We’re seeing some extraordinary snowmelt right now. Coming a month early, it’s setting this-date-in-history records up in the Rio Grande Gorge: Never, in more than a century of record keeping, have we seen a March snowmelt like that flowing down the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico right now. Record warmth across the mountains …
This is a fascinating harbinger of things to come on the Colorado River, as the dry side of the natural range of variability collides with rapidly growing water demands: A plant built to remove salt from highly saline irrigation runoff has sat idle in this southwestern Arizona community for more than 14 years after only …
Australia’s drought means no palms for Palm Sunday in New South Wales: Up to 300 NSW churches could have no palms for Palm Sunday with suppliers blaming the drought and logging for the shortage. Instead, churches will be supplied with paper replicas for the religious day, observed on April 1 this year as precursor to …
A new paper by David Lobell and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore illustrates one of the problems with the whole “average temperature” notion ensconced in our discussions of climate change. The researchers compared outputs from 12 climate models, looking at the differences between daytime highs and overnight lows. The lows went up a little bit …
Rio Grande at Alameda Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. We’ve had a burst of warm weather over the last two weeks, and you can see it in the river. Up at Alameda, it’s running at about 1,700 cubic feet per second (cfs) well above the average of 1,100 for this time of year. I realize for …
Folks in Tucson are gearing up for drought restrictions: A plan that would force homeowners and businesses to conserve water if southern Arizona’s drought worsens is expected to go into effect Tuesday. The City Council approved the plan in November, but the panel is scheduled to vote Tuesday on the code change that puts the …
A bunch of interesting drought news: From Australia, camels mad with thirst: “They helped to build the Australian nation and had a cross-continental railway named after their handlers. But now the camel population here is wreaking havoc in the desert and remote communities because of a desperate lack of water.” Things are so bad in …
Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.
Apparently union regulations require all climate bloggers to weigh in on Bill Broad’s story in today’s New York Times about Al Gore etc. In brief, there’s not much more I could add to what Chris Mooney and Andrew Dessler have said: “surprised it didn’t happen sooner” (Mooney) given that Gore was largely solid on the …
Via NEI Nuclear Notes, an interesting discussion about the role of nuclear power in the energy mix as Europe grapples with carbon emission reduction targets. Per capita/per GDP unit carbon emissions in France are already substantially lower than the UK and Germany. France generates 80 percent of its electricity from its nuke plants. The French …