To folks in many parts of the arid western United States, the notion that some California communities don’t meter residential and business water sales seems crazy. It is. This may be, by some measures, a record drought in California. But even without it, Californians have known they have serious water stresses. That it has taken …
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 you have any doubt about it, know that the desert begins with the creosote. – Mary Austin, Land of Little Rain
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’s a picture of a person in a frog costume, looking at Hoover Dam, thanks to Getty Images’ fascinating new stock photo licensing scheme. More on that from Nieman Labs. This is an experiment to test how it works and looks
Mark Lubell at U.C. Davis has a fascinating post about the history and politics of drought: [N]early every scientist, commentator, and politician is using drought to make some call for their preferred political change. Regulate groundwater. More storage. Build the twin tunnels. Pass the long-delayed water bond. So given that we’ve been here before (click …
Continue reading ‘Drought means we should do that thing I already knew we should do’ »
While Lake Mead’s drawdown might be viewed negatively from a perspective of maintaining full-pool water storage, it has re-exposed a vast area of new terrestrial habitat increasingly colonized by native species as invasive species abundance declines through time. That’s from “Plant colonization and soil properties on newly exposed shoreline during drawdown of Lake Mead, Mojave …
Continue reading ‘Here’s an upside to the decline of Lake Mead I never thought of’ »
tl;dr – It wasn’t the U.S. government “reserving” water rights on behalf of the Indians. It was the Indians keeping the rights they already had. Longer version: After I last took a stab at writing about the “practicably irrigable acreage” standard that sort of underpins U.S. Native American water rights in the west, a member of …
Continue reading ‘The origins of the “practicably irrigable acreage” standard, part II’ »