A group at the University of Arizona is using new tree ring techniques to try to crack one of the interesting outstanding paleoclimate questions in the Southwest – the summer monsoon. Tree rings have long been used to reconstruct winter precipitation records (fat rings = wet years, thin rings = dry years), but the summer …
A new study out today from the Pacific Institute of municipalities’ water use in the Colorado Basin has some good news and some bad news from a basin-wide perspective. Per capita water consumption in the basin’s cities is down: Almost every one of the water agencies included in the study experienced declines in per capita …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Cities’ water use in the Colorado Basin’ »
Sad but fascinating work by Nico Voigtlaender of UCLA and Hans-Joachim Voth at CREI in Barcelona looking at the cultural persistence of anti-Semitism. They found that communities that blamed (and killed) Jews during the Black Death of the mid-1300s were more likely to also engage in violence against Jews in the 20th century: Pogroms during …
This ran last week in the Albuquerque Journal, while I was on the road, sorry for the late bloggage (sub/ad req). From the Natural Resources Law Center’s Navigating the Future of the Colorado River conference, it’s a riff on how this year’s big snowpack buys a bit of time for the hard discussions to come …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere – Buying Time on the Colorado’ »
In a comically disingenuous TV diatribe earlier this month, Congressman Devin Nunes, defender of San Joaquin Valley farmers’ federal water, suggested that perhaps if the effete liberals in San Francisco care so much about the Delta smelt, they should reduce their own consumption of Sierra Nevada water: If the Delta ecosystem is collapsing, I would …
One of the most interesting analyses of California’s water problems I read before last week’s trip was “California’s Sacramento San Joaquin Delta Conflict: from Cooperation to Chicken“, by Kaveh Madani and Jay Lund at UC Davis. It looks at the struggle over the Delta’s future as a game theory problem, one in which an optimal …
My friend Alison, who used to live in Palo Alto, dispatched me on my recent travels to the Baylands, a lovely little park that is, as its name suggests, on the bay. It’s got salt marshes and tidal wetlands and a ton of birds. Being an inland desert dweller, I was in bird overload. A …
Twenty-one years ago, I did a very bad thing. This is my confession. On the Public Record lists the 1979 California Water Atlas as one of the essential texts, describing it thus: Try to get your hands on one of the old California Water Atlas, put out in the 1970?s. They’re real big, bound in …
SACRAMENTO – One of the things I’ve been struck by in my week talking to water people in Sacramento is a sense of urgency around the problems of the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta – a feeling that now is the time to do something. I’m also struck by the lack of consistent clarity of what that …
If you’re into nice round numbers (or live in Las Vegas and like drinking water coming out of your tap), keep hitting reload over here – Lake Mead’s elevation is about to cross 1,100 feet above sea level for the first time since – oh, was it only April 2010? Meanwhile, upstream at Lake Powell: …