Sound of a Warming World
Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George at the University of Minnesota have collaborated on another fascinating attempt to use music to communicate data about our warming world: Todd Reubold at Ensia has more on the project.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Albuquerque’s water use continues to decline
Since I left my job at the Albuquerque Journal, I’ve not been devoting the obsessive attention to local water that I did when I was, y’know, paid to. But a boy has to have a hobby, right? So this week I emailed David Morris at the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Water Utility Authority requesting a copy …
Continue reading ‘Albuquerque’s water use continues to decline’ »
Mulroy: We’ve built one giant watershed
Pat Mulroy in the Las Vegas Sun on the interconnected west-wide artificial watershed we’ve built for ourselves, and why efforts to solve the Sacramento Delta’s problems matter to the rest of us: From the vantage point of Sacramento, the Colorado River may seem distant and disconnected to the challenges in the delta. Yet, the two …
Continue reading ‘Mulroy: We’ve built one giant watershed’ »
Curiosity
I’ve the privilege of giving the commencement talk for the University of New Mexico Biology Department’s graduation ceremony tomorrow, and I’m nervous as hell. It’s such an honor to be asked, and feels like such a hopeless task – hard to match words to the measure of the importance of the day. (“A commencement speaker …
Water in the desert
In defense of Imperial Valley farming
Tom Philpott, who through his Mother Jones pieces has aimed aimed his considerable knowledge of our food system at California’s water problems, sets his sights this week on the Imperial Valley of southeastern California where, as he notes, “Imperial Valley’s farms gets 3.1 million acre-feet annually—more than half of California’s total allotment and more than …
An example of why groundwater regulation is hard
OtPR today offers a list of generally poor rural communities that have seen domestic wells go dry as relatively affluent almond farms pump down regional aquifers to keep their orchards alive during the drought. It’s not hard to see why this is wrong: This economic model, in which powerful outsiders come in, displace the natives …
Continue reading ‘An example of why groundwater regulation is hard’ »
Warm in the West, but not as dry as you might have thought
update: Jeff Lukas, in the comments, notes that I missed something important, which is the distinction between statewide averages and the east-west precip divide. As he correctly points out, that statewide blob of wet-looking Colorado hides the fact that it’s been extremely wet to the east, and relatively dry west of the continental divide. Here’s …
Continue reading ‘Warm in the West, but not as dry as you might have thought’ »
Water from the sky
One of my happy new discoveries among people writing about water in this time of drought is a guy named Dan Macon, who raises grass-fed lambs in the Sierra Nevada foothills of California. Mason’s one of those people who depend on water from the sky rather than irrigation water from a canal or groundwater pump, …
Rio Grande runoff forecast: 44 percent at Otowi
March – July snowmelt runoff on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande, which provides the bulk of the river’s water, is forecast to be 44 percent of the 1981-2010 average, according to a federal forecast out this morning. The measurement point for that number is the Otowi Bridge, which is on the road from Santa Fe to …
Continue reading ‘Rio Grande runoff forecast: 44 percent at Otowi’ »