Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Inkstain at Twenty
tl;dr I started this blog 20 years ago today. I used it to learn to write. Why? This blog started 20 years ago today (March 9, 2003) thus: I have too many blogs already – Advogato, the Nuke Beat, my ABQJournal musings. Starting another seems a bit of overkill. They all have their roots elsewhere …
Inching toward El Niño
Today’s ENSO outlook (El Niño Southern Oscillation) suggests a consensus among “the models” that the odds are tipping toward an El Niño for the coming summer and fall. The humans in the loop are more bearish: The most recent IRI plume favors ENSO-neutral to continue through the spring, with El Niño forming during summer 2023 …
On Gardens
Utopian text Every garden is a utopian text, expressing the desire for a more perfect world as well as an implicit critique of the less-lovely world in which it is located. – Naomi Jacobs, Consuming Beauty: The Urban Garden as Ambiguous Utopia Claude Monet, no doubt speaking in French and so shared here translated prosaically …
March 1 runoff forecasts are solid
With a solid snowpack in all of my rivers, we’ve got a pair of solid March 1 forecasts for 2023 runoff. Rio Grande 102 percent at Otowi, the main forecast point for water entering New Mexico’s Middle Rio Grande Valley. Implications: While we don’t have a formal Annual Operating Plan for the Albuquerque Bernalillo County …
Deadpool Diaries: “the law is an ass”
Apologies, no tl;dr is possible. To borrow from Blaise Pascal, I would have written a shorter blog post, but I did not have the time. On a bike ride a week ago I took a favorite “long cut” (the slow ways are mostly better, best to not be in a hurry) through downtown …
Deadpool Diaries: Defining the “Crisis”
Seven years ago, as I was finishing my book Water is For Fighting Over, I wrote this kicker: In the end, we need an honest reckoning with the basic problem: there is not enough water for everyone to do everything they want with it, or to use every drop to which they feel legally entitled. …
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Deadpool Diaries: On California and our moral obligation to share the burden of climate change
Brad Udall gave a talk in 2013 that became foundational to my thinking about solving the challenge of life with a shrinking Colorado River. Here’s how I described it in my book Water is For Fighting Over: Udall distinguished between the “reality of the public” and the “reality of the water community,” describing a world …
Seminar Today (Feb. 22, 2023): Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities
Heather Tanana and Anne Castle will be talking about the Universal Access to Clean Water for Tribal Communities project at today (Feb. 22, 2023 – noon Arizona time) at the University of Arizona’s Water Resources Research Center seminar series – over the Zoom! Signup info here. Access to clean drinking water is a fundamental human …
The peculiar economics of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District
I was talking to a friend last week about the work Bob Berrens and I are doing for our new book on the origin stories of the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District. I’m deep into a chapter on the failed 1920s efforts at tobacco farming (I’ve told that story before here), and we were talking …
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