Stuff I Said Elsewhere: Forest Health
New Mexico’s forests are seriously messed up. Here’s a video teaser for my Sunday newspaper story: Update: Sorry, didn’t realize the embedded video made noise without asking. If you want to see it, go here.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Who Was Carl Rasch? The lawyer behind the Winters Doctrine
update: A previous version of this post had what I though was a picture of Carl Rasch. Upon inquiry, I think it was a black-and-white picture of some other old dude with a great mustache. In answer to a question that came up in conversation on Twitter today, herewith an abbreviated version of the story …
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You can’t size your infrastructure for the outliers
Yesterday’s post about recurring suggestion that we build giant water infrastructure was premised in part on this year’s extremely wet year on the Missouri-Mississippi system, the “Why not build a big pipe from there to the desert” argument. As I mention, I hear this idea a lot, but especially this year, when it seems like …
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Drought? But it’s flooding on the Mississippi!
Nearly every time I write a newspaper story about water, and without fail every time I give a talk, I get a question about why we don’t just build a big canal from some wet place and bring the water here to the desert southwest. It just seems so crazy to me – so over-the-top-engineering-costly-we-don’t-do-that-stuff-any-more …
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“We have a cool, pleasant ride today…”
My new favorite Twitter feed is @jwesleypowell, who is tweeting his trip down the Colorado River into the great unknown: Soon after dinner, we discover the mouth of the San Juan, where we camp. The tweets are drawn from the publicly published version of John Wesley Powell’s journals, which is a ripping good read. But …
Earth, air, fire and water
I tried my best while I was out riding this morning to get a picture that shows the strange discomfort flowing past in the Rio Grande and the irrigation ditches that flank the river as it passes through town. Need words to help – the water at this spot, on one of the ditches in …
Drought – An Update
For grins, I just checked the latest climate data for Baton Rouge, which is in the grip of a fierce drought. July’s been a decent month for them. Still below normal, but better than it has been. From July 12-14, they got 2.84 inches of rain. It’s the last day of the month, so I …
The Ag Irrigation Conservation Paradox
Ever surprising. Although increased irrigation efficiency is one of the most widely promoted solutions to increased water demand, its actual effects on the water balance are complex and even paradoxical. The cost to farmers of delivered irrigation water is minimal, meaning that there is little benefit from installing expensive water-conservation technology in terms of reducing …
You Can’t Make Up Shit This Good
Nora, over at Escape Pod, captures something remarkable about the Manhattan Project: [T]he more I learn about the Manhattan Project the more it feels like a fabricated story. Oppenheimer is said to be the father of the atomic bomb, but really he’s just the only person in the world that rolled high enough Intelligence, Wisdom …
Sierras and the Colorado Basin: We’re All In This Together
A reminder that Northern California’s water problems and the Colorado Basin’s are linked, in this new paper by Paul Miller and Thomas Piechota on snowpack around the West. Miller and Piechota focus primarily on Colorado Basin snowpack (which as we know is declining) but note the relevance of the Sierra Nevada as well: Decreasing snowpack …
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