How seriously do Westerners take their water conflicts? Arizona Sen. John McCain brought it up yesterday during the White House health care debate. From the Washington Post’s transcript: There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One’s called California, the other called — called Texas. I won’t talk about California, because …
Continue reading ‘Western Water in the Health Care Debate?’ »
Because some things should be printed on paper and thrown on people’s driveways, in this morning’s paper I revisit Dianne Feisntein’s comments on the Rio Grande silvery minnow: Rio Grande silvery minnow, meet California’s delta smelt. Y’all have a lot in common. But perhaps not as much as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have Californians …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More on Feinstein and the Minnow’ »
The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy. Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the …
One of the things my colleagues and I found when reviewing the history of the ’70s global cooling myth was the consistent way alleged evidence was recycled through the literature by those perpetuating the myth. It was easy to verify the recycling in two ways. First, there were characteristic mistakes and elisions introduced early that …
Writing in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer, physicist Mark Boslough argues that scientists are being held to a higher standard in the media and political debate over climate change than those who oppose them: Denialists have attempted to call the science into question by writing articles that include fabricated data. They’ve improperly graphed data …
Continue reading ‘Boslough in SI: Playing By Different Rules’ »
From the work blog: Is Dianne Feinstein misrepresenting New Mexico history in her search for a precedent for reducing water for the delta smelt?
From this morning’s Journal, the struggle to help a river get to its destination when it doesn’t really want to go there on its own (sub/ad req): RATTLESNAKE POINT — Without Jason Thibodaux’s help, the Rio Grande would have a hard time making it past this sediment-choked desert flood plain. Around a bend in the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The View from Rattlesnake Point’ »
It must have seemed like a good idea. Southwestern Colorado had coal. California needed it. And the Colorado River provided what seemed like a relatively level route to get from Point A to Point B. Thus was R.B. Stanton dispatched in 1889 to survey a route for the Denver, Colorado Canyon & Pacific Railroad. The …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River, Looking South, Circa 1889’ »
Corporations are doing a poor job of incorporating water variability risk into the disclosures they make to stockholders, according to an analysis released this week by Ceres, an organization of environmental groups and investor advocates: Global water scarcity is one emerging risk that all companies should be focused on – and one about which investors …
Perhaps this explains Pat Mulroy’s recent travails: A court in drought-plagued Malawi has jailed a man accused of casting a spell that blocked rain from falling on his neighbour’s field, police say. The court sentenced Chikumbeni Mwanatheu, 35, to two months in prison with hard labour after he admitted a charge of witchcraft, police spokesman …
Continue reading ‘Here All Along I Thought It Was Climate Change….’ »