Page 16 - Sonoma County Gazette April 2017

Climate Change
is a Water Problem in Russian River
By Don McEnhill
Climate Change is in the news more and more despite the White House
windbag ordering that EPA and NASA delete all references to climate on their websites and publications. Even more worrisome is his order to erase trillions of pieces of data used by scientists around the world to help document and address the issue. Luckily hackers are busy finding and stashing that data in non-US servers and databases. Even if he succeeded in erasing all that data, we still have enough data to date to show us that our Climate is will warm
for decades and we’ve already warmed to the point where our weather has changed. These climatic changes will manifest in the Russian River and California as a Water Problem and our future will be dominated by too much or too little water.
Reduce emissions of green house gases.
Most if not everyone reading this is aware of the need to reduce emissions of green house gases (GHG’s) like the carbon dioxide from our cars. This effort is intended to reduce the GHG’s that are driving our planet to hotter temperatures every year. This is something everyone should take action on everyday by reducing vehicle trips, driving fuel efficient vehicles and carpooling. While
This water shouldn’t be in parking lot, should be in a creek but there is no room! Damages on 12/11/14 over $2 million. (Photo: Boston Globe)
Cause and Effect
we should continue all our efforts to reduce GHG’s, all that effort will not save us from much bigger floods and much longer droughts that we can expect from warmer global temperatures. We have to both address the problem of climate change, GHG emissions, AND the symptoms, bigger floods and longer droughts, at the same time. It’s a bit like Apollo 13 while flying it, an almost impossible task but it was done.
Why do we have to work on both at once, why can’t we just focus on the cause first and the symptoms later? We can’t because our watershed and our state’s environment and economy are both dependent on water. This wet winter reminds us that in 1862 California had a series of atmospheric river events
that turned the Central valley into an inland sea 300 miles long by 20 miles wide. If that happened today, our state would be bankrupt, 60% of southern
CA residents would have no water and doubt we’d get much help from DC. Looking at the flip side in the last 1,000 years we’ve had 300 year long droughts, thought the last drought was tough imagine one that lasts 100 generations? Climate change plus our past actions to eliminate wetlands and shove rivers into tiny channelized corridors have made us far more vulnerable to natural disasters than we were during our states biggest in history. The Climate problem is a Water Problem in our Russian River Watershed - it could bury us.
16 - www.sonomacountygazette.com - 4/17
As I illustrated in our January Sonoma Gazette piece, “Watershed View of RR Problems”, we have shrunk the space the river occupies by roughly 80% and at the same time narrowed it by 3-10 times leaving little space for water. When
WATER PROBLEM cont’d on page 17