jfleck at inkstain

A few thoughts from John Fleck, a writer of journalism and other things, living in New Mexico

Connecting some dots

A couple of (possibly connected?) things that crossed my desk this morning – According to the latest data from the San Francisco Fed, Las Vegas (Nev.) has huge foreclosure numbers. And then this good news, from Henry Brean at the Las Vegas Review Journal: [W]ater use continues to decline in the valley, where the water authority [...]

The Colorado Big Picture

Tom Yulsman and Brendon Bosworth have an excellent piece over at Climate Central looking at drought and water supply on my favorite river*. They capture what I think is one of the key elements in understanding what’s happening on the Colorado: the realization that, independent of the drought that has plagued the river for more [...]

River Beat: AZ May Not Need to Leave Water in Mead

With the mondo snow pack and good runoff forecast, Arizona may no longer need to leave some of its annual share of Colorado River water in Lake Mead, Shaun McKinnon reports: The CAP had been discussing a plan to forfeit as much as 80,000 acre-feet of its allocation this year to help keep water levels [...]

Bad Tap Water? Bottled Sales Go Up

UCSD economist Josh Zivin and colleagues found a correlation between water quality violations and bottled water sales in the US: [W]e find an increase in bottled water sales of 22 percent from violations due to microorganisms and 17 percent from violations due to elements and chemicals. What surprised me was the small size of the [...]

The Jevons Paradox and Christmas Lights

I noticed yesterday evening a significant number of homes with outdoor Christmas lights still up and shining, far more than I remember in past years by mid-January. (No data here, just a hunch.) They looked like the new high-efficiency LED lights, which seems to be the Jevons paradox in action. The core of the paradox [...]

River Beat: What a Difference a Month Makes

What a difference a wet, wet month in the Colorado Basin makes. In December, the long range forecasts for the big reservoirs at Lake Powell (upstream) and Lake Mead were flirting with trouble. Lake Mead’s levels for the end of the 2010-11 water year were forecast to drop to 1076.68 feet above sea level, close [...]

Climate Change on the Colorado: The Devil In the Details

udpate: full column here (sub/ad req) When I first began seriously trying to sort out New Mexico’s place in the scheme of Colorado River water management, I kept banging unsuccessfully up against what seemed like a simple question: If long term drought or permanent climate change reduces the river’s flow, how would the shortage be [...]

The Vltava, Prague, July 2010

When I was a boy, I built a river in the backyard of our family home in Upland, California. I would put the hose at one end, running slowly, and let the water course down through channels and lakes of my own devising, beneath a cluster of lemon trees. Eventually the water would spill over [...]

Tree Rings’ Tale – Teacher Feedback

I was delighted by the National Science Teachers association recommendation of The Tree Rings’ Tale, especially this bit from science teacher Teri Cosentino: I was so inspired by the book that when a tree was felled on campus, we counted and measured the tree rings to see what happened during the tree’s life during the [...]

River Beat: Good Snow Pack News

At the Dry Lake snotel station near Steamboat Springs in northern Colorado, there’s more than 4 feet of snow on the ground. By snow water content, that’s 32 percent above average for Jan. 7. Snow that melts there flows down into the Yampa River, which flows into the Green, which flows into the Colorado, which [...]

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