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 …
A sweeping deal to reduce Lower Colorado River Basin water use will get its most detailed public airing to date at tomorrow’s (Nov. 7, 2016) meeting of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s Water Planning and Stewardship Committee. If the deal goes through – and there are hurdles yet to clear – Arizona, California, …
Continue reading ‘On the brink of a major deal to reduce Colorado River water use’ »
As Bruce Finley notes in today’s Denver Post, we are on the brink of the first shortage declaration on the Colorado River: The next president could be faced with ordering a first-ever reduction in water siphoned from the river by 333,000 acre feet next August, a report by the Colorado River Future Project contends. That’s …
Continue reading ‘We’re already in a Colorado River “shortage”, we just don’t call it that’ »
Every fall semester, I have our UNM Water Resources Program students read Kelly Redmond’s 2002 Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society paper on the definitions of drought. It’s a classic in a very particular and important way. Based at the Desert Research Center in Reno, Kelly carried the title of “Regional Climatologist” for the western …