From the Sunday paper (sub/ad req.*), my attempt to make sense of the issues I was fumbling around about yesterday: The factors that set up trouble in the Southwest’s forests are complex – a warming climate and forest management practices over the 20th century that allowed a terrifying buildup of fuel. There was simply too …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the big dry, newspaper edition’ »
Been a busy week (what with New Mexico burning down) with little to show for it other than an overactive Twitter feed, but I caught my breath this morning and threw together some thoughts on weather, climate, forest management, drought, and the unnerving fact that I had to cut my morning bike ride short because …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Weather, Climate, Forest Management, Fire, Drought’ »
A group at the University of Arizona is using new tree ring techniques to try to crack one of the interesting outstanding paleoclimate questions in the Southwest – the summer monsoon. Tree rings have long been used to reconstruct winter precipitation records (fat rings = wet years, thin rings = dry years), but the summer …
Part of my standard schtick when I talk about water management in the arid southwest is an explanation of the problem of variability as it relates to aridity. It is so obvious that it almost goes without saying that life in an arid climate poses climate problems because it’s dry. But the more subtle problem, …
Continue reading ‘California and the Problem of Variability in Water Management’ »
There’s a myth that has firmly taken hold of a busted La Niña forecast on the Colorado River this year. It shows up this morning in a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial. No. This issue came up last September, as we were heading into the La Niña season. It was a common misapprehension back then, and …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The Myth of a Busted La Niña Forecast’ »
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …
Once, an impossibly long long time ago, it rained at my house.
This week’s column, in which I play the national security card (sub/ad req): These are the same folks responsible for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. They are thinking this way because the language of risk and uncertainty is familiar to people in the national security community, and it is their job to think about and help …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: In Uncertainty Lies Risk’ »
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is reported to have said in a talk this morning (Thurs. 2/24) in Washington D.C. that he believes the ongoing drought on the Colorado River could be the spark to shift conservative political opinion on climate change. From the Las Vegas Sun: In comments he delivered at a symposium hosted …
Continue reading ‘Will an Empty Lake Mead Sell Skeptics on the Reality of Climate Change?’ »
Peter Fawcett has a terrific paper in Nature this week on southwestern megadrought. I’ve been “upstream” (as the science journos like to say) for a while, having been along when Peter and others did some of their very first field work in the Valle Grande in Northern New Mexico back in 2003, and I’ve been …