by George Sibley
We’re hearing a lot about “climate change” these years – apparently an article of faith, like God: something you believe in or you don’t, or don’t really believe in but pretend you do, or sort of do believe in but pretend you don’t, as suits your politics and political friends in other more immediate matters.
My growing sense is that it doesn’t really matter whether you believe in climate change or not – just like it doesn’t really seem to matter whether you believe in God. If there is a God, okay, but that God truly moves in such mysterious ways that, as John Adams said 200 years ago, “it is not only vain but wicked for insects to pretend to comprehend it.”
We’re discovering – with much more careful research that was ever invested in the existence of God – that it might be the same with climate, and climate change. Here’s a couple of short stories about that, involving studies of the potential impacts of climate change. Over here in the Upper Gunnison, our water conservancy funded a study to try to determine what the impact might be of climate change predictions on our valley economy, which is primarily outdoor recreation, education (a college), and ranching, with the retailing, local governance, service industries, et cetera that support those primary activities. Outdoor recreation and ranching are heavily dependent on the climate we’ve enjoyed and suffered in recent centuries, so there’s concern about the possible effect on these things of a five, ten, 20 or even 30 percent reduction in annual precipitation, as various studies are predicting.
What we learned from our study was – nothing useful. More specifically, we learned that when the researcher looked for correlations between changes in local economic activity in any of those areas and the dry spells we have had in the past, there were no significant or demonstrable correlations. This was probably partly because the dry spells have been of relatively short duration – bad weather to endure rather than chronic change to adapt to. But more of the indeterminacy seems to have been due to what might be called “cultural noise”: was a slump in tourism in 2002-03 a result of the driest year in decades, or fallout from 9/11? And the governor’s national proclamation that it looked like the whole state was on fire that summer?
I will say, in retrospect, that the study itself was not very well designed on our part, and it was very badly run by the researcher, whose name and institution I will leave out to protect the guilty. But I felt better about learning nothing very useful from our study when I read the results of the Colorado Water Conservation Board’s study of water availability from the Colorado River – a study that was much better designed than ours (for the most part), and that cost fifty times more than ours and took twice as long to conduct.
The purpose of the CWCB “Colorado River Water Availability Study” was to try to narrow down the estimates on how much of Colorado’s allocation of Colorado River water was still available to help the state meet anticipated mid-century water demands. The State Demographer projects that the state’s population will double by 2050, with most of the new people settling in or near the Front Range megalopolis; estimates on how much “new water” this would require vary, but it is obviously a good time to do a serious check on how much “new water” we might actually still have to develop – which will help determine how much of it will have to purchased from agriculture. We know there is nothing left to develop in the Platte River, Arkansas and Rio Grande Basins, which leaves the Colorado River tributaries. Hence this study.
It would take more space than I have here to summarize all the considerations that had to be confronted in just getting a water-availability study scoped that would have a reasonable chance of being accepted across all of the geographic, political, economic and philosophical divides in Colorado. For my purposes here, suffice it to say that the study was required to take potential climate change into account.
So the scientists working on the study plugged a range of multi-decade greenhouse gas scenarios into five semi-randomly selected global climate models – and what they basically found is that it’s just not possible to project or predict what is going to happen as the climate changes. More specifically: prior to the study, we had some sort of politicized estimates on how much water was left to develop in the Colorado’s tributaries, ranging from 400,000 to 1,400,000 acre-feet remaining to develop. Before running the climate change models, just using existing data, CRWAS narrowed that range down to 350,000-800,000 acre-feet.
But when the scientists incorporated the climate change model runs, the projected estimates on water remaining to develop exploded out to zero at the low end, and almost a million acre-feet at the high end!
In short, while this study does shift the range of possibilities downward by about 400,000 acre-feet, it does nothing to resolve the Great Colorado Debate over the extent to which the West Slope can continue to be the solution to East Slope water problems. Here on the West Slope we love that “zero” figure; Dave Miller, Aaron Million and the South Metro burbs look at the “million acre-feet” figure and say, hah, we told you so!
The conclusion from both studies, though, would seem to be that, in putting all that long-sequestered carbon back into the carbon cycle, we are unleashing global dynamics that we aren’t able to anticipate, so we will just have to hope we have the flexibility and resilience to adapt to whatever happens when we get to it. Just like living with the mysterious ways of God. This is, however, a flexibility and resilience that we show no sign of having today, at least at the national and international levels.
I want to go back, though, to the “cultural noise” that made it difficult to say the 2002-03 slump in the local tourist-resort economy was due to events in the natural environment. Rather than “cultural noise,” let’s call things like 9/11 and the governor’s fire statement “events in the cultural environment”: discrete events that we have no more control over than we have control over the snow that falls or doesn’t fall from the natural environment, but events that nonetheless impact our lives considerably.
In other words – was our economy suffering from uncontrollable events in the natural environment, or from uncontrollable events happening in the “cultural environment”?
But that immediately raises another question – does it make any difference, here in central Colorado, to know whether what’s happening down on the ground comes out of the natural environment or the cultural environment, or a mix of both? We can’t do much to change either, from here down on the ground. The definition of “environment” is those events, circumstances and conditions impacting you that you cannot change, and therefore have to adapt to.
The real truth about our “local” economies here in Central Colorado is that they are mostly beyond our control. Almost everything we need to live here comes in from “out there” – the cultural environment – at prices we can no more control than we can control the snowfall. The same is true about the tourists and resort guests and students and retirees we have to persuade to come here, in order to get the wherewithal to pay for all that stuff we need to bring in to live here. We can bait the trap, send out brochures and catalogues and whatever. But if the economy crashes and burns, it will not be anything we can control or change from central Colorado; all the marketing in the world will not help us if people “out there” stop coming because of a “drought” in either the economy or the atmosphere. We need the blessings that might or might not fall from the environment a lot more than the environment seems to need us, and that is not a pleasant feeling when so much of that environment is so obviously as mysteriously fickle as the Old Testament God.
The real challenge, then, from the local perspective, might be less about understanding how the macro-activities in that thoroughly “cross-bred” natural and cultural environment are going to impact us, and more about just developing some flexible and potentially resilient local culture, to cope with whatever gets thrown our way. Grow potatoes.
I read Voltaire’s Candide a long time ago, in college, and was mildly offended by what seemed to be an anticlimactic ending – that after all his wild global adventures, not in his idiotic professor’s “best of all possible worlds” but in a world with so much needing set right, he would turn his back on all that, narrow his horizon to his little farm and his ugly wife and other hangers-on, put his head down and hoe. The book ends with Professor Pangloss delivering yet one more proof that it was the best of all possible worlds.
“Excellently observed,” answered Candide; “but let us cultivate our garden.”
It begins to make more sense to me, down on the ground in central Colorado.
George Sibley was born in Western Pennsylvania, but was conceived in Colorado by Colorado natives, and thus considers himself to be a native Coloradan.
