Archive of entries posted by jfleck

Climate change and California water: a bad situation likely to get worse

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If you think California’s water problems look bad now, just wait. That seems to be the message of a new study by a team from the USGS, Scripps, Berkeley and elsewhere who ran detailed simulations of climate change scenarios on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta/San Francisco Bay system. The project provides a useful exercise, not in …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: my latest nuclear weapon automotive metaphor

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The use of automobile metaphors in descriptions of nuclear weapon technology is somewhere between comedy and cliche. Here’s my latest entry (sub/ad req): You could think of the B61 as the Volkswagen bug of the U.S. nuclear arsenal — reliable, adaptable and very, very old. I also said some other, more substantive things: The risk, …

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Fiendfyre and the summer of 2011

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A guest post from my child, N. Reed Heineman-Fleck, which grew out of our conversations about my work chronicling the southwest’s fires of 2011: When Dad told me about the Los Conchas fire, and how it was different than normal fires–in some places it turned everything to black dust; it rolled instead of catching, it …

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Water: Why “the Rubik’s Cube of public policy” misses the point

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In an interview with Sacramento’s Capital Report, California resources secretary John Laird got off the water wonks’ quip of a lifetime: Water is the Rubik’s Cube of public policy. It will be quoted for all eternity. But really, it’s a lousy metaphor. Here’s the meat of what he said: The thing that probably works to …

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Central Basin Municipal Water District ignores the first rule of holes

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In my automated news searches on California water issues, I’d run across a number of stories of late on a web site called “News Hawks”, which seemed to be devoting an inordinate amount of time to detailing the efforts of an obscure Southern California water agency called the Central Basin Municipal Water District. I didn’t …

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Piers Corbyn, Twitter Spammer?

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The following appeared in my twitter feed last night: Could it be that the legendary “forecaster” is resorting to twitter spamming to drum up business? (I have suggested the good folks at Twitter look into that possibility.) I counted 115 identical messages that went out at the same time last night in his twitter feed. …

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Unpacking the water storage question

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Great job by Jay Lund in unpacking the issue of California water storage – how much it has, how it’s used and what role it might play going forward: Climate warming is reducing the ability of California’s snowpack to store water seasonally. Fortunately, downstream reservoirs on many streams are already large compared to seasonal changes …

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