Fascinating Greenwire story in today’s New York Times on a provision for statewide groundwater monitoring potentially sinking California’s massive water legislation deal: Then groundwater monitoring reappeared and slowed momentum in the chamber. A bill that would require statewide monitoring of water pumped from the ground — as opposed to more relaxed local control — was …
Continue reading ‘Groundwater Tiff Stalls California Water Deal’ »
Total storage in Lake Mead at the end of September (the end of the western “water year”) was lower than it’s been since they first filled it in the 1940s. But this is a bit more complicated than that stark statement might appear. If you click through to look at a larger version of the …
The Albuquerque Journal is engaged in a strange new experiment in running a front page column every day. There is a stable of three regulars, writers who are solely columnists, and a couple of us who are otherwise straight reporters share the remaining slots. This is the most interesting journalism I’m doing right now, but …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Wonder of it All’ »
I’ve not been posting on climate change much here at Inkstain recently for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, I’m trying to marshal all of my spare time (and Inkstain is a spare time gig) to think about western water. Second, the whole climate blogothing has seemed to be increasingly less than helpful, where all …
The Salton Sea is a fascinating case study in the cultural ambiguity of “nature”. Created in 1905 when the Colorado River found a hole in a poorly constructed irrigation intake and flooded low-lying California desert, the Sea has been sustained – sort of – by agricultural runoff. So it’s not at all “natural” by one …
From the morning paper (sub/ad req.): Los Alamos National Laboratory could expose its workers and neighbors to a massive and potentially deadly radiation leak in a major earthquake, independent federal safety auditors concluded in a report released Tuesday. Such earthquakes are rare — one every few thousand years in the Los Alamos area, according to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Seismic Risk at Los Alamos’ »
Some accumulated links to recent water news: Lisa Pham reports in the New York Times on new water tech developing in Australia, where drought has forced a certain level of creativity the rest of us have had the luxury thus far to ignore. (Note that a lot of this gee-whiz stuff is high tech, rather …
Also from this morning’s paper, a brief report (business model, ad/sub yada) on yesterday’s Middle Rio Grande Water Assembly meeting. I tried to balance the progress made on water conservation with the grim message I’ve been pushing in my recent work on this regarding the supply-demand deficit in New Mexico’s heavily populated middle valley: Water …
More blathering from the morning paper, this the tale of the fascinating work of Blair Wolf (sub/ad yada yada) a University of New Mexico biologist who studies the water consumption of desert birds: The smaller a desert creature, the more water loss matters, and little birds like verdin are especially vulnerable, Wolf said. Sometimes, that …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere II: Birds, warming and the desert’ »
Lots of accumulated blathering from me in this morning’s newspaper. First up, a fun thumbsucker on the Obama administration’s rhetoric regarding zero nuclear weapons (sub/ad req.) and what it might mean in practice: Supporters of a world without nuclear weapons, who include prominent hawks like former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, argue the world would …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere I: Big Think Nukes’ »