Expert says drought to continue 9 more years

Wesley G. Hughes, Staff Writer

Article Created: 06/25/2008 08:52:42 PM PDT

Straighten your halo and conserve. Listen to the expert. We are at the end of a nine-year drought and the next nine aren't looking any better.

"Stop watering your driveway - nothing's going to grow on it anyway," says William Patzert, an oceanographer with NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, a fast man with a quip and with advice.

Southern California has the cleanest driveways around, he says.
"When the Pacific speaks, water managers and politicians better listen," he says.

And the big blue body is asking to be heard.

Patzert measures the height of the Pacific from space, and it tells him our climate here is in trouble. The scientist has gone beyond the annual fluctuations of El Ni o and La Ni a. He measures the changing height of the ocean over a five- to 20-year range and sees what he calls a Pacific Decadal Oscillation.

Over about a 10-year period, the elevation of vast tracts of the ocean will change and where it was higher and warmer becomes lower and cooler and vice versa, he explains.

This oscillation has a powerful bearing on global warming and can dramatically reinforce the behavior of El Ni o and La Ni a, dampening or reinforcing their behavior.

Patzert says the last nine years are consecutively the nine driest in a century, and that can be traced to the oscillation.

"We haven't had a big El Ni o in a decade," he said, and it is having a profound effect on the water we depend on from the Colorado River and that is delivered to Diamond Valley Lake near Hemet.

He predicted temperatures will continue to rise in the region. Even in cooler years such as the one we are in now, temperatures will spike for a few days, resulting in dangerous triple-digit temperatures and heavy water use.

Patzert says a crisis is looming, and the only solution is for all of us to reduce water consumption by 50percent, something he calls doable. We massively waste water, ergo his driveway comment.

"There are no saints in the water-conservation business," Patzert said. "We could do a lot better without sainthood, maybe just a little bit of sainthood."

He blamed the Inland Empire's warming on the skyrocketing population and the greening of the region.

Golf courses are a major culprit. They absorb heat rather than reflect it back into space. Global warming has pushed the jet stream farther north, and there is less snow pack.

Patzert hopes we can control our thirst, but he has reservations.

"The world is getting dumber," he said.

If we can't be a little saintly, he says, "We better start handing out condoms in high school."