This week’s drought tour of America takes us to Cape Girardeau, Missouri, where they just completed the driest August on record. It is an old river town, with its downtown opening onto a bend in the Mississippi River. For those interested in Western lore, it’s where John Wesley Powell spent a summer early in his …
Staci Matlock has a nice story in the New Mexican about water problems in the San Luis Valley, on the upper Rio Grande in Colorado: Until five years ago, most people thought water in the upper one-third of the San Luis Valley was hydrologically disconnected from the river. It was called a closed basin — …
On water and growth: We live in the fastest growing part of the country. It is also the driest. We don’t seem to be doing a very good job of linking those two issues, according to experts gathered for a two-day symposium on water and growth. “We don’t adequately combine planning for growth and planning …
This paper by Martin Beniston on recent temperature extremes is a great example of the sort of exercise we need at the regional scale to help societies think about climate change. Switzerland has been hotter than Hades lately (bonkers 2003, record July 2006, near record winter 2006-07). Attribution is tricky, but Beniston neatly sidesteps the …
Just totaling up my rainfall to send in to the National Weather Service: 1.4 inches (35.5 mm) in August. The official Albuquerque total, out at the airport, was 1.05 inches (26.7 mm). Around town, from the COCORAHS network, totals ranged from a low of 0.54 inch (13.7 mm) out on the southwest mesa to a …
Ed McGaffigan, former aide to Sen. Jeff Bingaman, long-serving member of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the guy whose endless patience helped me understand, deeply, how government really works, died today. I will repeat what I wrote in January, when it was clear that Ed was dying: Reporters depend on the generosity of smart people, …
Let’s play the urban heat island game, shall we? This is not about whether global warming is real or not. I’m prepared to stipulate that the various groups analyzing global temperatures are doing a fine job of correcting for the UHI in their global temperature trend calculations. This is about the way we’re creating cities …
Notes on a water meeting
Nov. 2, 1989, was a strange day for me. It was the last day the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner published. I did a summer at the HerEx back in 1985, as an intern, and I largely hated every minute of it. We were the scrappy second paper to the much larger Los Angeles Times, all “it …
George and Big Toe Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I need to clarify something, because there have been a lot of rumors floating around the Internet since the news broke Friday that George Hotz had hacked an iPhone, unlocking it so you can use it with any mobile phone company. Big Toe and George did in …