California, the Pacific Northwest and Colorado could actually benefit from climate change-related impacts elsewhere, the model suggests. Populations leaving harder-hit states will migrate to these less-affected states, stimulating their economies. Nationwide, the effects would be more grim, including a sharply declining trade balance with other countries, the Sandia analysis suggests.

New Mexico populations would shrink with declining rainfall while Colorado’s population would increase, Sandia’s model predicts. Over the next 40 years, New Mexico’s economic contribution to the U.S. economy could drop by $26 billion and Arizona’s economy would lose $69 billion, the model suggests. Colorado could gain a relatively modest $1.2 billion over that time period.

The study estimates predicted ranges of rainfall and other precipitation, including high and low estimates, generated in computer models of climate change. The authors then estimated the economic impacts of changing precipitation patterns.

The analysis estimated impacts on employment, personal income and international trade for 70 industries at the state and national level.

On average, the nationwide economic impact of climate change “is on the order of $1 trillion over the next 40 years, with losses in employment equivalent to nearly 7 million full-time jobs,” the authors report.

“(U)ncertainty associated with climate change and its impacts that presents the greatest problem for policy makers,” the authors wrote. “If society knew how climate change would exactly unfold, it could readily determine what adaptation and mitigation responses should be undertaken. However, decades of climate science research indicate that it may not be possible to obtain a definitive reduction in the uncertainty, and certainly not possible within the time frame that is needed to counter the worst effects of climate change.”

Such certainty could come only after it is too late to intervene to “prevent the escalating damage,” the authors argued.

The overall bill passed on a vote of a vote of 320 to 97 and now heads to the Senate for consideration.

The Heinrich amendment passed on a unanimous vote, 424-0.

Sandia Labs Chief Technology Officer Steve Rottler praised the amendment in a statement issued by Heinrich’s office, saying, “LDRD projects play an integral role in Sandia National Laboratories’ strategic goal of nurturing core science and technology expertise to enable our national security missions, including enhancement of the security and reliability of our nation’s energy and other critical infrastructures.”

But as the Albuquerque Journal’s John Fleck notes, Heinrich proposal to increase research funding is still a drop in LDRD research from recent years, when 8 percent of the labs budgets were set aside for research.

Meanwhile, Congressman Ben Ray Luján, a Santa Fe Democrat whose district includes Los Alamos National Labs, praised the passage of the overall bill in a statement.

“This bill makes important investments in energy technology and infrastructure. This bill will help us move toward energy independence and rebuild our aging infrastructure,” Luján stated.

Luján praised the water improvements the bill would provide for in rural areas, citing $3 million in funding set aside for repairs and to replace the Jicarilla Apache Rural Water System.

“This will help address the public health priorities in our region by fulfilling the promise Congress made seven years ago when they authorized funding to address the substandard and dilapidated water system serving our people,” Levi Pesata, president of the Jicarilla Apache Nation, is quoted as saying in a statement issued by Luján’s office.

Nearly $7 million will go to a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Project that will provide “flood damage reduction as one unit of the flood control plan for the Rio Grande and Tributaries, New Mexico” according to Luján’s statement.

The big cut at Los Alamos, it seems, would be the Neutron Science Center, where $19 million could be cut. “Other cuts at Los Alamos are spread across various parts of the nuclear weapons program,” Fleck wrote.

Meanwhile, at Sandia there would be cuts in nuclear weapons, but Sandia Labs “would see offsetting increases in other areas, including renewable energy.”

Total Energy Department spending in New Mexico would drop from $4.27 billion this year to $4 billion in fiscal year 2010. The budget now goes before Congress. The fiscal year beings Oct. 1.

There was some good news on the LANL front yesterday, however, according to Fleck. A congressional panel backed Los Alamos over the Oak Ridge, Tennessee facility if one had to be chosen over the other.

[O] an issue that has been an enormous question mark in New Mexico, the group said replacement of the aging CMR complex at Los Alamos, where plutonium research has been done since the early 1950s, should be the top priority if there is not enough money to build both it and a major uranium complex at Oak Ridge.

The suggestion came from the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States.

Chu will visit the Los Alamos and Sandia national labs on Thursday and Friday, according to a preliminary schedule relayed by U.S. Sen. Tom Udall.
 From the blog posting:

We don’t have official confirmation from Chu’s handlers, but Sen. Tom Udall told me he will be accompanying Chu during the visit. Details are still being finalized, but the preliminary schedule has him visiting Los Alamos late tomorrow (Thursday) and spending Friday morning at Sandia, according to Udall.

At the end of March, Udall called for a broader mission for the national labs based in New Mexico.

“As two of America’s premier national security labs, Sandia and Los Alamos can and should continue to play a critical role in securing our nation from existing and future threats,” the New Mexico Democrat said in a statement early last week.

But I will point you to a great piece about an expert hoaxer at our own Sandia Labs. Sue Vorenberg from the Santa Fe New Mexican looks at a 1998 hoax that ranked seventh all-time, according to Museumofhoaxes.com.

The trickster? Mark Boslough.

Boslough just couldn’t help himself with that one, which he let loose on cyberspace back in 1998 — he said he just had to spread the word about Alabama legislators trying to change pi, an infinite number that begins with 3.14159, to the more “biblical value” of 3.0.

The e-mail was disguised as a news story, written by “April Holiday” of “The Associalized Press.”

In it, a fictitious lawmaker argued that because pi can’t be calculated exactly, it could “harm students’ self-esteem.”

What began as an e-mail prank to his co-workers went viral, as e-mail hoaxes commonly do.

The prank got so big that it had to eventually be debunked by Snopes, a popular Web site that checks out rumors and urban legends.

But Boslough wasn’t done. He had several other memorable pranks, as highlighted by the New Mexican.

And he had some advice for all you would-be hoaxers:

I do have some rules for hoaxes,” Boslough said. “Don’t be mean, don’t humiliate people — you want them to laugh. Remember that the best jokes have lots of clues in them, and also, on the Internet, you want about half the people to get the joke and half to not get it.”

“Focusing on their national security enterprise capabilities and cooperating with other agencies is a perfect way for NNSA labs to use their unparalleled skills and infrastructure to address the problems America faces today,” said Sen. Tom Udall.

Udall, a Democrat, said in a letter to Secretary of Energy Steven Chu that Los Alamos and Sandia are “two of America’s premier national security labs” and “can and should continue to play a critical role in securing our nation from existing and future threats.”

Udall wrote that the labs’ funding are still “supported fundamentally by a shrinking budget of [the] core mission” — that of the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP). This is despite the labs having “continued to support a broad national security objective” beyond the SSP.

Secretary Chu is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and the 12th United States Secretary of Energy.

The full text of the letter is available below:

The Honorable Steven Chu

Secretary

U.S. Department of Energy

1000 Independence Avenue, SW

Washington, DC 20585

Dear Secretary Chu:

Congratulations again on your appointment and confirmation as Secretary of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Our nation is in the midst of an energy crisis that requires substantial attention, and I am certain that you bring the necessary expertise, leadership and ambition that will serve President Obama and the nation well.

As you know, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) within the DOE provides not only surety for our nuclear arsenal, but acts as one of the strongest scientific research and development engines in the nation. Yet, while our laboratories have continued to support a broad national security objective beyond the core mission of the Stockpile Stewardship Program (SSP), almost all activities of the NNSA are supported fundamentally by a shrinking budget of that core mission. This has led to wide concern that the budget and mission constraints of the NNSA could lead to its being unable to provide the very necessary capabilities that are so critical to our nation.

In response to this growing concern, last year Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman, DOE Undersecretary for Nuclear Security Thomas D’Agostino, DOE Undersecretary for Science Roy Orbach, and the heads of four NNSA facilities (please see the attached letter) signed a four page “Future Vision” statement outlining a path forward for the NNSA labs to move towards a more encompassing national security mission. The purpose was not only to describe an evolving role of the labs, but also to foster a new environment of cooperation between the labs and other agencies.

“The scientific capabilities and infrastructure developed for the nuclear weapons mission have been utilized by many national security agencies,” the letter states, “and are recognized as essential to fulfilling their responsibilities. Maintenance of a strong infrastructure – both the workforce and the facilities – will require joint support from these national security agencies, as well as careful planning and budgeting by NNSA and its national laboratories, to enable this broader national security mission.”

On the heels of this statement, several Strategic Partnership Agreements (SPA’s) between NNSA and other agencies have either been signed or are currently under negotiation. The SPA’s represent in real terms the early realization of the vision elucidated in the statement signed last year. However, this simply marks the beginning. In order to allow other federal agencies to benefit from the expertise and capabilities developed at the NNSA labs, I believe additional resources and commitment should be devoted to expanding the mission in general, and as part of that effort, specifically to the vision statement and agreements between NNSA and other agencies.

With that in mind, I respectfully urge you to compile a similar statement and lend your support to the establishment of additional SPA’s. By doing so, you will be signaling that these national labs must continue to serve our nation, and must do so in a multitude of disciplines. It is quite clear that each of these labs has recognized the need to diversify their missions, and I firmly believe that we should encourage that diversification, otherwise we risk losing many of the scientists and much of the research that is so crucial and to critical for our national interests.

Several studies are currently being conducted related to the NNSA labs, from the recently released Stimson Report (which encouraged mission diversity and broad investment in the labs by other agencies), to the soon to be released report from the Congressional Commission on Strategic Posture of the United States, to the upcoming Nuclear Posture Review. The confluence of these studies marks what you already know; our national labs are at a crossroads. As such, I believe this represents an historic opportunity to ensure our labs continue to play a critical role in securing our nation from threats not imagined at their birth.

The signatories to last year’s statement underscored how important it was for these labs to transform into national security labs, stating “[we] will advocate for and enable a broader national-security role for NNSA and its laboratories…The nation’s ability to respond to as yet unknown challenging national security problems in the future demands nothing less.” I wholeheartedly echo this sentiment and respectfully ask that you consider lending your crucial voice in support of this effort.

I welcome the opportunity to work with you on this and the many other challenges facing our nation. Please do not hesitate to contact me to discuss further.

Sincerely,

Tom Udall

United States Senator

And on the second page of the document, it shows the House version prevailed on funding for the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). The NNSA is part of the Department of Energy, which runs both Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs.

The House did not appropriate any money for the NNSA, but the Senate version had $900 million for the NNSA. The final version has none.

But more money is there, apparently, for “defense environmental cleanup” under the heading of “Environmental and Other Defense Activities.” The conference version gives $6 billion for this, some of which would most likely benefit New Mexico, as Los Alamos and Sandia National Labs both do nuclear weapons research.

However, the congressional delegation in New Mexico — and educators — won’t be happy with one final cut from the House version. The $14 billion for school K-12 school construction that was in the House bill but not in the Senate bill is not in the conference version. Neither is the $6 billion that the House wanted to go to higher education facilities.

The New Mexico House delegation had urged House and Senate leaders to have that money put in the final version of the bill, to no avail.

Some experts who have studied or worked with the labs fear that change could reduce the quality of research. “They’ve already made it much harder for themselves to attract good people,” said Hugh Gusterson, a professor of anthropology and sociology at George Mason University who has spent years studying the culture of scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, talking about the management changes. A further shift, he said, “will just compound the difficulty.”

The story says that the changeover of control to the Department of Defense could be a “death knell for a tradition of academic research.” While Sandia National Labs is more defense-oriented, Los Alamos National Labs (and Lawrence Livermore National Labs in California) have a long history of civilian research and control.

Meanwhile, Lawrence J. Kolb, assistant secretary of defense from 1981 to 1985, agrees that a change would be a bad idea. He said that he didn’t know of any security breaches at the labs and that the Pentagon has its own security problems.

The contrasting argument is that a switchover to Pentagon control would free up the Department of Energy to do more civilian research without worrying about the nuclear weapons research. Nuclear weapons research takes up two-thirds to three-quarters of the Department of Energy budget.

Stephen I. Schwartz, editor of The Nonproliferation Review, the journal of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, told the Chronicle of Higher Education that a changeover of the labs to military control would “unleash the Department of Energy to do what its name says.”

But the money that could aid Los Alamos and Sandia National labs is still in the bill, according to John Fleck at the Albuquerque Journal.The bill includes a billion dollars for nuclear cleanup “no strings attached,” as Fleck puts it.

An additional $5.5 billion was earmarked for “Defense Environmental Cleanup.”

“Again, no strings attached,” Fleck writes. Both categories have to be spent by Sept. 30, 2010. With a lot of nuclear work going on at Sandia and Los Alamos National labs, a lot of this money could find its way to New Mexico.

However, in the “Defense Environmental Cleanup” category, the House budgeted just $1 billion. So look for it to be somewhere between the House and the Senate numbers.

“Such a move could pose a serious threat to the tens-of-thousands of good-paying, economy-boosting jobs in the First District that are associated with Sandia,” said the New Mexico Democrat. Sandia National Labs are in Heinrich’s district and are a major employer in the Albuquerque area.

Heinrich also said he has “grave concerns” over the potential change from civilian to military control.

And like the other members of the New Mexico delegation who have weighed in, he used the word “fight” in his statement:

“I will fight alongside the rest of the New Mexico delegation to stop any effort to move our nuclear weapons program away from (the Department of Energy).”