Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Seismic Risk at Los Alamos
From the morning paper (sub/ad req.): Los Alamos National Laboratory could expose its workers and neighbors to a massive and potentially deadly radiation leak in a major earthquake, independent federal safety auditors concluded in a report released Tuesday. Such earthquakes are rare — one every few thousand years in the Los Alamos area, according to [...]
Water News
Some accumulated links to recent water news: Lisa Pham reports in the New York Times on new water tech developing in Australia, where drought has forced a certain level of creativity the rest of us have had the luxury thus far to ignore. (Note that a lot of this gee-whiz stuff is high tech, rather [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere III: ABQ Water
Also from this morning’s paper, a brief report (business model, ad/sub yada) on yesterday’s Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly meeting. I tried to balance the progress made on water conservation with the grim message I’ve been pushing in my recent work on this regarding the supply-demand deficit in New Mexico’s heavily populated middle valley: Water [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere II: Birds, warming and the desert
More blathering from the morning paper, this the tale of the fascinating work of Blair Wolf (sub/ad yada yada) a University of New Mexico biologist who studies the water consumption of desert birds: The smaller a desert creature, the more water loss matters, and little birds like verdin are especially vulnerable, Wolf said. Sometimes, that [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere I: Big Think Nukes
Lots of accumulated blathering from me in this morning’s newspaper. First up, a fun thumbsucker on the Obama administration’s rhetoric regarding zero nuclear weapons (sub/ad req.) and what it might mean in practice: Supporters of a world without nuclear weapons, who include prominent hawks like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, argue the world would [...]
Ag Water in the West
Shaun McKinnon has a must-read story for those interested in western water in today’s Arizona Republic about the discussion in his state about the future of agricultural and municipal water use: As Phoenix grew, the land available for farms shrank and water use shifted. As recently as 1965, 80 percent of the water delivered by [...]
Birding the LA River
I used the Los Angeles River’s famed concrete as a bit of a stalking horse in a piece I wrote earlier this week. But Albuquerque birdwriter Judy Liddell points out that the concrete is not all there is to the old water course: As it flows through central Los Angeles, it reverts to the concrete [...]
$1,000 an acre foot
I’m always intrigued at the chance to see the price of a water transaction in the West. Usually it’s hidden, but a transaction being discussed among some Colorado River Communities offers this glimpse. From Jim Seckler’s story in the Mohave Daily News: George said the plan would be for the MCWA to keep 500-acre feet [...]
Limbaugh, Revkin and the Blues
I wasn’t sure what additionally needed to be said about Rush Limbaugh’s shameful attack on Andy Revkin the other day, in which he suggested the New York Times reporter might help the planet by committing suicide. (Charlie Petit has a nice rundown on the various things being said about it.) But I thought the issue [...]
Rivers Without Water
In the comments on Nora’s Salt River picture, DG shared a link to a wonderful story of a group of German World War II POW’s who escaped from a camp in Arizona: The plan was to float down the Cross Cut Canal, then to the Salt River, to the Gila River and on to the [...]
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