Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Riffing on the Millennium
From the work blog, a fond look back at what I was doing ten years ago today: Given as we are to the measurement of time in human terms – the second of a heartbeat, the day of waking and sleeping, the year of spring planting and fall harvest – the time scale of an [...]
To Dry the Salton Sea. Or Not.
David Zetland posted on the Salton Sea today, arguing that we should just give it up: Today’s Salton “Sea” is NOT natural. It’s replenished by irrigation runoff, of dubious quality. As water evaporates, it leaves behind higher concentrations of salts and other nasty stuff. Time to dry out the Salton Toilet, clean up the mess [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Drying Up the Butte
From this morning’s newspaper, an essay on what happens when yours truly tries to take on the duties of Middle Rio Grande Water Czar (sub/ad req). The column’s based on time I spent with Jesse Roach and Vince Tidwell at Sandia Labs, who have been developing a user-friendly water system model for decision makers to [...]
Pat Mulroy on How Vegas Plans to Do It: Desal, Baby!
Pat Mulroy on how Las Vegas (Nevada) plans to meet its long term water needs – desal! I know, I know, you’re saying, “But don’t you have to be by, like, an ocean or something?” Here’s the scheme: build big desal plant down on the Gulf of California, give that water to Mexico to meet [...]
Arizona Pondering Water Future
From Shaun McKinnon, a must-read story for water geeks on Arizona’s thinking about its water future – specifically where to get more (or use less?): Drop 2 is no Lake Mead, the huge reservoir outside Las Vegas that holds Colorado River water until cities and farms in Arizona, Nevada and California need it. The new [...]
Snowpack and Drought
It’s far too early in the season to draw any conclusions regarding 2010 runoff. The first serious forecasts don’t come out until January, and with months of snowmaking weather still to come, no one takes the January forecast terribly seriously. But this is a blog, so I won’t let that stop me. Currently, the NRCS [...]
Yemen and Water
Our national discussion about what to do with prisoners currently held in Guantanamo has focused a lot of attention of late on Yemen, the Arab world’s oil-poor sibling. It is increasingly seen as a haven for the sort of bad guys we, as a nation, worry about. Is the story of Yemen’s problems really a [...]
Science Saturday
It’s Science Saturday in the Albuquerque Journal. By which I mean that, when editors wander the halls looking for copy to fill the holiday news doldrums, there’s always an extra science feature on offer. (sub/ad req if you follow the links) VLA gets an upgrade: Rick Perley had a big smile on his face as [...]
Holiday ’09 and the Magic of Cell Phones
The tail end of 2009 has frankly been pretty crappy in the Heineman-Fleck household. My car battery died, and some other stuff I won’t burden y’all with. The net is that the Christmas tree we bought two weeks ago is still sitting in the backyard, where we placed it fully intending to bring it in [...]
Shocked
In Governing the Commons, Elinor Ostrom tells the story of the way some Southern Californians solved the problem of competitive groundwater overpumping. Cities and private water companies realized that if everyone kept pumping like nutso, their aquifer would go dry and they’d all be screwed. So they got together in a sometimes painful, expensive and [...]
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