Seeing opportunity in rising oceans

Conservative projections say rising seas from climate change would displace hundreds of millions of people and cost hundreds of billions of dollars over the next century. Sam Eaton found a scientist with a plan to capitalize on melting icecaps for the sake of everyone.

Big ideas, the kind that change the world, often come from the oddest places.

For atmospheric scientist Carl Hodges that place was 6,000 feet above Mexico's coastal desert, south of the Arizona border. And his idea, if it works, could stop one of global warming's most serious threats: Rising seas.But the source of Hodge's inspiration isn't the shrimp farms, it's the giant man-made canal that supplies them with a constant river of seawater.

That one pumping station with four pumps is as big as many rivers in the world. And that's what gave Hodges his "eureka" moment. These shrimp farms between here and Guaymas, which is only 100 miles to the south, pump more than 20 percent of the ice melt of the Antarctic.

Hodges started crunching the numbers and came up with the total volume of water flowing from the world's thawing icecaps and glaciers. "Four o'clock in the morning I'm at, 'Jesus, that's not very much.' I mean, I had this image of what it was and how much the sea level was rising. And I knew there was thermal expansion and all this, and that's not very much. And then I realized, my God, we can stop sea-level rise."

Especially with the right profit motive.

Near the Mexican fishing village of Bahia de Kino, Hodges is experimenting with what he hopes will become the world's next big cash crop. What look like rice fields stretch in every direction, turning this patch of desert scrubland into a green oasis.

This is Salicornia bigelovii. To be slightly modest, which I have propensity not to do at times, it's probably the reinvention of irrigated agriculture. That's because it doesn't use a drop of fresh water. The only thing these plants need to grow is the desert sunshine and a daily soaking of seawater.

The seeds are key to Hodges' vision. They pack as much high-quality vegetable oil as soybeans, making salicornia an ideal biofuel crop -- and a highly profitable one. Especially if the fertile effluent from those shrimp farms we saw from the air is used as the irrigation source.

Today that water flows back into the Sea of Cortez, causing huge dead zones along the coast. But it's not the environmental damage that bothers Hodges. It's the wasted opportunity.

Why not you take it inland, green the earth, make some money, and give a whole bunch of people jobs?

But for any of this to counter rising seas another step has to be taken. All that seawater pumped inland has to stay inland -- forever. And this is where the big science comes in.

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As supplies dry up, growers pass on farming and sell water

In a state where water has become an increasingly scarce commodity, a growing number of farmers are betting they can make more money selling their water supplies to thirsty cities and farms to the south than by growing crops.

The shortages this season among the most intense of the last decade are already shooting water prices skyward in many areas, and Los Angeles-area cities are begging for water and coaxing farmers to let their fields go to dust.

"It just makes dollars and sense right now," said Bruce Rolen, a third-generation farmer in Northern California's lush Sacramento Valley. "There's more economic advantage to fallowing than raising a crop."

Instead of sowing seeds in April, Rolen plans to leave his rice stubble for the birds and sell his irrigation water on the open market, where it could fetch up to three times the normal price.

"It's been a good decade since there's been this much interest in buying and selling water on the open market," said Jack King, national public affairs manager for the California Farm Bureau Federation. "We're prepared to see significant fallowing in several key parts of the state."

Water from Northern California rivers irrigates most of the country's winter vegetables and keeps faucets flowing in the Los Angeles area. But it must be shipped south through a complex network of pumps, pipes and aqueducts, and that system recently developed a kink when a federal judge ordered new restrictions on pumping to save a threatened fish.

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China Offers Plan to Clean Up Its Polluted Lakes

The Chinese government unveiled a detailed plan on Tuesday to limit pollution in China’s lakes by 2010 and return them to their original state by 2030.

The State Council, China’s cabinet, ordered strict regulation of the release of wastewater, the closing of heavily polluting factories near lakes, the improvement of sewage treatment facilities and strict limits on fish farms, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

The council also banned the use of pesticides with highly toxic residue near large lakes as well as detergents containing phosphorus.

While national leaders in Beijing have shown greater interest in recent months in cleaning up the environment, their efforts have frequently met resistance from provincial and local officials more interested in maximizing economic growth.

China’s three main lakes, Tai, Chaohu and Dianchi, have all had algae blooms in recent years. Stimulated by high levels of phosphorus and other chemicals, algae has blanketed large areas of water, killing fish and making the water undrinkable for large numbers of people living nearby.

An algae bloom that covered a large area of Lake Tai last spring was particularly severe and received national attention. The toxic cyanobacteria produced a choking odor up to a mile from the lake’s shores and prevented two million people nearby from drinking or cooking with the water.

Wastewater from fish farms has become another serious problem, and one that the State Council tried to address on Tuesday, ordering that all fish farms be removed from the three main lakes by the end of this year. Fish farms elsewhere are to be more tightly limited to certain designated areas within three years, Xinhua said.

The water cleanup effort will also include the lake behind the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River. Environmentalists warned before the dam was built that it would be hard to prevent toxic pollution from building up in the lake once the river was no longer carrying pollution out to the ocean.

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In a Strategic Reversal, Dutch Embrace Floods

Natural disasters have a way of shattering complacency. Earthquakes bring new building codes; hurricanes prompt evacuation planning. But what about a disaster that unfolds over 50 or 100 years? Sea level rise accompanying global warming is one such gradual peril, leading low-lying coastal countries to worry: How do you get people to focus on an enormous but slow-moving threat?

That's a problem now facing Holland, forcing Dutch leaders to rethink their thousand-year strategy of fighting back the water that threatens them.

To understand the history of the Dutch battle against water, talk to Geert Mak. He's a writer by trade, but more generally he's someone who thinks deeply about topics. And he's thought a lot about the Dutch relationship with water. Mak is every bit the urban intellectual, but he also maintains a rural hideaway in Friesland in northern Holland. That's where I caught up with him.

According to Mak, Holland's many ditches and canals are not just scenery. They're a critical part of the manmade drainage system that keeps this soggy country from filling up like a bathtub. Pointing out the window of his modern farmhouse, Mak indicates the flat fields stretching off to the horizon. "This is pancake country," he says.

When the Romans were here 2,000 years ago, they figured out that making a bit of high ground to build your house on would keep you dry when the flood waters came in. Since then, Mak says, the Dutch have constantly worked to protect themselves from high water. And yet Mak says something puzzling is now happening in the Netherlands. He says people seem to believe that only poor low-lying countries like Bangladesh are going to be affected by the sea level rise that will come with global warming.

"I am amazed all the time," he says. "Because we are a very rich Bangladesh, we are a very modern Bangladesh, we have an enormous amount of technology. But we are a kind of Bangladesh. And we are one of the first victims of the climate changes."

It's as if the Dutch have tuned out the threat climate change. The Dutch people, Mak says, "have the idea it's far away, while it is really at their door. They're sleeping. They're sleeping."The Maeslant barrier, at the Hook of Holland, is the final piece of the overhaul launched 50 years ago. It's a massive flood gate not far from where the Maas River meets the North Sea. "You can compare it with two gigantic doors," Dutch water official Jos Kuypers says. "One on the north side of the river, and one of the south side of the river."

When a storm causes the North Sea to rise, the doors will swing shut, closing off the river and keeping the water out. According to Kuypers, this will protect Rotterdam and all the small, low-lying towns nearby.

And it's easy to believe him. Standing below this giant steel structure, you get the feeling that it could withstand almost anything nature could throw at it. Even people who lived through the flood of '53 can feel safe now.

But that's a problem, Erik Boessenkool says, because "most people in the Netherlands rarely think about the fact that they are living below sea level, or in a sensitive area."

Boessenkool works with the water ministry's planning office in The Hague. He says the dams and barriers that were built after the '53 flood might be adequate if it were still 1953, but today there's something more insidious to worry about. He describes this threat in six words, give or take: "Climate change, climate change and climate change."

If the Dutch people have tuned out the problem of climate change, the Dutch government has not. And for an American journalist like me, it'sunusual to hear a government official more worried about climate change than the general public."One of the issues that we will have to deal with in the coming years is to create some sense of urgency," Boessenkool says. "But we don't want to stir panic." He isn't sure how to do that, but he says it's essential, because the government is changing its strategy for dealing with water, and it's a change that will make people uncomfortable.

Geert Mak says this idea of letting the water go where it wants is going to take getting used to. The Dutch are used to taming nature, he says. "But now, they have to accept retreat. And give part of the country back to the water. Because it is better. Because it is more clever."

And because climate change will force them to anyway.

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Drain on the Mediterranean: rising water usage

Arif Karaoglu recalls the days when Lake Aksehir lapped at the foot of the village mosque and residents had to build high walls to protect their homes from flooding. Now, when he looks out across the landscape, he sees only a vast, sandy plateau. Until recently, a body of water three times the size of Washington, D.C., filled the plain.

"Dust," laments Mr. Karaoglu, who moved to the village in 1942. "There's nothing but dust."

Dubbed the country's grain warehouse, central Turkey's Konya plain has long been known for its beautiful lakes and vast fields, which produce 10 percent of Turkey's agricultural yield. But both are now threatened by a severe water shortage that dramatically illustrates a broader regional crisis.

Across the Mediter-ranean, water is being pumped out of the earth at an unsustainable pace. In Italy's Milan region, groundwater levels have fallen by more than 80 feet over the past 80 years. So much water has been pumped from the Jeffara aquifer in Libya that even if all withdrawals stopped, it would take 75 years for the aquifer to return to its original level, estimates a 2005 report by the Blue Plan – a United Nations program on development and the environment in the Mediterranean.

As a result of this profligate water use, at least 50 percent of the region's wetlands are at risk, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). In addition, more than 100,000 square miles of coastal regions – roughly the same area as the United Kingdom – are under threat of desertification.

Near Konya, water pumped from underground to feed the thirsty crops above is part of the same closed system as the lakes. The cultivation of new land, along with a transition to more thirsty crops like sugar beet, has increased water use beyond what is naturally replaced, causing groundwater levels to fall and the lakes to dry up. More than a decade of drought and rising summer temperatures – which causes increased evaporation – have exacerbated the situation and laid bare the magnitude of the problem.

"These lakes are 5 million years old," says Guler Gocmez, a geologist at Selçuk University in Konya, who has been studying the region's lakes for the past 25 years. "There's always been water here, but that might not be true much longer."

more from the Christian Science Monitor

Crucial California Delta Faces a Salty Future

If you've never heard of the Sacramento Delta, you're not alone. Even people who live in California aren't too sure where it is. But the Sacramento Delta is crucial to the health of the state, and climate change is threatening the delta's very existence.

The Sacramento Delta is a small triangle of land just inland from the San Francisco Bay Area. It's where the fresh water from California's major rivers and the salt water from the Pacific Ocean meet. More than 20 million Californians get some of their drinking water from the delta. It also provides much of the water for California's huge agribusiness.

But rising sea levels threaten to turn the delta into a salty marsh, contaminating all that freshwater and flooding the homes and farms of delta residents."The delta of today is not sustainable even under today's conditions, never mind climate change," says geologist Jeffrey Mount.

Here's the problem. On one side of the delta is saltwater from the ocean. On the other side is freshwater coming down from California's mountain. And in the middle is the low-lying delta land, much of it below sea level.

About 1,100 miles of earthen walls called levees keep the land dry, and keep the salt- and freshwater from mixing. The situation is shaky now, and it's going to get worse. With climate change, sea level will rise, and there will be more rain and less snow in the mountains. That means there will be more water in the rivers.

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A Long-Dry California River Gets, and Gives, New Life

What Los Angeles took a century ago — a 62-mile stretch of river here in the parched Owens Valley — it is now giving back.

One of the largest river-restoration projects in the country has sent a gentle current of water meandering through what just a year ago was largely a sandy, rocky bed best used as a horse trail and barely distinguishable from the surrounding high desert scrub.

Mud hens dive for food. A blue heron sweeps overhead. Bass, carp and catfish patrol deep below. Some local residents swear they have even seen river otters.

So much reedy tule has sprouted along the banks, like bushy tufts of hair, that officials have called in a huge floating weed whacker, nicknamed the Terminator, to cut through it and help keep the water flowing — a problem inconceivable in years past.

The river, 2 to 3 feet deep and 15 to 20 feet across, will not be mistaken for the mighty Mississippi. And an economic boon promised to accompany the restoration has yet to materialize.

Yet the mere fact that water is present and flowing in the Lower Owens River enthralls residents nearly 100 years after Los Angeles diverted the river into an aqueduct and sent it 200 miles south to slake its growing thirst.

“This is infinitely better than before,” said Keith Franson, a kayaker pumping up his boat on the banks this week and preparing to explore a stretch of the renewed river. “You got birds, herons, terns, all sorts of wildlife coming back in because life is coming back in the river.”

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New center to focus on solving ocean problems

Stanford University and Monterey Bay Aquarium and its research institute, with $25 million from the Packard Foundation, on Wednesday launched a new academic center that will focus not on the problems plaguing the world's oceans, but on how to solve them.

The Center for Ocean Solutions, if it follows its mission, will be a marked departure from the traditional academic exercise of marine scientists: to define and analyze problems such as overfishing, the effects of global warming, coastal development and pollution streaming off the land.

Instead, the center aims to bring together scientists and experts in economics and business to meet with government policy makers so they can work out solutions and begin their implementation, said Buzz Thompson, a Stanford law professor.

That usually involves overcoming objections from industries that thwart change for fear of economic loss, Thompson said. So the plan is to engage experts and business leaders to maneuver around such hurdles.

"Solving the oceans' problems is not just assembling the usual cast of characters, but getting others involved," said Thompson, who is also co-director of Stanford's interdisciplinary Woods Institute for the Environment.

The center was born in part from frustration from a lack of government leadership in addressing the ocean's mounting problems. The U.S. Commission on Ocean Policy, appointed by President Bush, and another commission funded by the Pew Foundation, each issued dire reports about the oceans' future and spelled out hundreds of reforms to stem problems such as depleted fisheries, and toxic algae and bacterial blooms that sicken people and devastate wildlife.

Little has been done in the United States since those gloomy warnings in 2003 and 2004, prompting the chairmen of both disbanded commissions to award the federal government below-average and sometimes failing grades in annual report cards.

"The oceans have largely been ignored," said Meg Caldwell, a Stanford law professor who will run the Center for Ocean Solutions until a permanent director is found. Caldwell said she was encouraged by international efforts to address climate change, but added: "That's only half the story. The other half is the critical role that oceans play in sustaining the human population."

The center's focus initially will be on research and demonstration projects along the California coast that can be replicated elsewhere, and improving marine education for students, post-doctoral scholars, politicians and policymakers.

More from the LA Times

Scientists warn the Sai Gon River is dying

The Sai Gon River that provides water for HCM City’s almost 10 million people is dying.

Its killer is the waste water discharged from industrial zones and the pursuit of aquaculture, scientists at a seminar held to discuss the protection of the river agreed.

Many reports tabled at the HCM City meeting showed that high amounts of manganese, iron, ammonia, coliform and oil are the major pollutants.

A study by HCM City University of Technology Professor Nguyen Thi Van Ha showed the amount of manganese and iron in the river was higher than the norm of potable water.

The amount of manganese at the Tan Hiep pumping station from where water is supplied to the city, was measured at 0.2mg per litre, double that permissible.

Tan Hiep pumping station director Bui Thanh Giang said he was worried about the fall in water quality and the increase in the amount of ammonia since 2004.

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Anger and Blame After Deadly Flood in Northwest

The big rain fell with fatal efficiency those first few days of December. It washed mud from mountainsides and lifted logs into the Chehalis River, which rose to a historic high as it roared downhill. Bridges broke. Cows drowned. Helicopters plucked people from rooftops.

The flood was devastating, and revealing, churning up once again the question that confounds the Pacific Northwest: How to balance people, water, fish, forests and farms? A month later, anger and blame accompany the giant dehumidifiers still being used to dry out houses.

“We’ve got to have a big public debate, and it’s got to result in action, not inaction,” said W. Jay Gordon, an organic dairy farmer who is executive director of the Washington State Dairy Federation. “Maybe this will finally provoke that public discussion. It’s not just logging. It’s not just farming. It’s not just development, and it’s not just environmentalists.”

The storm that caused the flooding has been linked to at least six deaths in the Northwest and the loss of hundreds of farm animals. It instantly updated local building codes that require new development to be above the flood line. It has also prompted competing accusations that logging contributed to the damage and that efforts to protect salmon habitat left the river full of destructive debris.

“That’s part of it,” Pete Dykstra, a 64-year-old dairy farmer here whose 100 Holstein cattle drowned, said of the logging. “But part of it’s Mother Nature, too, and part of it’s the environmentalists.”

Mr. Dykstra and many other local residents attribute some of the damage to laws intended to protect salmon. “We can’t dredge it,” he said of the river. “And if a tree falls over, we can’t clear it out because that’s habitat.”

Tension has increased as more people move to this part of Washington, about 100 miles southwest of Seattle, bringing new development pressure and new ideas about how to use the land. Lewis County, which suffered much of the worst damage from the storm, had 59,000 people in 1990, according to the Census Bureau. Last year it had nearly 74,000.

While people still talk about the big flood of 1996, which inundated the region and closed Interstate 5, new retail development has been built in the flood plain since then, and some of the houses that flooded in December were under construction.

Like many other places in the Northwest outside big cities, Lewis County is trying to make its way from a declining economy based on logging and mining to one that meets new needs.

What had been the largest employer, a coal mine operated by TransAlta, closed late in 2006, taking 600 jobs. But the timber industry, in steady decline in many other places in the Northwest, has actually grown here in recent years, and the county has also lured warehouses for big companies like Fred Meyer, a department store, and Michaels, the chain of craft stores. They like the access to Interstate 5, which goes right through Lewis County and connects to ports in Seattle and Portland while it runs the length of the West Coast.

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Concerns Rise with Water of Three Gorges Dam

Next year, China is expected to reach a milestone when the giant reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River reaches its maximum height.

Beijing has long touted the dam — the biggest hydroelectric plant in the world — as a way to stop flooding, increase river shipping and generate clean power.

But in September, officials publicly admitted that the project could lead to environmental disasters, prompting speculation that China's leaders wanted to distance themselves from the project.

Intentions for the Dam

The dam on the Yangtze, the world's third-longest river, is 600 feet high and nearly a mile and a half across. In 2009, when the dam is completed, it will have taken 17 years to build, at an estimated cost of around $24 billion.

About a half-century ago, Chairman Mao wrote a poem envisioning how the dam would conquer the river.

"The dam will cut through the clouds and rain of the Wuxia Gorge, and a smooth lake will appear amid the deep canyons," he wrote.

That's pretty much what it looks like now. The river's once fierce current has been turned into a placid lake, extending for about 370 miles upstream from the dam.

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Orange County sewage will soon be drinking water

As a hedge against water shortages and population growth, Orange County has begun operating the world's largest, most modern reclamation plant -- a facility that can turn 70 million gallons of treated sewage into drinking water every day.

The new purification system at the Orange County Water District headquarters in Fountain Valley cost about $490 million and comprises a labyrinth of pipes, filters, holding tanks and pumps across 20 acres.

Almost four years after construction began, the facility is now purifying effluent from a neighboring sewage treatment plant run by the Orange County Sanitation District, a partner in the venture.

The finished product will be injected into the county's vast groundwater basin to combat saltwater intrusion and supplement drinking water supplies for 2.3 million people in coastal, central and northern Orange County.

But before that can be done, state health officials must certify that the reclaimed water meets drinking water standards. Officials expect the approval to be granted before opening ceremonies Jan. 25.

"Our sources from the delta and the Colorado River are becoming unavailable," said Michael R. Markus, general manager of the water district. "This will help drought-proof the region and give us a locally controlled source of water."

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