Willful Waters
By Vittoria de Palma, Alexander Robinson
Places Journal
2018
Research Papers
The spoils of dust: reinventing the lake that made Los Angeles
By Alexander Robinson
Novato California : Applied Research and Design Publishing, an imprint of ORO Editions
2018
Once the third largest lake in California, and among the world’s greatest air pollution offenders, the deadened Owens Lake was for decades merely a catastrophic footnote to the most notorious water grab in modern history. Now, the lake has been re-assembled to exceed the value of what was lost – without refilling its shores and depriving Los Angeles of its water supply. In ‘The spoils of dust’ the lake’s peculiar redemption is the backdrop for investigating contemporary relationships between landscape design, control, and perception. The lake-like terrain is our most intimate display of modern technocratic vision and exposes the limits of our invention and control of infrastructural ecologies. Whether by observations of dust or scenery, it is as much the product of how we perceive and value landscape today. Answering its analysis, the book concludes with a visual atlas and proposal to induce more imaginative outcomes and perceptions.
Climate models can correctly simulate the continuum of global-average temperature variability
By Feng Zhu, Julien Emile-Geay, Nicholas P. McKay, Gregory J. Hakim, Deborah Khider, Toby R. Ault, Eric J. Steig, Sylvia Dee, James W. Kirchner
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
2018
Measures of climate are known to exhibit scaling behavior with large exponents, resulting in larger fluctuations at longer timescales. It has been suggested that climate models underestimate these fluctuations [1-4], casting doubt on their ability to predict the amplitude of climate variability over coming decades and centuries. Using the latest simulations and data syntheses, as well as spectral methods tailored to scaling estimation, we find agreement for spectra derived from observations and models on timescales ranging from interannual to multi-millennial. Our results confirm the existence of a regime transition between orbital and annual peaks [5], occurring around millennial periodicities. That both simple and comprehensive ocean-atmosphere models can reproduce these features suggests that long-range persistence is a consequence of the oceanic integration of both gradual and abrupt climate forcings. The result implies that decadal to millennial variability over the Holocene is partly a consequence of the climate system’s integrated memory of orbital forcing. While climate models imperfectly depict some aspects of spatiotemporal variability, we find that they appear contain the essential physics to correctly simulate the temperature continuum. We hypothesize that the deep ocean plays a key role in integrating forcings, keeping a long memory of past events, and having the ability to strongly influence climate states. We therefore suggest that a critical element of successful simulations at sub-orbital scales are initial conditions of the deep ocean state that are consistent with observations of the recent past. Failing to provide such initial conditions sets the models up for failure.
Toward Sustainable Production: Finding Workable Strategies for Government and Industry
By Daniel Press, Daniel Mazmanian
Environmental Policy: New Directions for the Twenty-First Century
2018
Assessing changes in HIV-related legal and policy environments: Lessons learned from a multi-country evaluation
By Laura Ferguson, Alexandra Nicholson, Ian Henry, Amitrajit Saha, Tilly Sellers, Sofia Gruskin
Public Library of Science One
2018
There is growing recognition in the health community that the legal environment-including laws, policies, and related procedures-impacts vulnerability to HIV and access to HIV-related services both positively and negatively. Assessing changes in the legal environment and how these affect HIV-related outcomes, however, is challenging, and understanding of appropriate methodologies nascent
Does water scarcity shift the electricity generation mix toward fossil fuels? Empirical evidence from the United States
By Jonathan Eyer, Casey Wichman
Journal of Environmental Economics and Management 87
2018
Water withdrawals for the energy sector are the largest use of fresh water in the United States. Using an econometric model of monthly plant-level electricity generation levels between 2001 and 2012, we estimate the effect of water scarcity on the US electricity fuel mix. We find that hydroelectric generation decreases substantially in response to drought, although this baseline generation is offset primarily by natural gas, depending on the geographic region. We provide empirical evidence that drought can increase emissions of CO2 and local pollutants. We quantify the social costs of water scarcity to be $330,000 per month for each plant that experiences a one-standard deviation increase in water scarcity (2015 dollars), a relationship that persists under future projections of water scarcity.
The effect of firm size on fracking safety
By Jonathan Eyer
Resource and Energy Economics, 53
2018
Large firms are becoming increasingly dominant in the natural gas production industry. At the same time, regulators and environmental groups are concerned about potential environmental damage associated with hydraulic fracturing. However, small firms are protected from the full extent of their damages, while large firms must internalize a greater portion of their social costs. This paper examines the effect of firm size and liability on environmental safety in the context of hydraulic fracturing in Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale across three dimensions of size. Impacts of firm size on safety are found across legal, regulatory, and brand dimensions of size with the largest effects being driven by changes in regulatory liability. These safety gains are sizable as violation rates would be approximately twice as high if firms at remained at 2008 sizes.
Systematic Comparison of the Influence of Cool Wall versus Cool Roof Adoption on Urban Climate in the Los Angeles Basin
By Jiachen Zhang, Arash Mohegh, Yun Li, Ronnen Levinson, George Ban-Weiss
Environmental Science & Technology, vol. 52, no. 19
2018
This study for the first time assesses the influence of employing solar reflective “cool” walls on the urban energy budget and summertime climate of the Los Angeles basin. We systematically compare the effects of cool walls to cool roofs, a heat mitigation strategy that has been widely studied and employed, using a consistent modeling framework (the Weather Research and Forecasting model). Adoption of cool walls leads to increases in urban grid cell albedo that peak in the early morning and late afternoon, when the ratio of solar radiation onto vertical walls versus horizontal surfaces is at a maximum. In Los Angeles County, daily average increase in grid cell reflected solar radiation from increasing wall albedo by 0.80 is 9.1 W m-2, 43% of that for increasing roof albedo. Cool walls reduce canyon air temperatures in Los Angeles by 0.43 K (daily average), with the peak reduction (0.64 K) occurring at 09:00 LST and a secondary peak (0.53 K) at 18:00 LST. Per 0.10 wall (roof) albedo increase, cool walls (roofs) can reduce summertime daily average canyon air temperature by 0.05 K (0.06 K). Results reported here can be used to inform policies on urban heat island mitigation or climate change adaptation.