“Water year” 2010 ends next week, making this a good time to take stock of our historic position on the Colorado River. And by a couple of different measures, things are truly historic: The latest forecast (and right now forecasting amounts to tiny fractions of in inch) puts Lake Mead’s surface elevation at 1084.14 feet …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: End of the Water Year, Taking Stock’ »
With La Niña rapidly strengthening, it is reasonable to ask what can be said about the resulting effect on flows in the Colorado River. The short answer: not much. It is reasonable to guess otherwise, because so much of the southwest depends on the Colorado for its water supply, and because La Niña is so …
Speaking at a symposium in Las Vegas in April, former Bureau of Reclamation Commissioner Bob Johnson made a critical point about the differences between water problems on the Colorado River and the current struggles in the southeast over the Apalachicola-Chattahoochee-Flint and Alabama-Coosa-Tallapoosa river basins. The ACT-ACF fights made the Economist this week, in an article …
In an interview over at Grist, Brad Udall reminds us that, as we think about the effect of climate change on the West, it’s not just the thorny question of whether precipitation rises or falls that matters. Despite the uncertainties surrounding that question, as temperatures rise (a projection about which there is considerably less uncertainty), …
Eleven years ago next week, I stuck up a rain gauge in the backyard and starting dutifully writing down daily data on NOAA WS FORM B-91, “Record of River and Climatological Observations.” Today, my employer kindly indulged my little hobby, affording me space on the front page of the newspaper for a riff on the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Measuring the Weather’ »
Caltech prof David Rutledge’s “peak coal” argument is getting a lot of traction of late, and came up in a discussion on twitter this morning. The question was posed: if Rutledge is right, does this mean greenhouse gas regulation is not needed? Rutledge, in a talk two years ago here in Albuquerque, said the answer …
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I had a dream last night that the Native Americans we drove out of South Florida left a sort of time bomb that, in time, would render Miami unlivable: In White’s view, it’s already too late to turn back the clock on climate change to save low-lying coastal cities like Miami.
One of the less appreciated effects of warming temperatures on water supply is the shift in the timing of runoff. Warming springs mean earlier melt. This is as much an infrastructure problem as it is an overall water volume problem, because the dams and ditches built to manage water during the 20th century were based …
David Appell, the science journalist whose work more than anyone else’s got me thinking hard about the implications of climate change and its relationship to my journalism, spewed some frustration last week that resonated. It doesn’t quoteblock well, go read the whole thing, but in a nutshell he argues that there’s not much point for …
Continue reading ‘Why David Appell Might Quit Reporting on Climate’ »
I just got my copy of my friend Chuck McCutcheon’s new book,What are Global Warming and Climate Change?: Answers for Young Readers (Worlds of Wonder). It’s the latest in the UNM Press series that includes my book. Haven’t read it yet, but it looks great! If you have a young friend or relative you’d like …