One of the casualties of drought is the piñon in the mountains of New Mexico. I took this picture back in February in the Sandias, the mountains on the eastern edge of Albuquerque. Where you see snow the slopes are generally north-facing. No snow is south-facing, and that’s where you see brown trees. I tweaked …
If I was a more clever writer, I’d have a joke here about how the statistics of a WIPP accident change now that we’ve got a Bayesian prior: The radiation leak that has shut down the nation’s only operating underground nuclear waste disposal site was, for all practical purposes, never supposed to happen. No one …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the WIPP accident that was never supposed to happen’ »
Ben Cook at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies has a new paper that offers a reminder of why the impact of climate change on our ecosystems and water supplies involves more than “will it rain less”? In some sense this is an old and obvious point, which I link here just to repeat said …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the West: it’s not just about more or less rain’ »
Here in Albuquerque, we have a really big groundwater contamination problem under and adjacent to the Air Force base on the city’s south side. It is a textbook model of decision-making under scientific uncertainty: how long will it take to reach the nearest drinking water wells? I’ve seen an increasing confusion among the public, politicians …
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Rio Rancho, New Mexico, has a dilemma. My colleague Rosalie Rayburn has been writing about the trials and tribulations of the privately owned Chamisa Hills Golf and Country Club, which has had a lot of both. In her latest story, Rosalie describes … a recent request by potential Chamisa Hills buyers Bob Gallagher and Jhett Browne …
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From the morning paper, a look at the U.S. government’s filing in the case of Texas v. New Mexico (and Colorado*) over water-sharing (or lack thereof) on the Rio Grande: In a brief filed Thursday, U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli alleged that excess groundwater pumping in New Mexico is intercepting water in the shallow aquifer …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: “an insatiable greed for water”’ »
I watched the superstructure of this go up from the levee path a hundred yards or so to the west. Had no idea. Imagined all manner of strangeness.
I live in Albuquerque, as does my wife, my sister and my daughter. At dinner recently, we realized that none of us watched “Breaking Bad”, which is a television program filmed in Albuquerque starring people who would be famous to us if we watched said television program. This leaves us all left out of some …
OK, this was just fun: Absent a really giant floating rubber ducky, the Rail Runner bridge across Albuquerque’s main flood control channel appears to be safe. “The thing about water that people don’t understand is that it is so powerful,” said Adrienne Martinez as she stood over water rushing beneath a scale model of the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: the giant rubber duck risk’ »