Climate Change Isn’t Coming to the Middle Rio Grande.  It’s Already Here.

I’ll be honest: I’m not one for sitting through an all-day symposium or lecture. I always feel bad for people sitting near me, in fact, because I shift positions about 15 times each minute and find myself feeling faint for the lack of air inside the room. (As a reporter, I also have to resist raising my hand through the entire question-and-answer period.)

But on Friday, I made a rare exception and sat in on the morning sessions of the symposium sponsored by the League of Women Voters and the Sierra Club, titled “Climate Change in New Mexico: Seizing the Opportunities.”

The list of local speakers was an impressive one: Tony Sylvester, from the Mid-Region council of Governments talking about the Rail Runner, UNM Economics Professor Janie Chermak on the inevitable costs of climate change, New Mexico Environmental Law Center’s Eric Jantz and UNM law school professor Eileen Guana on the hidden impacts of climate change and carbon trading, Dr. John Fogarty, executive director of the Santa Fe-based group, New Energy Economy and the founder of Architecture 2030, Edward Mazria.

But the person I was really there to see was University of New Mexico earth and planetary sciences professor David Gutzler.

(Let me quickly get this out of the way, just in case there’s an incredulous reader out there in cyberspace: I will neither acknowledge nor indulge climate change deniers.)

Starting off his talk, Gutzler highlighted a 2007 model from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which shows the predicted global mean temperatures under a handful of carbon scenarios.

And then, he brought things down to a more meaningful level for those of us in the audience.

Based on one of the more conservative carbon scenarios, the Middle Rio Grande Valley will see annual warming increases of 6.9 degrees Fahrenheit per century. (Winter warming will be 5.8 degrees; summer warming, 7.4 degrees.) Those predictions, by the way, take into account the inter-annual variability observed throughout the 20th century.

What do those numbers really mean?

Well, by the mid-21st century, we will see summers much warmer than any conditions humans have ever experienced here.

“We don’t need models. Climate change is already happening, and we can look at the data,” he said, adding later, “There is nothing hypothetical about warming trends.”

So, in the interest of data-sharing, here are just a few of the facts I gleaned from Gutzler’s talk.

●Here in the Middle Rio Grande Valley, the growing season has already increased by about a week since the 1960s.

●Warmer temperatures will increase evaporation from reservoirs. And despite the fact that precipitation predictions are more optimistic than the temperature models, soil moisture will also decrease as a result of warming.

●Snowpack will decrease. The snow line will move higher in elevation and further north. Snows will also start later and end earlier. (Most of New Mexico’s surface water currently comes from snowpack. In the late spring and summer, those northern, higher-elevation snows melt and send water running down the Colorado River and the Rio Grande, providing water for farmers as well as cities.)

●Less snowpack means less water flowing through the river basins; it also means those pulses of water that irrigators rely upon will occur earlier in the season—before the beginning of the growing season.

●Both the Colorado River and the Rio Grande will be “big losers” in the warmer Southwest. Already, experts are prediction the Colorado River Compact—the agreement by which the basin’s water is tallied among states—will become unenforceable by the mid- to late-21st century.

In other words, water rights and allocations will exceed the actual amount of water flowing through stream banks.

And just a reminder: We rely on water from the Rio Grande, as well as a tributary of the Colorado River (that’s the San Juan-Chama water you’ve been hearing about the past few years.)

Here in Albuquerque, Gutzler points out that there is no “cushion.” All the water here has been fully allocated. We’ve already stressed the local aquifer—hence the recent switch to surface waters—so where else will people start looking for water?

The biggest question right now, of course, is this: What are the area’s lawmakers doing to prepare for inevitable water shortages?

Climate change is happening. There is no respite in sight. And that’s why it seems so ridiculous to even have to type these words: It is long past time for local lawmakers to reach out to scientists such as Gutzler and learn more about the future we are facing.

We no longer have the luxury of labeling ourselves a “green” city or futzing about with vague plans and initiatives. Sacrifice and drought, a withering Southwest and reality checks are hardly the stuff of campaign rhetoric. But until the public demands that politicians and lawmakers plan for a warmer, drier valley, all of our children face bleak futures here in the valley. Any plans for the future must also be transparent and realistic, taking into account the reality of how climate changes will affect businesses, farmers and residents. In short, it’s time to face reality.

Difficult choices lie ahead. After all, as Gutzler pointed out in his talk, the Southwest is Ground Zero for climate change.

“We see the biggest climate signals already,” says Gutzler. “We see the trends already.”

Resources:

Dr. David Gutzler’s UNM homepage

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

The League of Women Voters, New Mexico website, where symposium presentations will be posted shortly.

NOAA Climate Prediction Center