When I was a boy, I built a river in the backyard of our family home in Upland, California. I would put the hose at one end, running slowly, and let the water course down through channels and lakes of my own devising, beneath a cluster of lemon trees. Eventually the water would spill over …
I was delighted by the National Science Teachers association recommendation of The Tree Rings’ Tale, especially this bit from science teacher Teri Cosentino: I was so inspired by the book that when a tree was felled on campus, we counted and measured the tree rings to see what happened during the tree’s life during the …
At the Dry Lake snotel station near Steamboat Springs in northern Colorado, there’s more than 4 feet of snow on the ground. By snow water content, that’s 32 percent above average for Jan. 7. Snow that melts there flows down into the Yampa River, which flows into the Green, which flows into the Colorado, which …
I’m having a hard time deciding whether this was the year of the yellow-bellied sapsucker, or of the swimming doves. I’m leaning toward the doves. The sapsucker was a novice birder’s treat. It showed up Dec. 11, a Saturday. I was sitting in my office at the back of the house and saw it flitting …
Returning to a fine New Year’s tradition*, I bring you the most-read Inkstain posts of 2010. The thing is, it’s frankly a crap list, or at least a particularly odd one. It’s not based on some profundity on my part, but rather some weird Googlejuice, drawing random readers who no doubt click, scratch head, then …
From the newspaper this week, a look at the bargain that was struck to win support for the New START nuke deal with the Russians (sub/ad req), which includes money for a new plutonium lab at Los Alamos to replace its aging CMR building – despite dramatic cost increases and schedule delays since the project …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The New START Bargain’ »
I’ve been watching Lake Mead rise remarkably as a result of last week’s storm that blew through Nevada before drenching the Virgin River watershed on the Arizona-Nevada-Utah border area. It looks like Mead will finish December at a surface elevation of about 1086.25 feet above sea level, 2 feet above the level forecast a month …
I’m certain this graph is of enormous importance in understanding long range water issues in the west. But I’m not entirely sure how. It’s single family home starts in the Phoenix (blue) and Las Vegas (red) metro areas over the last decade: What you see here is the housing bubble bursting. Adam Nagourney did a …
Rebecca Hammer at the NRDC makes an interesting point regarding the relationship between last week’s census data dump and water supplies: [T]he greatest U.S. population growth is occurring precisely where water supplies are going to be the most vulnerable over the coming years. She’s talking about us in the arid western United States.
Shaun McKinnon reports this morning on a very interesting proposal under discussion in Arizona: Under a plan now being considered, water officials would pass up billions of gallons that they could take from the river in 2011, hoping to keep the drought-stricken reservoir full enough to avoid triggering automatic cutbacks. Any cutbacks could deny Arizona …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Conservation before shortage?’ »