Lee’s Ferry is a storyteller’s delight, one of those connect-the-dots places that is simply irresistible. On the Colorado River just downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, it is where John D. Lee was sent into hiding (exile?) following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where John Wesley Powell split his second Grand Canyon trip in two, where the …
Continue reading ‘“He called the place Lonely Dell, and it was not a misnomer”’ »
This dude used to work with me at the newspaper. He was in a back corner, both literally and metaphorically, and was kinda quiet, and it took me a while to figure out that he was the smartest and most interesting person in the room.
I don’t know Florida water issues at all, so maybe someone can help me here. Tampa Bay Water spent $160 million to build a desal plant. But they don’t use it all that much: Tampa Bay Water says it costs four times as much to turn water from Tampa Bay into drinking water as it …
A couple of (possibly connected?) things that crossed my desk this morning – According to the latest data from the San Francisco Fed, Las Vegas (Nev.) has huge foreclosure numbers. And then this good news, from Henry Brean at the Las Vegas Review Journal: [W]ater use continues to decline in the valley, where the water authority …
Tom Yulsman and Brendon Bosworth have an excellent piece over at Climate Central looking at drought and water supply on my favorite river*. They capture what I think is one of the key elements in understanding what’s happening on the Colorado: the realization that, independent of the drought that has plagued the river for more …
With the mondo snow pack and good runoff forecast, Arizona may no longer need to leave some of its annual share of Colorado River water in Lake Mead, Shaun McKinnon reports: The CAP had been discussing a plan to forfeit as much as 80,000 acre-feet of its allocation this year to help keep water levels …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: AZ May Not Need to Leave Water in Mead’ »
UCSD economist Josh Zivin and colleagues found a correlation between water quality violations and bottled water sales in the US: [W]e find an increase in bottled water sales of 22 percent from violations due to microorganisms and 17 percent from violations due to elements and chemicals. What surprised me was the small size of the …
I noticed yesterday evening a significant number of homes with outdoor Christmas lights still up and shining, far more than I remember in past years by mid-January. (No data here, just a hunch.) They looked like the new high-efficiency LED lights, which seems to be the Jevons paradox in action. The core of the paradox …
Continue reading ‘The Jevons Paradox and Christmas Lights’ »
What a difference a wet, wet month in the Colorado Basin makes. In December, the long range forecasts for the big reservoirs at Lake Powell (upstream) and Lake Mead were flirting with trouble. Lake Mead’s levels for the end of the 2010-11 water year were forecast to drop to 1076.68 feet above sea level, close …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: What a Difference a Month Makes’ »
udpate: full column here (sub/ad req) When I first began seriously trying to sort out New Mexico’s place in the scheme of Colorado River water management, I kept banging unsuccessfully up against what seemed like a simple question: If long term drought or permanent climate change reduces the river’s flow, how would the shortage be …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change on the Colorado: The Devil In the Details’ »