Mutually Assured Dysfunction 5: Gravity and the Feinstein committee

It’s been a big week for announcements in the California water wrangle.

First, NASA announces that in the last six years the Valley has pumped a Lake Mead’s worth of water out of the ground.

Preliminary studies show most of the water loss is coming from the more southerly located San Joaquin basin, which gets less precipitation than the Sacramento River basin farther north. Initial results suggest the Sacramento River basin is losing about 2 cubic kilometers of water a year. Surface water losses account for half of this, while groundwater losses in the northern Central Valley add another 0.6 cubic kilometers annually. The San Joaquin Basin is losing 3.5 cubic kilometers a year. Of this, more than 75 percent is the result of groundwater pumping in the southern Central Valley, primarily to irrigate crops.

This data was produced by the NASA/German Aerospace Center Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (Grace). “Grace’s extremely sensitive microwave ranging instrumentation is capable of measuring variations at the micron, or millionth of a meter, level ... Launched March 17, 2002, Grace senses minute variations in Earth’s surface mass and corresponding variations in Earth’s gravitational pull.” Pretty amazing technology.

The map is interesting. If the DNP is reading it correctly, then white represents the least gravitational change. The darker the reddish area, the more gravitational change, the more groundwater being pumped out of the ground. The yellow, with even more change, is where Tulare Lake and Sean Hannity were. Lots of gravity lost there. 

As always, some feel that the reason farmers have to pump so much groundwater is the fault of the Endangered Species Act. A drop of fresh water that escapes to San Francisco Bay is “wasted” for this crowd.

By the way, it’s worth noting that while most of that water is being extracted from the southern part of the Valley, the Sacramento part is no stranger to groundwater pumping. Groundwater monitoring and regulation is, as the On the public record blog notes, a good reason for the entire state to have more government intrusion.

Perhaps the state should try to get one or two hundred million, give or take, in stimulus money for an army of plumbers to install water meters in all unmetered houses and businesses in the state.

For the DNP, the NASA data underscores the need for greatly strengthened groundwater management and accounting, urban and ag.

Second, the National Academies publishes committee membership information for the newly formed Sustainable Water and Environmental Management in the California Bay-Delta project.

What a landscape awaits them!

This is a preliminary list, subject to review:

No appointment shall be considered final until we have evaluated relevant information bearing on the committee’s composition and balance. This information will include the confidential written disclosures to The National Academies by each member-designate concerning potential sources of bias and conflict of interest pertaining to his or her service on the committee; information from discussion of the committee’s composition and balance that is conducted in closed session at its first meeting and again whenever its membership changes; and any public comments that we have received on the membership during the 20-calendar day formal public comment period.

In a nutshell, here’s what they do:

Huggett (chair): fate and effects of hazardous substances in aquatic systems
Anderson: computer models of the migration of juvenile and adult salmon through hydrosystems
Campana: transboundary water resources issues, regional hydrogeology, surface water-ground water interactions, and arid zone hydrology
Dunne: studies of drainage basin and hill-slope evolution; sediment transport and floodplain sedimentation
Giorgi: fish passage migratory behavior, juvenile salmon survival studies, biological effects of hydroelectric facilities and operation
Glibert: transformations and fate of inorganic and organic nitrogen in marine and estuarine systems
Klein: natural resources, environment, water, land use, wetlands, and property laws
Luoma: bioavailability and ecological effects of metals in aquatic environments
McGuire: control of trace contaminants in drinking water
Miller: population dynamics of aquatic animals, including recruitment, feeding and bio-physical interactions and early life history
Obeysekera: development and applications of computer simulation models for the restoration of the Everglades Ecosystem
Pfeffer: environmental sociology with an emphasis on land use policy and management
Reed: aspects of sediment dynamics in coastal wetlands, with emphasis on sediment mobilization and marsh hydrology
Rose: mathematical and simulation models to understand and forecast effects of natural and anthropogenic factors on aquatic populations
Tullos: ecohydraulics, river morphology and restoration, bioassessment, and habitat and hydraulic modeling

Emily Green has written about the very questionable impetus that led to the creation of this body of relevantly skilled people. But despite that, does anyone see any disciplinary omissions or conspiratorial configurations among the committee membership? The DNP doesn’t. But if you do, now is the time to voice your concerns.

A thankless task, that’s what the DNP sees in the future of these fifteen people. No matter what their findings, they will not in all likelihood convince anyone of anything that they don’t already believe.