From Jonathan Overpeck last month in Nature (gated): The complexity of these megadroughts still defies complete explanation and yet it implies that unusually persistent anomalies of sea surface temperature can combine with amplifying changes in vegetation and soil to drive droughts that — if they happened today — would outstrip many of our institutional capacities …
On this holiday, we can give thanks that the snowpack in the Upper Colorado River Basin is more than twice as big as last year at this time. It’s actually (#dontjinx) above average:
In Scottsdale, AZ, there’s a business called Desert Cadillac. It sells cars, apparently without irony.
tl;dr – In 1960, U.S. Supreme Court Special Master Simon Rifkind made a fundamental mistake in calculating how much water was then available in the Colorado River Basin, and how much might be available in the future. The court, in its ruling in the case of Arizona v. California, accepted Rifkind’s math. The consequence is …
Continue reading ‘Simon Rifkind’s great mistake and the shortfall on the Colorado River’ »
Does this simply represent hardening of demand – the result of low-hanging conservation fruit being mostly all plucked? Or does this suggest arid Arizona is not headed toward the big water-driven economic collapse some people fear?
Circa 1958, a unique argument in favor of the development of the next wave of dams in the Colorado River Basin. At the time, the Eisenhower administration had failed to include any “new starts” for U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects in its Fiscal Year 1959 budget. Sen. James E. Murray, D-Montana, was alarmed: Your attention …
Full caption: Irrigation ditch along the road. Imperial Valley, California; Lange, Dorothea, photographer; 1937 Feb. Lange’s justly famous for her pictures of the people of the Imperial Valley when she travelled there in the late 1930s as a documentarian for the Farm Service Administration. She also took pictures of water. If you want to get lost for …
With Lake Mead water levels dropping, Pat Mulroy is in a race against Mother Nature. That’s how the risks facing by Las Vegas, Nev., were framed this week in a piece in The Henderson Press. But as one of the members of my water geek brain trust, Phil King, likes to point out, reservoir levels …
Here’s a great quote from Carl Hayden. It was June, 1922, still in the early days of the jockeying for development of the Colorado River’s water. Hayden was at the time a relatively junior member of the House, having not yet ascended to the political heights from which decades later, as Arizona’s senior senator, he …
Continue reading ‘Carl Hayden: “water as cheaply as it can be served”’ »
Working on a book chapter about the genesis and importance of the Arizona v. California litigation over the Colorado River, I ran across this priceless little bit of business from 1944. It is Harry Bashore, Comissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, testifying in Phoenix in July of that year, before the a subcommittee of …
Continue reading ‘Drought and Despair: “these enemies of mankind”’ »