At the peak of the housing bubble in January 2006, when the annual pace of new home construction hit a blistering 2.29 million units, an estimated 14 percent of laborers in the construction sector were undocumented immigrants, including 20 percent of carpet, floor and tile installers, 28 percent of drywallers, and 36 percent of insulation …
Based on the latest federal forecasts (pdf from USBR here), we can expect Lake Powell to drop 20 feet this year and Lake Mead to drop 10 feet. That’s the midpoint forecast. Could be better if it snows. Could be worse. So far the trend based on the first half of January leans toward worse. …
Continue reading ‘Draining the Colorado River’s reservoirs, 2013 edition’ »
So it looks like we’ll have solar panels installed by the end of February. How long after that will it take for global warming to stop?
There’s a rich, historical elegance to the tradition of state-v-state lawsuits over interstate compacts. Because each of the US states is constitutionally sovereign, when they sue one another over water flowing down a river from one state to the next, the legal action begins and ends before the US Supreme Court – the court of …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: original jurisdiction’ »
The bonus water of 2010-11 on the Colorado River, when Lake Mead jumped nearly 50 feet in surface elevation, is looking more and more like an anomaly. The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center issued its January forecast this week, with early snowpack pointing to a mid-point forecast of 61 percent of average flow into Lake …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Another Bad Year on the Colorado’ »
In the summer of 1869, while John Wesley Powell was making his first journey down the Colorado River, Ferdinand V. Hayden, he of the famous Hayden surveys, was making a less notable journey down the eastern flank of the Rockies, from Colorado into New Mexico. Hayden’s primary purpose was geology, with an eye toward the region’s …
I went for a walk this morning at the old Two-Mile Dam site on the Santa Fe River east of Santa Fe, NM. It’s two miles from downtown (hence the name), in the Sangre de Cristo foothills near the end of a road lined with wealth. Santa Fe is unusual in New Mexico as a …
Back in the 1980s, when I was a reporter covering Pasadena City Hall, Tim Brick sold me on the fact that water was a great story. Pasadena had a municipal water agency, so it made sense that the city hall beat reporter should pay attention. But Tim, Pasadena’s representative on the Metropolitan Water District board …
The science accumulates: The more greenhouse gases push up temperatures over the next few decades, the more New Mexico’s water supplies are at risk, according to new research by a team of Columbia University scientists. Using the latest high-resolution global climate simulations, the scientists show evaporation caused by warming temperatures is likely to leave less …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: climate change on the Colorado River’ »
I blogged a similar picture a couple of years ago, but this new NASA image of the Nile Valley, at night, from space, bears a reblog: Our rivers define us.