The always insightful* Coco offers some helpful backstory to the institutional arrangements responsible for sucking water out of Albuquerque’s low-lying neighborhoods: One of the strongest reasons behind having growth management is to plan public infrastructure investment to assure adequate funding for replacement and repair of things like aging infrastructure that serves existing neighborhoods – like …
More discussion over on the Fix about my July 23 story on climate science.
animas_la_plata Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Calling Durango, Colorado, “the desert” is a bit of a cheat. Located on the edge of the San Juan Mountains, it averages 20 inches or so (50 cm) of precipitation a year, well above what might formally qualify as desert. But Durango sits at a fulcrum in the complex interplay …
Today’s Journal letters page has some discussion of my climate science story from a couple of weeks back. I apparently don’t have many fans: John Fleck probably has a PR job on George W. Bush’s staff waiting for him after the spin he put on global warming science in the Journal. Hey, at least they’re …
Monday afternoon, I was sitting in a meeting of federal drought scientists up in Santa Fe when Nora pinged me this text message: Yes, it is raining really hard here. It was something of an understatement. When I got up Tuesday morning and checked my rain gauge, it had recorded 1.93 inches in the previous …
The folks running the Climate Working Group summer retreat on drought were kind enough to invite me up to Santa Fe this week. I spent most of the time listening, but they also extended the huge kindness of inviting me to speak. I think they hoped I could explain the rituals of my somewhat mystifying …
I’ve been much of the week up in Santa Fe at a workshop of drought scientists, and while we’ve been busy palavering, things have been changing on the ground here in the drought-stricken southwest. The greatest excitement was in Coronado National Memorial Park, near Bisbee in far southern Arizona, which got 12 inches of rain …
Zippy’s concerned about global warming: I’m concerned about global warming, but I’m even more concerned about Al Gore’s love affair with his Powerpoint program. On the one hand, I don’t want to be underwater in 30 years, but on the other, can Al Gore sweep into the oval office on a wave of animated carbon …
Andrew Dessler, one of my favorite climate science/politics/policy ‘splainers, has started a blog.
Interesting new bit of work by Dirmeyer and Brubaker in GRL about the effects of early spring on northern hemisphere water budgets: Over most mid- and high-latitude areas, a strong annual cycle of recycling ratio exists; low during winter when storm tracks are active, tropospheric circulation strong, and surface evaporation rates low, high during summer …