Consistent with Friday’s dismal US jobs report, the latest Inkstain CSFC Index, my key indicator of local economic health, does not look good. On the morning bike ride, I swung by the local Walmart Superstore and counted just two big storage containers out back.
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 …