What’s the Colorado River failure mode? By which I mean, with as much specificity as we can muster, when the water begins to run short, who will get less? I’m pushing this question because of a frustration with the doom scenarios generated by simply extrapolating the diverging supply and demand curves forward in time and invoking …
Continue reading ‘In Arizona, a Colorado River shortfall would hit ag first’ »
Dan Kahan, the Yale “cultural cognition” guy, has a new paper highlighting the problem with the argument that a more scientifically literate public will solve all our scientized problems, things like climate change, GMOs and nuclear stuff where the scientific argument has become intractably embedded in a political context. (The paper’s actually targeted at climate …
Continue reading ‘Science literacy, numeracy and science policy challenges’ »
I know it is in the mission statement of all card-carrying western water journalists to harp on the gloomy prospects of shortage. But in the near term, the odds of a surplus on the Colorado River are greater than the chances of a shortage, according to new calculations by the US Bureau of Reclamation. Don’t …
Continue reading ‘On the Colorado, chance of surplus early, shortage down the road’ »
Inspired by the beautiful maps Geoff McGhee made for the Lane Center-KQED California Delta project, I spent some time this weekend playing with GIS software. I haven’t done any hackerly projects in ages, and a friend who’s a GIS professional had suggested QGIS, a free software project. (ArcGIS is pricey, and I’m a Mac guy …
The central premise of my book project is that, despite the enormous western water problems I regularly chronicle here and in the various other places I publish, I expect that we’ll do OK in the long run. My optimism comes from the way communities, when they approach the edge of the water supply cliff, show …
I believe that anyone who flies in an airplane and doesn’t spend most of his time looking out the window wastes his money. – Marc Reisner When your vantage point spans a sufficient chunk of landscape, Hoover Dam doesn’t look so big. Is this really the right scale at which to think of it?
I dashed out of town early Wednesday and failed to share with Inkstain readers the latest in the Kirtland Air Force Base jet fuel saga: As much as 24 million gallons of jet fuel might have escaped from a decades-long leak in an underground Kirtland Air Force Base pipe, three times more than previously estimated, …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Kirtland jet fuel spill’ »
From Douglas Kupel’s history of Arizona water, the story of Tucson’s efforts to conserve supply against rapidly rising demand. One thought – regulating outdoor watering: [T]he city council discussed a plan to limit all such irrigation to between six o’clock in the evening and four o’clock in the morning. The year was 1893.
My column in the morning paper on a rift between the state of New Mexico and the feds over water for the endangered Rio Grande silvery minnow. Because it’s not really about a fish: As has been happening for more than a decade on the Rio Grande, the minnow is merely one of the first …
One of the briefs (pdf) in the voluminous filings in the water rights adjudication on the Lower Rio Grande makes this fascinating assertion regarding water for irrigation in southern New Mexico: The irrigators find themselves in a constant state of drought as compared to the demands of their crops. Perhaps, then, the word “drought” is not …