Adaptation or Mitigation: whichever of these still a question as to what to do in meeting future water demand

Do we believe climate change:

Have we drop the ball on water resources Research? Lettenmaier, 2008
Author refers to Peter Rogers’ editorial and starts his editorial saying that regardless of the three hypotheses made in Peter Rogers article the adaptation of water resources systems is critical to meet the future demand for water resource resources. How to plan for the future under highly uncertain outcomes is an adaptation which in fact valid for all three hypotheses made in Peter Rogers article.
If natural course are assumed for the climate change, our mitigation methods are greatly reduced, may be restricted to only one-“living with global warming” and making plans accordingly.
If the anthropogenic causality (courses) is assumed, we have panoply of social and technical fixes such as switch from carbon-based fuels to bio-fuels etc., and life-style changes can be considered are effective adaptation approaches.
-point here is regardless of the hypotheses one made about climate changes if the global warming is due to the natural causes or anthropogenic causes, the adaptation strategies are valid for all of those hypotheses. Focus is how to choose portfolios of policies, technologies. Optimum adaptation strategy that maximize the expected benefits or minimize regrets associated with choosing the wrong portfolios.
According to the IPPC report two kinds of adaptation have been listed: autonomous adaptation and planed adaptation. Autonomous adaptation requires no government intervention where socioeconomic process adapts over time to newly objective conditions of hydrological changes, but if the changes are abrupt then the response time may be too slow for sufficient autonomous adaptation to occur.
Hurst phenomenon has not been well explained yet, but essentially was an argument about the relevance of stationary versus non-stationary statistics for hydrologic time series.
Stationary, the cornerstone of the most of our planning methods, is dead as argued by Milly et al. (2008). The argument about Hurst phenomena, which essentially the argument about stationary versus non-stationary statistics to the hydrologic time series analysis-which viewed by 35 years ago concluded that water resources systems were susceptible to climate variability and even change there is no prior knowledge as to its direction.
I presume that author agree than water resources systems are capable to climate change variability and even change (I presume this is mean), but we don’t have a prior knowledge about the direction of the change – means he agree about the non-stationary statistics to the hydrologic systems.
Para-3
Direction of change – stream flow temperatures in western United State have warmed up over the past 50 years and seems like it continue to do so, resulting in shifts in the seasonality of runoff).
Climate change does not have corner on the market for non-stationary methods-We now increasingly recognize the role that change in the land cover and land use has in hydrologic variables.

Para-4-water resources community
Profession has been slow to acknowledge role that climate change in hydrologic variables and acknowledge that fundamentally new approaches will be required to address them. Some critics on water resources planning community-populated largely by engineers, meaning our students- has been to dig in their heels.
Water resources community says that there is lot of uncertainty in the planning process (including that attribute to future hydrologic changes)- but these uncertainty is already dealt with in our traditional planning methods.
My critics is mainly the University professors and other leading research community unaware of what is really happening in real engineering projects and designs.
Para-5-how are you dealing with future climate change in those projects
-The argument of the water resources community is “climate and land cover changes are just one of many terms in the uncertainty equations”.
-that perspective is difficult to sell, especially given the widespread visibility afforded to the IPPC processe
-So the heat is on, to speak, to develop new approaches that explicitly deal with climate change and other types of environmental change.

Para-6- it is reasonable to state categorically (assert) that hydrologic change will be one of the key challenges to the hydraulic community in the coming decade
-there are numerous examples where land cover and climate change have affected both natural means stream flow and managed water resources
-what kind of jobs the academic community doing training in training the next generation of scientist and engineers to address these problems in the context of water management.
Author accept that the academic community are not doing their job in any meaningful way.

Para-7 –why not academic community doing their job in any meaningful way.
Water resources community responsible for planning generally ignore climate change and land cover change
-they use methods (taught by academic community) that don’t address the problem.
-How do we break the cycle? The simple answer is, the impetus (the force that required to move the community) has to come from the academic community, which is charged with being the source of new ideas and methods.
But what drives the academic community? “ you surely don’t think that universities exist for the pursuit of knowledge? They exist for the pursuit of money.
Para-8
Considering the hydrology alone, we had lots of applicants in areas such as land-atmospheric interactions, remote sensing, ecohydrology- but essentially no one in water management.
Para-9 Why is that?
No funding in the area, hence most PhD students tends to work in other areas. But that means that there are no young faculty members in the area, hence no new ideas.
Para-10 –Where does the sources of the problem lie?
The so-called Eagleson Report (NRC 1991) essentially rode the water resources engineering community out of hydrology.
Primary funding agencies (NSF, NASA,and NOAA) does not deal with water management problem.