The International Boundary and Water Commission today released its initial science report (pdf) on this spring’s Colorado River pulse flow. A few key bits: When you add water, stuff grows. Satellite imagery in June ’14 compared to a year earlier showed a 36 percent increase in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index. The NDVI increased in all …
Continue reading ‘First Colorado delta pulse flow science findings’ »
David Zetland really cares about water policy, and he wants you to think better about it: I confess that I’m not a fan of the “educate the general public” model of water policy problem solving, which might seem odd given my profession as a journalist. That’s an “educate the general public” job, right? But …
tl;dr Everyone on the Colorado River has a legitimate argument that they’ve already sacrificed, and that they have a legal entitlement to what’s left. If everyone digs in their heels on these points, the system will crash. We need to be willing to share the pain. But (scroll to the bottom) there is hope on that …
Continue reading ‘How to solve the Colorado River’s problems, or not’ »
A couple of new papers exploring California’s drought triggered what I thought this morning was some overly simplistic back and forth on the twitters about whether climate change is to blame. I think that’s the wrong question. The first paper, which I wrote about last week, was the Griffin/Anchukaitis paleo look at the thing. They …
Continue reading ‘Tweeting lessons from a California drought’ »
On twitter the other day, I was joking that I’ve adopted a new approach to my book research: when confronted with a problem, I first ask, “Did Elinor Ostrom write about this?” Ostrom won the economics Nobel in 2009 for her work on how communities solve common pool resources problems, work that’s central to the …
When I was a youngster, which was a very long time ago, a guy named Ed Helminski took me into his journalistic embrace. Ed had a business model that involved smart coverage of the U.S. nuclear enterprise, and he made that model work at a time when journalistic models were faltering all around us. His …
From the beginning, it was clear that solving Southern California’s water problems would require “the best talent of the country”: That’s Walter Mendenhall, from a series of U.S. Geological Survey papers published in 1905 inventorying the groundwater resources of the greater Los Angeles Basin’s groundwater resources (before we thought of it as “the greater Los …
Continue reading ‘Southern California water: “the best talent of the country”’ »
Defining drought is a tricky business, but I think Daniel Griffin and Kevin Anchukaitis have come up with a reasonable one – three years of persistent low soil moisture. By that measure, the drought in Central and Southern California is…. Well, I’ll let them tell it (pdf): We demonstrate that while 3-year periods of persistent below-average …
Continue reading ‘In California, the worst drought in a really long time’ »
A riff in the morning paper on Albquerque’s beloved Tumbleweed Snowman, after spending the morning watching the flood control authority crew do his final assembly: Tumbleweed origin stories differ, but only slightly. German-Russian Mennonite farmers are believed to have inadvertently brought the seeds of our modern tumbleweed, also known as Russian thistle, mixed in with …
Continue reading ‘The Tumbleweed Snowman: An Immigrant Tale’ »
Sacramento holds by far the largest body of unmetered water connections in California – about 62,000. These customers are allowed to consume all the water they want and pay only a flat monthly rate of about $41 for an average home. With a few exceptions, all other California communities are entirely served by water meters …
Continue reading ‘Sacramento, gettin’ serious about water’ »