Let's get this water main fixed and move on...

This is the first in a series of two articles by retired economist Bill Marriott, making the case that contra City Hall, Calgary is not out of water.

Should Calgarians be punished for wanting green lawns?

The Alberta government continues to announce capital projects to increase the irrigation capacity in southern Alberta. Current commitments amount to nearly $1 billion in various locations. Meanwhile, the irrigation managers are asking for $5 billion in additional government funding.

Oddly, the bureaucrats at Calgary City Hall are telling us there is no water in Bow River and thus, they continue to threaten extensive mandatory water use restrictions in the near future.

But something doesn’t add up. If there is no water why would we build more irrigation? If there is water why do we need mandatory restrictions?

What is even more confusing are the recent claims of “the worst drought ever” in the face of three months of above average rainfall. Even the Weather Network is now saying Alberta will return to “normal” for the summer ahead, meaning cooler and wetter than 2023. Confused? You are not alone.

It turns out that water is rather complicated. But if you bear with me for some junior high school science and geography, as well as some basic climate science and meteorology, you will be able to make sense of media coverage and government policy pronouncements in the next little while. (If you only want to look at policy issues then go directly to the second article of this series to be published in a week or so.)

The climate in southern Alberta is classified as semi-arid. This is dry. Really dry. Right next to desert on the climate classification scale.

Central and northern Alberta get more precipitation and thus are spared the semi-arid classification. This extra northern rainfall does little good for the south because the major Alberta watersheds all drain north and east. Only the South Saskatchewan Basin, roughly the area south of Red Deer drains into the driest part of the province. (Fun fact — the Columbia Icefield which is 125 square miles (about ½ the size of Calgary) and nearly one kilometre in depth is a hydrological apex of North America. This means that when a snowflake there melts, the water will flow to three oceans, the Pacific, the Atlantic and the Arctic. Sadly for Calgary, that drop of water gets to the Atlantic via the North Saskatchewan Basin bypassing the Bow River entirely.)

In recent years we seem to have become a bit loose on the definition of climate versus weather. In the good old days, weather was what was happening outside your window. As Bob Dylan famously sang “ya don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows”.

Climate on the other hand was something more stable over long periods. Wiki says “Climate is the long-term weather pattern in a region, typically averaged over 30 years.” The key concept here is a typical long-term pattern. Nowadays it seems as if everything, even day to day weather is caused by something called “climate change.”

Wait — What???

The whole point of the old “climate” was that it didn’t change. But now the claims of causality for something that previously didn’t change, but now changes really slowly, are truly remarkable.

The famous Calgary flood of 2013 would not have happened except for climate change.

The 2023 drought was caused by climate change.

The lack of water in the Bow River is caused by climate change.

Forest fires (now called (key scary music) wildfires) past and present are caused by climate change.

What is truly worrisome is that government policy, at least at Calgary city hall, seems to be based not on actual current empirical evidence or even what is plainly right in front of our cold wet noses, but what by what some folks believe might happen at some indeterminate time in the future because of “climate change”.

In February, Calgary city councillor Gian-Carlo Carra summed up this thinking for us: “Everyone understands we’re moving into a crisis . . . the City of Calgary is aware we’ve got a punishing drought coming to us, we’ve known this for years”. Oh my!

So if southern Alberta’s climate is semi-arid why is “drought” suddenly the current scare word of the day? Drought is the default condition. Why are we surprised? Almost every headline screams drought, drought! drought!! as if it was a recent thing that we have never experienced before.

And in every reporting the same sentence appears “Scientists say it’s the result of climate change ...” It is not clear whether the reporters just feel obligated to include this statement or whether their editors added it in after the article is written.

In southern Alberta, the prevailing weather patterns (formally known as climate) are dominated by westerly moisture flows moderated by the rain shadow effect of the Rocky Mountains. Remember, in grade school we were taught that the famous Chinook wind was an example of this general weather phenomena. Thus the normal condition is prevailing warm dry winds crossing our plains which give rise to the semi-arid designation.

Of course the actual annual precipitation making it to Southern Alberta varies from the average and is dependent on numerous factors including the surface temperature of the Pacific Ocean. Turns out that the surface temperature changes as well but trends through definite cycles called the El Niño–Southern Oscillation.

In the El Niño phase, the warmer surface waters tend to generate warmer and drier conditions for Alberta. In the La Niña phase the cooler ocean causes cooler and wetter conditions. Not surprisingly, 2023 was an El Niño year and is generally thought to be a significant factor in what turned out to be warmest global temperatures on record. However, things have changed, we have now tipped into La Niña and true to its form we are now seeing cooler and wetter conditions.

How much cooler and wetter? (On May 31, there was an overnight frost warning for Calgary, brrr!) See for yourself. The three month long term average rainfall for March to May is 98.6mm.

In 2024, these same three months have given us 167.2mm a 65% increase over the expected average. Remember that June is our rainiest month. Suppose for June this year we get what we got last year, a dry year, then we will have received over 283mm or 68% of our total for the entire year.

If we get the long term average of around 100mm then we will have 75% of our total expected rain for the entire year. How is this a drought? The facts are really inconvenient.

And it has been colder. Have you been outside lately? If you like graphs here is one that shows you are not mistaken about the late arrival of summer. Since mid March we have been well below average just in case you hadn’t noticed. Last August we had a few days above 30C and the world was going to end ...

Global boiling don’t ya know! Now we have 2 ½ months of cold and it is not even mentioned let alone explained.

Yeah but ... What about the melting glaciers (misinformation,) climate change trends (generally beneficial) and reservoir water levels (numbers used out of context?)

First of all the melting glaciers are not some harbinger of impending doom. They have been melting steadily for nearly 12,000 years (not a typo). They will continue to melt and even Columbia Icefield will one day disappear, though not for at least 100 years.

Yeah but ... they are the source of all the water in the Bow River. Actually not. In 2017, Cambridge University published the definitive study of glacial melt contributions to the Bow River. It turns out that only 3% of the water in the Bow comes from glacier melt. Virtually nothing comes in the winter because frozen water doesn’t melt when it is below 0 degrees C.

Even in August the results estimate a very wide range and likely less than 10%. So if the glaciers volume is depleted by 50% over the next twenty years we will lose about 1% of the volume of annual flow in the Bow. The important thing about the glaciers is that they are stored precipitation. This is a very significant point in the discussion of water management. If only there was a way of storing the variable source of water that we could then later match to our more or less stable usage of that resource.

Which brings us to storage reservoirs. Who knew that photos of an empty Alberta reservoir (Oldman) could become the latest in “weather porn”. While these point-in-time photos can be shocking they tend to obscure the fact that levels vary over time. They always have and they always will. The real story behind the current (early June) levels is that they are normal for this time of year.

More importantly, the latest detailed report dated May 29, 2024 show something odd but also normal for this time of year. Glenmore Reservoir is at about 54% of capacity whereas it was at nearly 100% in January. Ghost Reservoir is at 45% and Barrier is at 17%. And if you look at the Bow River it is high right now.

The reason for this is that water is being released from the reservoirs to provide for additional capacity to accommodate the primary rainy season of June. The reservoirs provide for two functions, storage and flood mitigation. When all that rain comes as it always does in June, much of it can be stored in the reservoirs and thus protect Calgary and downstream from flooding.

What is amazing about Glenmore being 100% full in January is that there was no snow melt because it was too cold and there are no glaciers in the Elbow drainage.

Further, the Glenmore supplies about half of Calgary’s drinking water. So where did the water come from?

The simple answer is that this is ground water seeping into the Elbow, which is why there are still open water flows even when it is below zero. This is also true for the Bow which routinely has open water near Banff even in the dead of winter. The aquifer is not the source of all Calgary’s water but it is earth’s storage reservoir and the “pipeline” which delivers it.

Yeah but ... Doesn’t global warming mean there will be no rain?

Well hardly. Back in junior high science we learned about humidity. Warmer air supports higher levels of humidity. So in the winter when we go into a warm house our colder eyeglasses fog up. And if our humidifier is set too high we get condensation and even ice on our colder glass windows.

So generally warmer weather means more humidity and more humidity means more rain. This is true for Alberta as well but claims that evaporation and transpiration will increase more than the increase in precipitation are conjecture and this balance may vary widely depending on where you are in the world.

In Alberta some intrepid scientists decided to look at 40 years worth of data since 1980. “The results show decreasing trends of drought in some areas, mainly in the headwaters of the Bow River in the Rocky Mountains, and increasing trends in larger areas, mostly downstream.”

So more rain into the Bow basin headwaters but more drought downstream. This has been southern Alberta’s problem forever. Ample water but not when we need it, nor where we need it.

So the answer the question: “Is Calgary running out of water?” is a resounding No! Go ahead water your grass.

To quote the Bow River Basin Council — “Most of the water (over 90%) in the Bow River comes from the mountain region. A majority of the water reaches the river as groundwater that has been stored for varying periods (days to millennia). Alberta has been experiencing drought conditions across the province, and the Bow Basin is no exception.

Fortunately, as of May 2024, conditions have improved across the Basin. There are currently no water shortage advisories in the Bow Basin (down from 12 earlier this year). The river flows in the Bow River at Calgary and Bow River near the mouth are within normal range as of May 27, 2024. Additionally, the City of Calgary has not implemented watering restrictions, and irrigation reservoirs are full.” No porn here, sorry.

Against all the overwhelming climate change hysteria I am going to bravely predict a cooler, wetter summer which will carry into the fall and winter. Soon we will be looking back at the mild 2023 as the good old days when the weather wasn’t hostile and maybe even enjoyable.

That being said what are we to make of the province and the city’s ongoing pronouncements about water? Do they have any legitimate policy objectives and are they pursuing the best policy options?

That is the subject of the next instalment on this subject.

William D. Marriott is a retired economist who specialized in public policy analysis of the oil and gas industry
https://www.westernstandard.news/opinion/marriott-lets-get-this-water-main-fixed-and-move-on/55072