From today’s Judge Parker, it looks like Sophie’s on to something big: “A company in Nevada has been slowly buying agricultural property all over the West!” “So?” “They’re buying the property to gain access to the water underneath!” Smart girl. This sounds like trouble. (Hat tip Kelsey.)
Went back to the full text in my RSS feed. Sorry for the delay, Luis. I just forgot.
There’s an interesting framing thing going on here in New Mexico around the Fiscal Year 2008 budget. The House of Representatives is pushing some relatively deep cuts in the nuclear weapons research, development, manufacturing etc. budget. For those not familiar with New Mexico, we’re home to two large nuclear weapons labs. Those cuts would effect …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Framing Edition’ »
Staci Matlock has a good story in this morning’s Santa Fe New Mexican outlining the regulatory dilemma facing New Mexico related to Sandoval County’s hunt for brackish water for desalination: This new, deep source of water poses a regulatory challenge to the state engineer, who is charged with overseeing New Mexico’s increasingly precious water resources. …
Continue reading ‘Inland Desalination: The Regulatory Side’ »
One of my great frustrations as a science journalist covering environmental controversies is that they are often driven not by risks themselves, but by the entities that cause them. Thus, for example, an environmental risk caused by us – the hazardous wastes we through out in our own trash, which ends up at a municipal …
A remarkable story out of Alabama, where Alexander City seems to be quite literally running out of water: “The water is so low the pumps are shutting down on us,” said Eugene Mahan, superintendent of water treatment for the system, which provides drinking water to about 50,000 to 60,000 people in east central Alabama, including …
I swear to god. I am not making this up. That’s Rob Browman on the left, who founded Inkstain with me back in 1998. Winning an Emmy. I swear to god. Rob’s a video producer now at MediaStorm. He and his colleagues won the Emmy for a remarkable piece about a young man’s emigration from …
But the question “Has man inadvertently changed the global climate, or is he about to do so?” is quite legitimate. It has been widely discussed publicly – unfortunately with more zeal than insight. Like so many technical questions fought out in the forum of popular magazines and the daily press, the debate has been characterized …
Been said before, but bears repeating: Tom Swetnam’s Senate testimony Monday: Global warming is making Western wildfires worse, a top fire expert told members of the U.S. Senate on Monday. Combined with a century of firefighting that has left some forests choked and overgrown, along with people building more and more communities at the forests’ …
The highest mountain “tundra” terrains of the Western United States are disappearing because of warming temperatures, according to a new paper by Henry Diaz and Jon Eischeid: In the last 20 years (1987–2006), rising temperatures have caused a significant fraction of these areas to exceed the 10°C threshold for alpine tundra classification. The result has …