Monday, Sept. 26, 2005 | 10:04 a.m.
Managers of Western water agencies and climate scientists capped a two-day conference in Las Vegas with a call for more research and better communication.
The goal is to provide real-world information to the water agency officials as they craft often complex policies to bring the resource to their customers.
The officials and scientists met for the meeting on "Urban Water Supplies and Climate Change in the West" as two powerful hurricanes hitting the U.S. Gulf Coast helped direct media attention to issues of global climate change.
During the conference that wrapped up Friday, researchers told water agency managers that the West is the "worst and first" part of the country to feel the brunt of global climate change, and that the temperature is going up because of the burning of fossil fuels. It is less clear what the impact on water supplies in the arid West will be, but research to quantify potential impacts is continuing.
One probable impact is that more extreme weather events such as droughts and floods are increasingly likely, rising by 10-fold over their occurrence in the old "normal" years.
Brad Udall, director of the University of Colorado's Western Water Assessment, a federally funded center looking at climate issues, said information on what is happening to the climate is critically needed by agencies' decision makers, many of whom are elected.
The information on climate change doesn't reach the people who need it most, Udall said.
"All too often science has had this total disconnect from decision makers," he said.
Useful information is available as models of climate change become increasingly sophisticated, Udall said.
"The starting gun has gone off on this and we are all on the starting block."
A few voices said the cost and complexity of the issues need to be refined.
Shawn Stoddard, a senior resource planner with the Truckee Meadows Water Authority, said that before officials can start integrating information into their plans, they have to have firm information.
"Give us a number, any number," he said, referring to how much stream flows would likely be affected by Western climate change. "What I need from the scientists is to boil this down to a one-page fact sheet."
Stoddard, an economist by training, told the researchers that he also wants to see a more detailed cost-benefit analysis of steps that could be taken to respond, mitigate or prevent impacts coming from climate change.
"My rate payers are only interested in one thing: How low can I keep my payment?" he said.
The cost-benefit issue is important because while few people now doubt that human-impacted global warming is a reality -- converts include the Bush administration and conservative economic think-tanks -- not everyone is convinced that the threat posed by global warming justifies the potential costs of taking action in response.
The Southern Nevada Water Authority, which supplies Clark County's metro population with wholesale water mostly from the Colorado River, co-sponsored the meeting with the University of Nevada Desert Research Institute and environmental nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council.
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