to build a new, $80 million water treatment plant, to replace our 80-year old plant.  One part of it, the clear well, is falling apart and cannot be fixed in the time it would take us to use all the water in our storage tanks.

            Wednesday, November 7^th, at 6:00 PM, the City Council plans to vote on new water rates to start paying for the plant as we build it.  Please come to the meeting and ask the Council to hold off on setting the rates until they look at the numbers for both proposed rate systems.

           We all have the same right to water, as we all own it.  Our present rates oppress the poor and middle class by giving us cheap access to water with a low base rate but rationing our use by high unit prices.  The City’s highly-paid consultants would double down on the high and tiered unit rates and low base rates that were instituted in 2006 to save water.

            We should pay overhead, fixed prices, in the base rate, and pay unit costs, those that vary with the units produced, electricity for pumping and chemicals for cleaning, in one unit price.  This is the normal way that industry sets prices for a service and allows households to pay less per unit the more we buy, the normal way things are priced.  We have long had this alternative rate proposal on the table.  But city staff needs direction from Council to figure out the rates that would result.  Ask the Council to demand these numbers and to wait on setting rates until they have them.

• ·        Watering property is a basic right and duty of property owners and renters, rich and poor alike.  Low unit price promotes equal maintenance that makes the city clean, green, and safe. 
• ·        We have plenty of water in our river, and a dam to hold it for irrigation.  When the Lost Creek reservoir is low in May due to low snowpack, we can save water equally, by not watering lawns.
• ·         It is hard to waste water in a country with modern wastewater treatment.  Sewage is treated to drinking water standards and put back in the river.  Water that sinks below roots recharges the water table.  Water that evaporates makes rain locally and elsewhere, sharing moisture with surrounding areas and those downwind, which West of the Rockies, is uphill and upstream, filling our creeks and rivers.
• ·        Cities in the West have become dry, weedy, seedy and fire-prone from lack of watering.

·        Poor people presently pay more per unit overall for household water, as they tend to live many to a house.  Those who can afford to live one or two to a house usually do so and pay less.

·        Young families also pay more for household water, as children use a lot of water.

·        Everyone pays more to use less water under the city’s present and proposed rate system. Paying for overhead by selling high-priced units has resulted in rising base and unit rates as less is used.

·        Subsidize the household base rate for those who would be unable to pay it by using the franchise fee that the city charges us to use its own right-of-way.

·        Keep prices and plant finances stable by paying for fixed costs in fixed rates and only variable unit costs in the unit price. 

    Email the Grants Pass City Council and Mayor: mayorcouncil@grantspassoregon.gov.

Rycke Brown, Natural Gardener               541-955-9040                 rycke@gardener.com

Conjoined Conspiracies: Saving Water; Blaming Carbon

It is hard not to notice a conspiracy when it has been staring you in the face for ten years.  I've been fighting two nonscience eco-fads for at least that long, and yet have only lately admitted that they are joined at the hip, one dependent on the other.  Saving water and trace gas warming, AKA global warming, AKA climate change, were both popularized in the '80s and both are pushed by the same people.  The former has provided supposed proof for the latter.

The goal of both eco-fads is a carbon tax. Saving water has dried out and heated up our world; this foreseeable result has been blamed on trace gases like carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane, measured in parts per million and billion, tiny fractions of the air, heating up and drying out our world.  Fights over water saving have been quietly suppressed; the fight over trace greenhouse gases and the push for a carbon tax has been noisy and very divisive.  The magician has been telling us to look at one hand, while the other was doing the trick.

We have already changed the climate twice, the first time by watering farms and cities with sprinklers between the '50s and the '80s.  The effect become noticeable in the '70s and '80s, but we didn't notice it then; we considered the resulting moisture, rain and coolness to be the norm.  Since the '80s, we have changed it back to dryer and hotter with water-saving water rates, rationing by price, in most of our cities, large and small.

Not that everyone promoting these fads was in on the conspiracy.  It makes great use of people who buy plausible-sounding theories that fall apart when one really thinks about them, and rate consultants and scientists who chase government and grant funding.  I bought into both fads in the '80s but was not alarmed; I didn't want to water and mow a lawn and welcomed global warming as stopping the next ice age.  Conservation is supposedly a good thing, and so we thought that conserving water was the thing to do, once it was brought up in a drought year.

Water-saving alarmists talked to city councils, cities talk to and copy each other; and states tend to follow their cities.  All over the industrialized world, cities started rationing water by price.  California cities led the way, raising water unit charges and lowering base rates to allow customers cheap access to water but making people pay through the nose to use it.  As those rates have been raised and keep rising, cities and their surrounding countryside have been drying out and burning in summer and even in winter in California, as weeds grow, seed out and dry out where green grass formerly dominated city landscapes.

I stopped believing in trace gas warming when I realized that the million in parts per million was being ignored and converted parts per million into percentages.  A large rise in a very small fraction is still a very small fraction.  The absolute amount of carbon dioxide may have increased 60% since the beginning of the industrial revolution.  But as a percentage of the atmosphere, it has increased only 0.012%, twelve thousandths of a percent, in that 250 years, which does not seem to be enough to appreciably warm the planet.  Nor have its proponents ever accounted for the fact that warming increases rotting, and carbon dioxide and methane are products of rot.  Are increased gases warming the air, or has warming increased these gases?

I've also noted the way that trace gas warming proponents dismiss, belittle, and vilify those who disagree with their theory.  They are not scientists; they are political activists, and even Science News writers, who would normally quote a scientist critic of a theory by name, do not in the case of trace gas warming, but they do push “climate change” wherever they can fit it into an article.  The more ignorant its proponents are of real science, the more they appeal to authority instead of answering objections.

And then there is Bill McKibben, one of its more famous proponents, being interviewed ten years ago on public radio, telling me, in answer to my pointing out the small fraction of CO2 and how little it has increased as a portion of the atmosphere, "Carbon dioxide is the difference between Venus in Mars!"  The host did not question that, and I was already cut off from answering.  But my daughter pointed out that the real difference is size and distance from the sun.  Both planets have a very similar proportion of CO2 in their atmospheres, 97% and 96%, very different from Earth at 0.04%.

It wasn't until after 2008 that I realized what a disaster water saving is, as properties in Grants Pass and other cities started going dry and creeks dried up in midsummer that used to run all year.  My water bill, already high, doubled when Grants Pass instituted tiered rates on single family homes in 2006, just before the recession started.  A couple of years later, city staff asked the Council to raise the base rate because water-saving tiered rates had worked too well and the city was having trouble paying the overhead.  Base and unit rates have continued to rise as use has decreased.

Rationing water by price has been disastrous for the poor, as most people prefer to live one or two to a house if they can afford it, while poorer people live many to a house to share expenses.  They not only cannot afford to garden their yards and grow food; they are socked in water and sewer bills for having more people in their house, while richer folks on small lots pay less per unit than poorer folks for their lesser use, thanks to low base and high unit prices.  Young families are hit especially hard, as children need more baths and laundry, dirty more dishes, and contribute no income.

Thousands of homes have burned in California in recent years as wildfires burn into cities that used to be safe.  Wildfire smoke has become the major pollutant in the west, with more fires smoking us every year and now burning through cities.  We have had wildfire disasters all over the Western world; Greece, Spain and Australia, where semi-desert "Mediterranean" climates have turned from garden spots to dry weedy messes, burning at a spark.

We have been told that only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh water, and that we must save it wherever we can, so it doesn't run out as our population grows.  They say that evaporation is waste and that sprinklers evaporate up to half of the water they throw, so we need to use drip and plant natives that need little water.  They said that lawns take more water and chemicals than other plants, which is not true, but lawns definitely need sprinklers. 

This is a war on sprinkler use, because sprinklers put a lot of water in the air, on plants and on the ground, and all of this evaporates and cools the area.  It has become a war on gardening and even farming, with people telling us how much water it takes to grow a single almond in California.  And yet the rich can use all they are willing to pay for, making inequality far more visible.

Fair Use, no copyright infringement intended.                    

But evaporation is not waste; it is the beginning of the water cycle.  It cools, humidifies and makes clouds and rain.  That 2% of Earth's water that runs off the land is constantly renewed by evaporation of salt water and fresh, condensing into clouds that shade us and precipitating fresh water as it rains.  The more we throw water in the air and all over plants and the ground, the more rain it can make.  Acting as though water is abundant makes it so, at least West of the Rockies.

Water is like money.  When people become afraid to use money, recessions and depressions happen and deepen.  When they become afraid to water, either because of price or supply, irrigation drought sets in, increasing the fear for the supply and making the drought worse.

Indeed, it is hard to waste water where we have water and sewer treatment plants and a good river.  Water that goes down the sewer is cleaned to drinking water standards and put back in the river.  Water that sinks into the ground renews the water table.  Water that is evaporated, transpired and breathed out makes clouds and rain.

It is even harder to waste irrigation water on the west side of the Rockies and other western mountain ranges on other continents.  The western edge of any continent tends to be dry because the eastern side of oceans are cold and create little evaporation, as water does not evaporate below 40 degrees F.  But we are blessed with clean, cold rivers that run into the prevailing western wind, which blows our evaporated irrigation water upstream and uphill, making rain to fill creeks and rivers, just like the drawings of the water cycle.  Water can make this circuit many times over a summer. Some of that water blows over the Rockies to the Great Plains and the Southwest, sharing water with other states.  Sprinkler-aided farming in the Great Plains moistens and cools summers in Chicago with clouds and rain.

Water is the most powerful force in our weather.  Water is the most abundant greenhouse gas, at 1%-4% of the air, and holds heat through the night and in winter by its sheer thermal mass and cloud blanketing.  You can feel the difference that water makes when it varies up to 400%.  A rainy or snowing winter day is warmer than a clear one, as heat escapes into space when it's clear, and heat is released as water vapor becomes liquid water, and more heat is released as water becomes ice.  It cools summer days by evaporation, cloud shading, fog, rain, and dew.  Water is the great moderator of our climate, and yet is involved in our biggest disasters, blizzards and hurricanes.

When "global warming" started, we were told that excess CO2 and methane would warm winters, higher latitudes and nights more than summers, the tropics, and days.  After 2000, "global warming" became "climate change," which had the twin vices of being both less specific and more frightening.  We were told that extreme weather was increasing, which it was.

Temperature extremes, heavy storms, flash floods and fires are symptoms of drought, of desert conditions prevailing as we returned our highly gardened cities in the dry West of every continent to semi-desert conditions, which are far more dangerous than real deserts, as semi-deserts grow a lot more weeds to dry out and burn.  Even hurricanes are strengthened, as less and warmer water flows from cities down the Mississippi into the Gulf of Mexico, warming it and revving up the storms that enter it, like Hurricane Michael.

Beavers made Western climes moister and rainier by building dams on creeks that make ponds that grow trees around them, slowing down creeks and allowing water to soak into the ground and grow the trees they eat.  They make ditches to transport wood from those trees to their ponds, which spreads the water further and grows more trees.  Trees transpire and make rain, which spreads the water further still.  When the trappers killed them for their fur, early in Western exploration, many of these places quickly became desert, and the ranchers and settlers that came after the trappers did not know what had been lost as tumbleweeds took over the West.

We, like beavers, make our own habitats and changed climates in our favor by building dams and using water for irrigation, and like the beaver, we didn't realize what we were doing when we were doing it.  But we can bring beavers back to the West, and we can talk to our city councils and bring back the kind of water rates that made gardening our cities possible, those that follow the normal business practice of charging less per unit the more units we buy.

Most of the cost of providing clean water is overhead, fixed costs: plant; people; maintenance, and debt service.  Very little of it is unit cost, which varies with the number of units cleaned and delivered: electricity for pumping; chemicals, and filters or filter cleaning.  This is what we were told by city staff when they asked the Council to raise the base rate to stabilize the plant finances after a few years of tiered rates cutting usage, which was supposed to pay the overhead.

When I first lived in Grants Pass for 2 years in the '80s, we paid $25 per month for water and sewer, combined.  The city was clean, green, and beautiful.  We had wet thunderstorms nearly every weekend over the summer of '85.  In '86, we had low snowpack in the mountains and drought was declared.  We were told not to water our lawns or wash cars.  We grew vegetables and fruit and suffered brown lawns equally.  We had 103 days of no rain that summer, and 98 the next, as the low snow drought continued and then passed.  And still, the ‘80s was a wet decade overall, because nearly everyone in dry climates was watering in summer when they could.

Remembering that decade, in 2013 I did a study of rainfall and temperatures in the Grants Pass zip code in summers that covered 1983-2012.  In the first decade, we had larger rain events in July and August than in June or September.  The following decade, that reversed as the base rate was lowered and unit prices introduced in the late ‘90s; the third decade, when tiered rates were introduced in 2006, reversed it further.  July and August rainfall dropped by 0.9 inches per decade as water unit rates rose and use dropped.  Both trends have continued, as prices rose and use dropped.

Monthly high temperatures rose with each decade along with water prices.  The base rate did not stay low but had to be raised repeatedly to continue to cover the overhead as we used less water.  Unit prices rose as well with the Consumer Price Index, as we all paid more individually to use less water collectively, from 82 cents top rate to $1.40, before the recent rate raises to start paying for a new water treatment plant. They are now $1.49 and set to rise 5% per year for 5 years.

We must demand that they put all the overhead back in the base rate and only unit cost in the unit price, both increased, not by the CPI, but by increased expenses.  This system creates the most stable plant finances and lowest rates and allows us to use the water we are paying for access to, for watering our cities and keeping them and the surrounding countryside safe from wildfire.

If talking to them fails, we can sue them.  Both Oregon and California law requires that any public entity, when setting rates for a service, must charge no more than the cost of providing that service to each customer, individually.  The customer is the household, not its residents. Paying for fixed costs with a fixed price and only marginal unit costs with a single unit rate pays exactly what it costs to provide each customer with all the water they want to use, at a rate that allows all of us to use as much as we want.

Email the Grants Pass City Council and Mayor: mayorcouncil@grantspassoregon.gov

Science News: Watering fields in California boosts rainfall in Southwest

"What we do with water management really has an impact on climate — locally, regionally and globally.”

Irrigation has downstream effects on climate and runoff to Colorado River

BY ERIN WAYMAN 10:06PM, JANUARY 22, 2013

Magazine issue: Vol. 183 #4, February 23, 2013, p. 16

Farmers in California help make it rain in the American Southwest, a new computer simulation suggests. Water that evaporates from irrigated fields in California’s Central Valley travels to the Four Corners region, where it boosts summer rain and increases runoff to the Colorado River, researchers report online January 12 in Geophysical Research Letters.

This climate link may be crucial to the 40 million people who depend on the Colorado River for drinking water. That number could nearly double in the next 50 years at the same time that droughts are projected to become more common in the Southwest. Since the Central Valley’s supply of irrigation water faces an uncertain future, it’s important to examine how shortfalls in California might affect climate change in the region, says study coauthor Jay Famiglietti, a hydrologist at the University of California, Irvine.

“We have to understand these connections better to deal with changes in water availability,” he says.

The Central Valley is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions. More than 50,000 square kilometers of the valley are irrigated, equaling one-sixth of all irrigated land in the United States.

A study in 2011 showed that watering the area’s crops cools local temperatures and increases humidity. But the work didn’t find any larger climate ties outside the region, because it relied on a regional climate simulation, which has trouble estimating conditions along the boundaries of a study area, Famiglietti says.

To overcome this problem, Famiglietti and Min-Hui Lo, now at the National Taiwan University in Taipei, simulated global climate over a 90-year period. They added in 350 millimeters of water — coming from groundwater and surface reservoirs — to the Central Valley between May and October each year. The researchers say that’s a realistic amount of irrigation based on published agriculture and climate data.

The simulations revealed that evaporation doubles in the Central Valley when there’s irrigation. That water vapor circulates to the Southwest during the summer monsoon season, which naturally brings rain to the area. “The monsoon is like a big campfire burning away over the Southwest,” Famiglietti says. “The irrigation acts as fuel on the fire.” In addition to bringing more water to the atmosphere, the water vapor brings more energy. And it changes the regional circulation, drawing in even more water vapor from the Gulf of Mexico.

Together, these changes intensify the monsoon season, resulting in a 15 percent increase in rainfall in Utah, Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona and a 28 percent increase in runoff to the Colorado River compared with simulations lacking irrigation. Some of the water returns to California via the All-American Canal, which brings water from the Colorado River to Southern California, the simulation suggests.

“It’s a nice first step,” says hydrologist Michael Puma of Columbia University. “And it’s a link that we need to investigate quite a bit more.” Many other variables, such as sea surface temperatures, also influence climate in the Southwest. To better estimate the strength of irrigation’s effect in the real world, more complex simulations that take these other factors into account are needed, Puma says.

The study also highlights the importance of investigating irrigation’s role in climate in other parts of the world, as well as other ways in which people’s use of water might have unintended consequences, Famiglietti says.“What we do with water management really has an impact on climate — locally, regionally and globally.”

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/watering-fields-california-boosts-rainfall-southwest

Citations:

M-H. Lo and J.S. Famiglietti. Irrigation in California’s Central Valley Strengthens the Southwestern U.S. Water Cycle. Geophysical Research Letters. Published online January 12, 2013. doi:10.1002/grl.50108. [Go to]

S. Sorooshian et al. How significant is the impact of irrigation on the local hydroclimate in California’s Central Valley? Comparison of model results with ground and remote-sensing data. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. Vol. 116, March 16, 2011, D06102. doi: 10.1029/2010JD014775. [Go to]

Further Reading:

S. Perkins. Crop irrigation could be cooling Midwest. Science News. Vol. 177, February 13, 2010, p. 15 [Go to]

S. Perkins. Going down: climate change, water use threaten Lake Mead. Science News. Vol. 173, February 23, 2008, p. 115. [Go to]

S. Perkins. Hey, it’s cooler near the sprinklers. Science News. Vol. 171, March 17, 2007, p. 174. [Go to]

This article is reprinted as fair use in education, as one cannot directly access whole Science News articles unless one subscribes to Science News.

Science News: Crop irrigation could be cooling Midwest

“A variety of climate simulations don’t show such long-term changes in precipitation, probably because those simulations don’t take irrigation into account, Robock and his colleagues say. July, Robock noted, is when irrigation on the Great Plains is most profligate, with more than one-third of groundwater withdrawal occurring during that month.”

Drop in hot days blamed on moisture from Great Plains

BY SID PERKINS 2:02PM, JANUARY 22, 2010

Magazine issue: Vol. 177 #4, February 13, 2010, p. 15

ATLANTA — If summers seem cooler and wetter in parts of the Midwest in recent years, you can thank — or blame — farmers, two new studies contend.

While average global temperatures rose about 0.74 degrees Celsius during the past century, the U.S. Midwest has experienced a noticeable slump in summer temperatures in recent decades, reported David Changnon, a climatologist at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, on January 19 at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society.

On average, daily high temperatures in Chicago rise above 90° Fahrenheit (32.2° Celsius) on 24 days each summer. But from 2000 through 2009, only two years tallied more than 24 days hotter than 90°— the lowest decadal total in 80 years, Changnon noted.

Rather than being just a statistical anomaly, the recent cool temperatures seem to be part of a steady long-term decline in summertime highs in Chicago, Changnon and his colleagues found. The last 10 years have seen a total of only 172 days above 90°; the 1930s saw more than twice as many. And Chicago wasn’t alone. The team noted a comparable decline in unusually hot days at 13 other sites in a swath stretching from western Iowa through Illinois to eastern Indiana.

From 1970 through 2009, average high temperatures at the sites in Iowa and Illinois during July and August were between 0.5 and 1.0 degrees F (0.28 and 0.56 degrees C) cooler than they were for the years 1930 through 1969, the researchers found. The amount of precipitation received in the region has changed substantially as well: Average rainfall for July and August from the 1970s through 2009 was about 0.33 inches (0.8 centimeters) higher each month than it was from the 1930s through the 1960s.

Changnon suggested that fewer hot days and more precipitation are linked, because humid air warms more slowly than dry air does. One likely source of the extra moisture is the region’s agriculture. Plants pump vast amounts of water from surface soil into the atmosphere as they grow, and thirsty row crops such as corn and soybeans are much more prevalent in the region these days — about 97 percent of farmland is planted in those crops now, versus about 57 percent in the 1930s, Changnon notes. Also, the plants are spaced more closely now (about 30 inches apart, versus the 40-inch spacing typical in the 1930s), a trend that has boosted the numbers of water-pumping plants per acre by about 60 percent.

Even if much of the extra summer rainfall in the Midwest derives from water in local soils, the original source of that moisture might be an irrigation spigot somewhere on the Great Plains. A rapid rise in irrigation in that region apparently has boosted precipitation downwind in the Midwest, Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., reported January 21 at the meeting. Rather than running off into rivers and streams or soaking back into the ground, Robock added, most of that liberated groundwater was used by plants, evaporated into the air and was carried downwind, where it condensed in clouds and then fell to the ground as rain.

In 1930, in a swath of plains that stretches from South Dakota down to Oklahoma and the Texas panhandle, farmers irrigated only about 7,500 square kilometers, an area about half the size of Connecticut. But by 1980, he notes, irrigated farmland in this same area covered about 60,000 square kilometers. During the 20th century, irrigation pulled more than 333 cubic kilometers of groundwater from aquifers beneath the Great Plains.

When Robock and his colleagues analyzed precipitation at more than 300 weather stations from central Wisconsin and Michigan down to northeastern Arkansas and northwestern Tennessee — a region that includes much of the same area studied by Changnon and his team — they too found that rainfall had increased. At sites in that swath, precipitation during a typical July late in the 20th century was between 25 and 50 percent higher that it was early in the century.

A variety of climate simulations don’t show such long-term changes in precipitation, probably because those simulations don’t take irrigation into account, Robock and his colleagues say. July, Robock noted, is when irrigation on the Great Plains is most profligate, with more than one-third of groundwater withdrawal occurring during that month.

Future analyses will compare the results of simulations that include irrigation with those that don’t, Robock said. Results of those studies might allow the team to more confidently pin the blame for the region’s increased July rainfall on Great Plains irrigation, he noted.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/crop-irrigation-could-be-cooling-midwest

(Reader’s note: “Blame?”  Rain and milder summer weather than 90 degrees is a good thing!)

Citations:

Changnon, D., V. Gensini, and J. Prell. 2010. A common Midwestern question: Where have all our 90° F days gone? American Meteorological Society meeting. Jan. 17–21. Atlanta. Abstract available: [Go to]

DeAngelis, A. . . . A. Robock, et al. A. 2010. Great Plains irrigation produces enhanced summer precipitation in the Midwest. American Meteorological Society meeting. Jan. 17–21. Atlanta. Abstract available: [Go to]

Further Reading:

Perkins, S. 2007. Hey, it’s cooler near the sprinklers. Science News 171(March 17):174. Available to subscribers: [Go to]

This article is reprinted for fair use in education, as one cannot directly access whole Science News articles unless one subscribes to ScienceNews.

A conspiracy for Planet Money: saving water

A residential property in Grants Pass.

Planet Money, you asked for conspiracy theories.  Mine is about the environmental fad of saving water, regardless of local conditions, supplies, or needs.  This started in the ‘80s, with people telling us that only 2% of the water on Earth is fresh, and we must therefore conserve it, that it is a precious resource.  It is not precious, it is vital to life and healthy living, and now it is overpriced by the unit in many, if not most, places in this country and around the world. 

Governments in the United States and throughout the world have taken it upon themselves to ration water by price, instituting low base rates and high unit prices, the opposite of previous water pricing, which was all base rate.  

California cities have led the way, with tiered pricing, charging more per unit for higher tiers of use, the opposite of normal business pricing. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/09/us/a-thirsty-california-puts-a-premium-on-excess-water-use.html?_r=0   

That practice has spread to Oregon, including my city of Grants Pass, encouraged by state officials.  High unit rates have spread to sewer rates, with units based on winter water use, putting downward pressure on household water use.   My sewer bill jumped from $20 to $40 when these unit rates were instituted, and this year it jumped to $75, because I had 7 people living in my house last winter.

It is a quiet war on irrigation and use of sprinklers particularly.  Their battle cry is “Evaporation is waste!”  My landscape management teacher, in 2000, told us that half of sprinkler water evaporates; evaporation is waste; we were due for a drought; and to sell customers on drip systems.  In my 18 years of gardening professionally, I did so for the first 10 and sooner and later lived to regret it.  Drip and all other water-saving irrigation devices are delicate and don’t water completely or well, which is their point.

The war on irrigation is a direct attack on gardening, and landscape maintenance codes have not been enforced well for 20 years, mainly due to the property bubble, filling city councils with bankers, speculators and developers, none of whom want to maintain properties at all, much less to code. Weeds grow, bloom and seed unchecked on many properties, making it harder for gardeners to maintain their own places.

The ignored collateral damage of all this water saving is the budgets and lives of the poor and middle class, who are provided cheap access to water with a low base rate but must pay through the nose to use it.  They can’t afford to water lawns, trees and shrubs, or grow food.  What good does it do to let us buy vegetable seeds with food stamps, if we can’t afford to grow them?  In the ‘80s, we paid only a base rate for water, and could use all we needed or wanted.

But if the poor can’t garden, then they won’t garden for you.  They’ll work fast food.  Those who would hire gardening help are finding that weeders are hard to find.  Grants Pass is dry, dusty, and prone to weed fires, where it used to be clean, green and well kept.  Even though poverty was high and wages were low in the ‘80s, we all lived more beautifully.

Evaporation is not waste; it is part of the water cycle.  It cools, humidifies and makes rain.  It is the easiest way to share water with neighbors and other localities downwind, and to make rain in and around the place it from which it evaporates.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/crop-irrigation-could-be-cooling-midwest 

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/watering-fields-california-boosts-rainfall-southwest

Indeed, it is hard to waste water in a city with a good sewage system and a good river with a storage dam.  Water that goes down sewage pipes is cleaned to drinking water standards and returned to the river.  Irrigation water either goes into the ground, recharging the water table; into the air to make rain, or into and through the plants, and transpired to make rain.  Even the plants we grow eventually give up their water to the cycle.

We on West Coast who live near rivers are blessed with clean rivers running west, into the prevailing wind, which blows our water vapor uphill, where it condenses and rains, filling our creeks and rivers.  The more we use sprinklers, the more rain we make. 

When I read the above article about California water boosting rainfall in the Colorado River drainage, I did a study of rainfall and temperature in Grants Pass zip code, June-September, 1983-2012.

I lived here from late ’84 to ‘86, which, thanks to this fad, was probably the height of sprinkler irrigation in California and Oregon.  We had wet thunderstorms every weekend in midsummer, though not usually wet enough to skip watering.  We didn’t have many dry lightning storms that started fires and had no fires or smoke near Grants Pass.  Watching the local news, I saw that Medford had more and larger midsummer storms than Grants Pass, and Klamath Falls had more than Medford, which fits with each city in turn adding to the water in the air with sprinklers as it condenses and falls from blowing uphill from the west.

We had a drought in ‘86 and were told not to water lawns or wash cars.  Everyone suffered equally, and paid equally for water, and our slight suffering ended with the fall rains.  That year, we had 103 days without rain, because we weren't watering lawns.

My study showed that the first decade, 1983-1992, had larger top rain events in July and August than in June and September; 1993-2003 reversed that; and 2003-2013 reversed it further.  Highest monthly temperatures also tended to increase, but lowest lows also decreased.  The amount of midsummer rain dropped nearly an inch per month per decade.

Between 1987 and 2000, I lived in Arizona.  I saw the cooling effects of irrigation in their cotton and corn fields, 10 degrees cooler in the fields than up the road in Bullhead City.  I saw the thunderstorms, torrential rains and flash floods; cold nights and hot days; the tempering effect of humidity and rain during their monsoons; and even brush fires.  Fires, floods and weather and temperature extremes are common to deserts and droughts, not a consequence of a slowly warming climate.

We have changed the climate.  First we made it wetter and cooler between the 1960s and 1980s by widespread sprinkler irrigation, and then made it drier and hotter since the ‘80s by making water use too expensive, mainly in the cities.  The resulting drying and warming has been blamed on trace gases like CO2 and methane, measured in parts per million and billion, respectively.  The former has been ignored as natural variation, rather than looking at the role of water vapor, 1%-4% of the atmosphere, and the way we keep it wetter and cooler when we use sprinklers and work the water cycle.

Why would the enviro powers-that-be push this deceptive and absurd water-saving agenda?  To gain their goal of carbon taxes, their holy grail.  But the semi-desert cities in California, Oregon, Greece, Spain, Italy and Australia that were turned into gardens and then let dry out every summer are starting to burn up (even in winter in California and the Great Plains) from all the dry weeds that these water-saving policies have grown, along with the dry forests and grasslands around them.