While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians: By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires …
Continue reading ‘Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians’ »
Wayne Bossert, who manages the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4 on the famed Ogallala Aquifer, raised the interesting issue recently in testimony at a Senate field hearing of the effect of federal agricultural policy on water: Historically the farm bill has been blamed for promoting fencerow-to-fencerow corn production due to it’s design and …
From yesterday’s newspaper, a reminder that not all the area within the boundaries of this year’s big New Mexico forest fires is burned to an ugly, indecipherable ecological cinder (sub/ad req): There is good reason to visit the moonscape, and to talk about what happens next to the ecosystem there — the subject of a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It didn’t all burn like that’ »
In a hard-hitting exposé, the Desert Sun earlier this month seems to have conclusively cleared the Salton Sea of charges that it smells really bad: The smell seemed to be everywhere — except the place where people usually think it comes from. A pungent, sewer-like odor in the air was noted Friday morning by people …
Continue reading ‘Newspaper exonerates Salton Sea of charges it stinks. Or does it?’ »
I am a weather nerd. So it was with great excitement that I unpacked my new official CoCoRaHS RG202 4″ Rain Gauge this evening. It replaces an identical old one that I put up in the back yard in September 1999 when I joined the local National Weather Service office’s CityNet group of volunteer observers. …
The question of how much water we’ll need in the Southwest going forward is dominated by uncertainty over what future population growth will look like. And I confess that I’ve got no earthly idea how to think well about this question. Consider Phoenix. In his new ebook The Gated City, Ryan Avent argues that Phoenix …
Once this resource was provided*, those who failed to pay for it (such as me, drifting through Albuquerque’s Old Town plaza at the end of a long Saturday bike ride) could not be excluded from enjoying its benefits. In addition, my consumption of the resource (sitting in the shade listening to the music) did not, …
Continue reading ‘My education in economics: Public Goods’ »
For the current water year, Oct. 1, 2010, through the end of August, I’ve had 4.39 inches (11.15 cm) of rain at my house in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights. That’s 51 percent of the mean going back to the 1999-2000 water year. Just one of the months, December, was above my long term mean, and …
Climate change and the resulting changes in rivers flows pose significant problems for transboundary water management agreements. But a new paper by Heather Cooley and Peter Gleick at the Pacific Institute finds a hopeful model in recent tweaks adding flexibility in the face of drought to the “Law of the River” governing distribution of water …
Continue reading ‘The Law of the River as a model for dealing with the loss of stationarity’ »
My friend Jaime Dispenza, a triathlon coach, was out for a training run recently, when… I’ll let him describe it: After my second of four intervals I approached the river and there standing in ankle deep water was a couple holding hands. OK, no biggie I have seen this before. Then I noticed there was …