Wildman and Forde make my last post on this subject look smart, arguing that the supply-demand imbalance on the Colorado River will hit Arizona and Nevada first: We find that initial shortages will be borne only by the cities of Arizona and Nevada and farms in Arizona whereas the other Basin states have no incentive …
From the Delta National Park blog: I mean, how much competent science leading to inconclusive policies needs to be commissioned before smart people admit that this is not a problem of science? Yup.
Classified ad in today’s Albuquerque Journal: BECOME a millionaire raising alfalfa. Pay off in five years. Only $2,900/acre. 70 acres
The groundwater subsidy – what happens to it after we pump it up and use it – is frequently ignored in policy discussions. When we stop mining groundwater, I’ve often argued, we need to recognize that the share we discharge into our rivers, which becomes water supply to those downstream, goes away. But via David …
Continue reading ‘Another anthropogenic influence on sea level: groundwater pumping’ »
In the work I’m doing now on the Colorado River Basin for my book, I’m trying to get beyond simply extrapolating supply and demand curves and then running around with my hair on fire. The hair-on-fire thing is easy to do, because the current supply and demand curves, as the Bureau of Reclamation frankly noted …
I went back two weeks ago to the Las Conchas fire zone, where an unprecedented blaze tore through New Mexico ponderosa forests that will never be the same – “Not in our lifetimes,” as one forester put it. My story: During a daylong hike last week across an area that once was dominated by ponderosa …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Las Conchas, 10 months on’ »
Jeffrey Michael runs the numbers and suggests the marginal cost of water from a new Peripheral Thingie (canal or tunnel beneath/around the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta) will be prohibitive for agricultural users asked to foot a share of the bill: According to the draft BDCP, the marginal cost of new water the contractors get out of …
Continue reading ‘Will taxpayers bail out delta water exporters?’ »
A: When April 1 falls on a Monday. That’s the conclusion of a clever bit of work by Tom Pagano, former NRCS forecaster who used to do the Rio Grande forecasts before he went on to bigger and better things. “Bigger and better” has included a stint in Australia and a current world tour of …
Continue reading ‘Q: When is an April 1 snow survey not an April 1 snow survey?’ »
Much has been made of the analogy that climate change is like steroids for our weather. But what if we’ve got the thing backwards? Here’s baseball sage Tim McCarver: It has not been proven, but I think ultimately it will be proven that the air is thinner now, there has been climactic changes over the …
Continue reading ‘The climate change-steroids analogy in reverse?’ »
The authors acknowledge that the result when they looked at the effect of piñon die-off from the Four Corners drought a decade ago seems counterintuitive: Basins with the most tree die-off showed a significant decrease in streamflow over several years following die-off, and this decrease was not attributable to climate variability alone. The results are counterintuitive …
Continue reading ‘drought kills seem to be reducing streamflow in the arid southwest’ »