JPL climate scientist Bill Patzert wrote a nice op ed in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune about weather, climate and fire that got me thinking about my old home turf of Southern California yesterday: What set us up for these fires? Rain has been scarce. A large-scale drought has strangled the American Southwest for almost …
I’d like to think the President of the United States has the best interests of America’s children in mind with this school address thing that has generated such a kerfuffle. But after reading the advance text, I’m not so sure: Every single one of you has something you’re good at. Every single one of you has …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: Career Advice From The President’ »
Giving my desk at work its Labor Day holiday shift cleaning (I’m the warm body in case news happens), I stumbled across a bit of history: the notebook from the day nine years ago when Wen Ho Lee made the first of a series of appearances federal court that ended his prosecution as the spy …
I spend a lot of time these days reading water news. When I read something good, I often blurt it out on my twitter feed, which is good for that sort of link sharing. But one of the problems with the disjointed nature of social media right now is the way different communities use different …
Somewhat surprisingly to me, Albuquerque’s water future has become an issue in our upcoming mayoral election. My Journal colleague Sean Olson, who used to cover the Water Utility Authority and now covers politics, interviewed the candidates for a piece in this morning’s paper: You can’t talk about Albuquerque’s future without talking about water, and the …
I’m puzzling over the real story of Oliver Meredith Wozencraft, the chap who was arguably the first person to imagine the large-scale irrigation of the deserts of the southwest with water from the Colorado River. Wozencraft was a physician who came west in 1849 in search of gold and stumbled instead (apparently quite literally) onto …
For the water geeks in the audience, I highly recommend this movie, which my sister, Lisa, Netflixed for us this weekend: (h/t Karl Flessa for suggesting it)
Some time ago I purchased an Actron CP7875 PocketTherm Infrared Thermometer from Amazon. It’s a cool gizmo. I highly recommend it. You point it at whatever, and it tells you the object’s temperature based on infrared emissions. Today, Amazon informed me that people who bought the Actron PocketTherm also might like this: The accompanying description …
There’s some water geek hilarity over on the New Mexico Independent today correcting V.B. Price on a point of history and water law. First Price: New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming — the “upper basin” states in the Colorado Compact of 1922 — have “junior” water rights to California, Arizona, and Nevada, the states that …
Continue reading ‘Stephen B. Davis Jr., Back From the Dead?’ »
When Milly et al. pronounced the death of stationarity in Science magazine last year, lots of folks in the water world took notice. Stationarity is the idea that the envelope of variability we’ve seen is the envelope of variability we’ll get in the future. Not so in a climatically changing world? Now come Gabriele Villarini …
Continue reading ‘If Stationarity Dies, How Will We Know?’ »