Last summer I posted an item about a Toronto Star article (22 July 2007) on the depopulation of the American Southwest. Very provocative.
Now, the same paper has an article by Chris Wood (6 April 2008), "Time to start paying water's real price". The article is based upon Wood's forthcoming book, Dry Spring: The Coming Water Crisis of North America, to be published at the end of this month (see my previous post about Wood's book, which I have not read).
From the Toronto Star article:
The Great Lakes, and those who work or live around them, are witnessing profound changes in climate. No one knows that better than Linda Mortsch.
Her childhood was spent near the banks of the St. Lawrence River, at Cornwall, in a house built in 1958 from lumber salvaged from an historic inn that was due to be submerged, along with half a dozen riverside villages, to make way for the St. Lawrence Seaway. Today, she teaches geography at the University of Waterloo, investigating how the changing weather will affect the Great Lakes.
Mortsch walked me through the Lakes' historic water calendar. Typically, the year begins with most smaller lakes and rivers – and large expanses of the great ones – locked in ice. Snow covers the land. As spring comes, the snow and upland ice melt, releasing a vast pulse of fresh water to the Lakes.
Superior, the largest lake, receives the biggest pulse. As the winter's snow-melt flows in, the Lakes' levels rise, with Superior reaching its peak earliest and the lower lakes peaking progressively through the summer until the annual pulse of winter runoff reaches Lake Ontario, usually around Labour Day. The Lakes are at their lowest in December and January, when the cycle begins again.
Now this timeless rhythm is changing. Average air temperatures in the Great Lakes region rose by nearly a degree Celsius over the last 100 years, faster than the world average. Winter and spring have warmed even more, with highs as much as 4 degrees Celsius above those of the last century.
By 2003 places like Sault Ste. Marie and the Kawartha Lakes were getting a month fewer days below freezing and nearly two months fewer of cold nights each winter than in 1950, but 30 more very hot days and nights each summer.
With less snow hanging around anywhere in the Lakes' basin, the yearly pulse of melting snow and ice starts earlier and carries less water into the Lakes.
By far the greatest threat to the Lakes, however, comes from the insidious amplification of evapotranspiration (ET). Evaporation already extracts more water from the Great Lakes than all our human diversions combined.
Across Ontario, calculated losses to evaporation claim two-thirds of every centimetre of rain or snow the province receives. Scientists who monitored lakes in northwestern Ontario between 1970 and 1990 discovered that as temperatures rose by 1.6 degrees Celsius – more than twice the global average for that period – rainfall declined. But evaporation ballooned by 50 per cent. Annual runoff into Lake Superior plummeted by almost two-thirds, from 40 centimetres to only about 15.
[The combination of late-forming ice on the Lakes, and that invisible thief evaporation, may have been largely responsible for this past winter's record snowfalls in eastern Ontario and Quebec. With little ice to protect the Lakes' water, it easily evaporated into the dry arctic air that flows south during the winter, riding the wind to fall back to land later as snow. Counter-intuitive as it may seem, the record heaps of snow were not evidence of climate change slipping into reverse — but of it going into overdrive.]
If less water flows into the Great Lakes each spring, and more of it is drawn out by evaporation over longer ice-free seasons, exactly how much lower will the Lakes be at the end of each year?
If Mortsch and her colleagues are correct, Lake Superior's seasonal low-water levels could fall 38 centimetres below present-day lows before mid-century. Lake Ontario could drop more, losing 54 centimetres from present-day lows, with the deepest impact in the spring. But Lake Erie, already the shallowest of the five, could fall as much as 85 centimetres below its current low-water level. Another study has suggested that the St. Lawrence River at Montreal could in some late summers be at barely half its present volume.
Wood then goes to describe how we must use less water and use it more efficiently. We must also stop deluding ourselves and start paying a higher price for water, implementing a "scarcity" or "commodity" charge for the water we drink.
It's true. When most people get their water bill, there is no charge for the cost of the water. You're paying for water system O&M, yet the world's most precious liquid generally is assigned no price(there are some exceptions to this).
We also don't pay for the "services" that water renders - consider environmental flows, or ecosystem services.
He concludes:
Those who advocate the public commons and a human right to water are correct that water runs through us all. It infuses every aspect of economic, social and cultural life and every hour of the day. For this very reason, neither government, no matter how powerful and intrusive, nor any self-appointed overseer from "civil society," can possibly ensure its wise use.
Only we can do that, through the decisions we make in our homes, fields, office cubicles, plant floors, schools and shopping malls or wherever else we spend our time. It's what we each do daily in the marketplace that will determine whether collectively we protect our water and the natural systems that provide it, or despoil both.
The marketplace is the most flexible problem-solving institution we have. Adapting it to the smarter use of water veers away from the one-size-fits-all frame of last century's "big engineering" and outdated eco-Marxism that sets disciples of Blue Gold on course toward a tragedy of the commons.
It directs us instead toward a liberating ecology of persistent innovation in which a diversity of solutions can prosper.
Eco-Marxism and "tragedy of the commons", eh?
Amen, Chris!
"If you aren't in over your head, how do you know how tall you are?" -- T.S. Eliot
Professor Noah D. Hall of the Wayne State University Law School recently started the Great Lakes Law blog. Wayne State is home to the Great Lakes Environmental Law Center, of which Hall is the Executive Director.
Audet makes an interesting statement:
Colleague Paul Godfrey of the University of Massachusetts sent me some slides prepared by Canadian Romain Audet that describe how all this will work. It's pretty awesome, eh? The 
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