Henri Grissino-Mayer and his colleagues have been doing some neat work using tree ring dating as a historical tool – in this case to clear up who really built the buildings on the old McDonald Farm* in Virginia: We found cutting dates for the collapsed cabin ranged from 1809 to 1810, making the likely builder Samuel …
Center-pivot irrigation in Garden City, Kansas – 1972 on the left, 2011 on the right Courtesy NASA: h/t Andy Revkin
From the morning paper I would like to personally thank the taxpayers of Albuquerque for saving my life.
One of the smartest comments on last week’s Cal-Fed announcement about the California Bay-Delta system came in a blog comment from UC Davis’s Jay Lund: The Delta has always been about hostage taking – traditionally with local interests using Delta salinity as a hostage on the big water export projects, and water export users using …
One of the hidden constituencies for forest health is downstream water users. Western wildfires can really muck up a watershed, creating problems when bad fire happens and therefore significant incentives to try to keep it from happening. Today’s case in point, from my colleague Rene Romo, is the Little Bear fire in southern New Mexico: …
Phil Isenberg, California water’s self-described “grumpy old guy”, put down a marker today with a particularly useful, nuanced take (pdf) take on this week’s Bay-Delta Conservation Plan announcement, arguing that it is a bigger deal than some of us have been willing to acknowledge. “Serious public policy people should pay attention,” Isenberg wrote. As I’ve written before, the …
Continue reading ‘California water’s “grumpy old guy” on BDCP’ »
While it’s easy to get caught up in the climate wars rhetoric about the Colorado River, and the effect of anthropogenic warming on the river’s flows, it’s important to remember that’s only one of the variables changing in my region’s water future: With population growth pushing up Colorado River Basin water demand as climate change …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the Colorado River’s supply-demand problem’ »
It’s just geographical coincidence that Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber were at Berkeley in 1973 when they published their Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning (pdf), less than 30 miles as the American white pelican flies from Sherman Island at the downstream mouth of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta. But as we await tomorrow’s unveiling of the …
I don’t think we’ll recognize this: One upshot will be the emergence of whole new ecologies. The landscape changes brought on by climate change are affecting areas so vast that many previous tenants of the land—ponderosa pines, for instance—cannot be expected to recolonize their former territory. Their seeds don’t normally spread far from the parent …
Continue reading ‘deBuys on the climatology of the New West’ »
Is this Michelle Nijhuis piece on the Colorado River terrific because she’s willing to go against the grain and argue for an optimistic future? [D]eputy secretary of the U.S. Department of the Interior David Hayes, ecologist Osvel Hinojosa Huerta of the Mexican conservation group Pronatura Noroeste and University of Arizona paleoclimatologist Jonathan Overpeck all described …