Liveblogging Nature’s Half Acre
9:01 am: Watching roadrunner in the backyard. Unsuspecting sparrow flies up. Snap. Sparrow dead, spectacle of roadrunner breakfast kinda gross. 9:05 am: Two house finches and a white-winged dove sit on power line, watching roadrunner eat sparrow. Are they, in fact, “watching”? Do they care? 9:09 am: Roadrunner sitting on a stump, wiping off his [...]
Energy-Water Follies, Jatropha Edition
I’ve got this energy-water hammer, and they all look like nails right now. Today’s nail is jatropha, one of the next-gen bio-energy darlings. Or not: Jatropha, a biofuel crop favoured for its ability to grow in areas not suitable for food, may be about to become less popular. A new Dutch study shows it uses [...]
Drought Causes Crime?
This one was enough to lure me away from the all-MJ/Farrah news feed this morning: In some valley towns the crime rates have soared. The link, officials suggest, are the water shortages to farming communities. The drought is said to have lead to higher crime rates in some Valley towns. In the farming community of [...]
Water and Energy
I recently finished up a piece at the day job on the connection between water and energy, and perhaps as a result, everywhere I turn these days I’m seeing stories on the linkage. Today’s example comes from Cynthia Barnett: Matthew Cohen, a professor in UF’s School of Forest Resources and Conservation, and post-doctoral researcher Jason [...]
Waxman-Markey Horse Trading, a Case Study
My Albuquerque Journal colleague Mike Coleman has a nice example in today’s paper (might be behind paywall, a bit of a crapshoot there) of the horse trading now underway in an attempt to win passage of the Waxman-Markey climate bill: Rep. Harry Teague, a southern New Mexico Democrat, this week persuaded the authors of a [...]
The solution to our water woes
When I was a kid, they had one of these things at the Los Angeles County Fair. I remember staring for the longest time, trying to figure it out. (h/t Chris Corbin)
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: My 60 Vote Obsession
On counting to 60 votes in the U.S. Senate.
Colorado River Quote of the Week
Some scientists predict that climatic changes could alter historic precipitation patterns, and reduce available water supplies. Carbon dioxide loading of the atmosphere caused by fossil-fuel combustion, mostly in coal-burning power plants, threatens a significant climate change…. A National Academy of Sciences report estimates that the resulting temperature increase and reduction in precipitation could diminish water [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Drought Edition
New Mexico drought conditions forecast to improve
Runoff Timing
In light of yesterday’s mediapalooza about the new federal climate report (see my contributions here and here), there’s an interesting on-the-ground reality check today in the Denver Post: Colorado’s peak flow from snowmelt hit a few weeks earlier than normal, causing problems for some recreational users of the state’s rivers and complicating downstream irrigation strategies. [...]
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