Clearly, the apocalyptic imaginary is unlikely to disappear from the popular global psyche any time soon. Despite this, we must resist catastrophic hyperbole, including the increasingly alarmist discourses adopted by climate scientists in recent years. With the shock election of serial climate change denier Donald Trump to the Oval Office, the need for an effective, …
I’ll be on Colorado Public Radio this morning (Mon. 11/21/16) sometime around 10:30 a.m. mountain time, talking about the importance of water conservation and collaboration. CPR’s Rachel Estabrook, who spent some time talking with me last week about my book, did a nice writeup ahead of the interview: To avoid federally mandated cutbacks, Arizona, Nevada …
Continue reading ‘talking water cooperation this morning on Colorado Public Radio’ »
Worth bookmarking: We want to be a place where research findings about geology or sociology blend with our journalism about the world of the West, to give a multi-dimensional picture of the region’s life and issues. We will also introduce, and constantly update, a library of links you can use to explore the subjects we …
Continue reading ‘& the West – new offering from Stanford’s Lane Center’ »
A new paper on federal dam operations by my University of New Mexico colleague Reed Benson seems suddenly timely. It’s an exhaustive review of the legal structures surrounding Bureau of Reclamation and Corps of Engineers dam operations, with an eye toward finding a path to more flexibility in response to changing climate, human values, and …
Continue reading ‘federal dam operations in a Trump administration’ »
With campaign rhetoric suggesting the likelihood of a changing relationship with Mexico, it is worth asking how a Trump administration might influence ongoing binational collaborations on the Colorado River. The important caveat here is that, as one of my friends put it in the days after the election, we chose Door Number Two on Nov. …
When Brad Plumer interviewed me about my new book for Vox, he seized on this point: For a journalist, few things make better headlines than a good resource crisis. Which is why reporters writing about water issues in the American West are often attracted to the prospect of apocalypse — that the region is going …
Last year, a website called “Breitbart” ran a piece about the growing El Niño in the equatorial Pacific, a climate pattern that shifts weather across much of the Earth. Without evidence – let us be clear, the author of the piece offers a chain of cobbled together logical fallacies but zero evidence – Breitbart’s Chriss Street …
For those planning a trip to Mars…. Evidence shows that more than 3 billion years ago Mars was wet and habitable. However, this latest research reaffirms just how dry the environment is today. For life to exist in the areas we investigated, it would need to find pockets far beneath the surface, located away from …
Continue reading ‘Not a lot of good reservoir sites on Mars’ »
Laura Paskus has a new piece touching on an issue that is one of the most important policy problems in western US water management – the tendency of water managers to overestimate future demand. In this case, it’s the Gila River basin in southwestern New Mexico, where planners are considering significant investment to build a …
Continue reading ‘The risks of overestimating future water demand’ »
My University of New Mexico Water Resources Program colleague Bruce Thomson loves to point out that Albuquerque’s wastewater treatment plant is, in New Mexico, the second largest tributary to the Rio Grande after the Rio Chama. But as tributaries go, it’s a short one – under 100 yards/meters from the outfall to the main river …