One of my favorite bits of business that never made it into my Colorado River book was a late afternoon encounter at Lake Mead’s Boulder Harbor boat ramp with a guy named Scotty. I was thinking about Scotty when I came across the image below, in a 1946 Bureau of Reclamation report on the development …
Scientists for many years have projected a decline in the Colorado River’s flow as a result of a warming climate. But it’s only in the last couple of years that we’ve begun to see evidence that this is already happening. The system has a lot of natural variability, so detecting the relatively smaller impact of …
Continue reading ‘More evidence that climate change is reducing the Colorado River’s flow’ »
Erik Loomis is writing here about capitalism and socialism and forestry, but this generalizes: [W]e need to value experts, not romanticize putting power in the hands of “the people,” which are not the figment of your projection about your own beliefs, but rather are the racist uncle at Thanksgiving and people who think The Big …
A little “field work” yesterday morning, with one of our University of New Mexico Water Resources Program graduate students and a faculty colleague, looking at a potential environmental restoration site we’re studying. The only way to get there was by bicycle. Bummer.
Pasadena, California, wants to use treated effluent to water golf courses. This is a water policy no-brainer, right? Well…. “As part of preparations to commence deliveries of recycled water to Pasadena, the city of Glendale petitioned the State Water Resources Control Board to seek their approval for a reduction in the amount of treated wastewater …
Continue reading ‘When wastewater isn’t being “wasted”, Pasadena edition’ »
If you had asked me to guess whether public or private utilities did better at water conservation, I would have without hesitation guessed that public utilities did better. So here’s a fascinating result from Manny Teodoro and Youlang Zhang of Texas A&M, looking at data from the recent California drought: [O]n average, communities served by private utilities …
An example of what can happen when folks stop fighting over water and search for common ground paths: Now, instead of a wide shallow creek, the low-flow Fraser River drops into a narrow channel that allows to run deeper, faster and colder. That led to a nearly immediate rebound in the fish population, according to …
Continue reading ‘Fish returning to the Fraser in one of Colorado’s high mountain valleys’ »
California has seen excellent groundwater recovery in the last year, according to a report last week from the California Department of Water Resources: But it’ll take more than a year to dig out of the hole left by the massive groundwater pumping of the last 6 years: From the report: While images of filling reservoirs …
Continue reading ‘It takes more than one year to dig out of California’s water hole’ »
Arizona’s current internal political struggles over allocation and management of shortage on the Colorado River illustrate a central dilemma in the basin’s transition from the era of managing development of the river’s water to the era of managing scarcity. While we generally have demonstrated the ability to use less water across a range of water …