New data being presented by NASA scientists at this week’s AGU meeting shows how truly remarkably fast California’s aquifers are being sucked dry: New space observations reveal that since October 2003, the aquifers for California’s primary agricultural region — the Central Valley — and its major mountain water source — the Sierra Nevadas — have …
AP is reporting this evening that a state judge in California has thrown out the 2003 deal by which California agreed to stop using so damn much Colorado River water: A California judge has tentatively invalidated a landmark pact to curtail the state’s overuse of water and allow other Western states to claim their fair …
Continue reading ‘Judge Throws Monkey Wrench Into California Water’ »
In Dead Pool, James Powell sketches out an apocalyptic scenario facing the hydraulic society we’ve built in the West on Colorado River water. (It’s a great read. If you’re interested in western water, you daren’t miss it.) After building up the history, science, politics and policy that have developed over the last century, Powell lays …
Continue reading ‘Dead Pool, the Colorado River and the Solution Space’ »
Cynthia Barnett reviews The Tree Rings’ Tale: Fleck has an eye for the detail that will grab a young person’s attention. My son was interested to learn that scientists in these different fields get to shoot down rapids, launch giant weather balloons and climb rocks. He also loved Fleck’s details about some of the makeshift …
From yesterday’s newspaper, a slightly sheepish ode to my fascination with really, really big water engineering projects (sub/ad req.): From the time I first toured Hoover Dam as a kid — “enough concrete to pave a strip 16 feet wide and 8 inches thick from San Francisco to New York,” as the Bureau of Reclamation …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Engineering Marvels’ »
At the work blog, cobbling together a bunch of folks I agree with in an attempt to assemble a coherent thought about the CRU mails. Comments open over there.
The first review of my book is in, and it’s a good one (albeit less than 140 characters long): great for us non-youths too. Highly recommended. The Tree Rings’ Tale, available now.
That was a pun. It’s a story about dead trees (ad/sub req.). Printed on paper, which is made of dead trees. The dead piñon trees stretching across northern New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau stand out, stubborn clumps of gray still standing six years after they died. They were not alone. Craig Allen, the scientist who chronicled …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Dead Tree Edition’ »
If we can all avert our eyes for a moment from the CRU emails, the inexorable momentum of climate science hurtles down the track with a new paper in today’s Science using paleo records to suggest (among many interesting things) that a warming world is, for the southwestern US, a drier world. Mike Mann and …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Southwestern Drought’ »
It’s early days yet in terms of a forecast for 2009-10 flow on the Colorado River. Because it depends on the amount of snow that falls on the Colorado Basin’s mountains, there is great uncertainty this early in the year. But the map below can give us some hint about the probabilities: What you can …