A blog post showed up in my Colorado River news feed, about a winery on the west slope in Colorado, that is irrigated with water from “the infamous Colorado River” (emphasis added) What an odd way of describing the Colorado. Is the great muddy lifeline of the West really “notoriously evil,” “having a reputation of …
For my bike ride this morning, I headed north to check out the new bike path into Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, which my colleague Rosalie Rayburn wrote about in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req). We’re a week away from Albuquerque’s famed balloon fiesta. I’ve always enjoyed riding bikes in the mornings and watching a zillion …
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead’ »
I’ve been relatively successful over the years in ending my newspaper’s practice of getting snowfall totals from ski areas when we’re doing storm stories. I reason that the ski areas a) are built in places that get an unusually large amount of snow relatively to their surroundings, which makes the number misleading, and/or b) have …
Further research shows this, from C.A. Browne, The Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Hay and Other Agricultural Products, Science, 3 March 1933: Vol. 77. no. 1992, pp. 223 – 229, DOI: 10.1126/science.77.1992.223 In 1929 the author suggested as a possible solution of the problem of spontaneous ignition the formation, by micro-organisms under anaerobic conditions, of …
In Vol. II of his exhaustive 1882 treatise “Legal Medicine“, Charles Meymott Tidy, M.B., FCS, Master of Surgery; Professor of Chemistry and of Forensic Medicine and Public Health at the London Hospital, Medical Officer of Health for Islington, Late Deputy Medical Officer of Health and Public Analyst for the City of London, Etc., Etc., noted …
The experimental restart of the Bureau of Reclamation’s Yuma Desalting Plant, which should get underway after the first of the year, is more than a technical experiment in operating the big desalination equipment. It is, I think more importantly, a fascinating experiment in cross-border collaboration, as I describe in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req): Beginning …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Colorado River Delta’ »
I’m pretty sure Michael Tobis and I share important goals and values. We both, I think, believe that political and public policy processes have the best outcomes when science is well understood and used by the participants. We both, I think, believe that journalism can and should play some sort of role in helping toward …
Continue reading ‘In Search of Bafflegab in the New York Times’ »
I love history as a journalistic storytelling technique for two reasons. First, it often can provide built-in context. Second, it can provide a natural narrative arc. So when I sat down Friday with Mike Connor, the new head of the Bureau of Reclamation, I tried to frame his job today in terms of the western …
The AP’s Ben Neary has a significant story this weekend about a Bureau of Reclamation analysis of how much water really is available from the Green River for an interbasin transfer being proposed by entrepreneur Aaron Million. Million thinks there is a quarter of a million acre feet a year available. While studies are ongoing, …
Continue reading ‘BuRec: Not Enough In Green River For Transfer Scheme’ »