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california Water Today 131 to deal with daily crises, have no program for coordinated development of net- works that better account for and analyze water movement and management.61 Without this information, successful adaptation to changing conditions will be hindered or foreclosed. Costs of “Combat” Science The failure to organize, integrate, and fund robust science and technical pro- grams to support decisionmaking imposes a high cost on California. The lack of strong, coherent governmental scientific and technical programs has provoked efforts to attack or augment (depending on one’s perspective) existing govern- mental and academic scientific and technical conclusions. Weak government scientific programs contribute to the proliferation of “combat” science—the selective development and presentation of facts and analysis primarily for the political or regulatory advantage (or disadvantage) of one stakeholder group or agency. When the National Research Council (2004) was asked to review the biological opinions governing the operations of the Klamath Project, the authors of the report were struck by the amount of combat science on the basin and how little trust existed in the science being used to make decisions (Doremus and Tarlock 2008). The recent dust-up over the role of ammonium in the decline of delta smelt is another example. For several years, concern existed in the scientific community over ammonium in the Delta and its potential to disrupt food webs on which native fish depend. Consultants were hired to help the Sacramento Regional County Sanitation District with press releases and studies claiming that although they are the primary source of ammonium in the Delta, the ammo- nium poses no problem and the Delta’s problems are from downstream water exports (www.srcsd.com). To counter this combat science, a coalition of water contractors, led by the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, funded a researcher from the University of Maryland with no experience in the Delta who drew a sharply different conclusion, suggesting that the ammonium was the cause of the decline of delta smelt and that the exporters were blameless 61. Data-collection efforts are typically fragmented and incomplete. For example, the SWRCB collects annual water use reports from surface water right-holders, but these often bear little relation to actual volumes used, and the exercise neglects groundwater users and many riparian and pre-1914 surface water rights holders. Regional water quality control boards collect a substantial volume of water quality data, but there is little synthesis that would enable the use of these data in basin management. Similarly, DWR had a wide range of data-collection and assessment activities but lacks a coherent technical organization that would allow such data to inform or guide integrated water management at regional or statewide scales.