Forgot to blog earlier in the week, a frustratingly inconclusive newspaper piece on the reasons behind the rising cost of refurbishing the US stockpile of B61 bombs: Is Sandia National Laboratories to blame for cost overruns in the multibillion-dollar effort to refurbish the U.S. arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs? A December 2011 evaluation by the …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on the B61’ »
In the midst of reading Nate Silver’s book, I felt like I ought to say something nuanced about the seasonal forecast that came out this morning: In this morning’s briefing, the forecasters were careful to explain that they’re not making predictions here, but rather forecasting odds – “probabilistic” in the jargon: “These impacts are not …
The typical “out with the old” etc. celebrations don’t have much resonance as New Mexico stares down a new water year. From the morning paper: New Mexico faces three problems in the new water year. The first problem is the winter forecast itself. There were signs of an El Niño forming, a climate pattern driven …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Happy New Water Year!’ »
There’s a truism in water politics and policy in the western United States that “water flows uphill to money”. But is it correct? I ran across it most recently in an excellent editorial in the Salt Lake Tribune regarding the Southern Nevada Water Authority’s proposal to build a pipeline to rural Nevada, along the Utah …
Continue reading ‘Does water really flow uphill toward money?’ »
Sept. 30 is the end of the “water year”*, and it’s been another dry one at the Heineman-Fleck house. With data back to the 1999-2000 year now, this is the fourth consecutive dry year relative to my personal long term mean here in Albuquerque’s near northeast heights: * Water managers here usually (though not for …
From this week’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece looking at the history and future of the notion of “beneficial use” in western water law: The doctrine’s history is bound up in the ideas of the generation of European immigrants who swept across the region in the 1800s, establishing what became United States law. “The climate is …
Continue reading ‘beneficial use: quaint, yet enduringly sturdy’ »
From the morning paper, an attempt to frame and make sense of the questions Congress will face in coming years and the views of New Mexico’s Senate candidates thereon: Nuclear weaponry is big business in New Mexico. More than 20,000 people work at Sandia and Los Alamos labs, two of the nation’s three nuclear weapon …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: politics and the nuclear labs’ »
From the morning paper: With drought draped across all of New Mexico and much of the United States to our east and west, it’s an interesting time to think about the prehistoric Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Its fate is a reminder that drought isn’t simply something climate does to us. Drought’s effects are defined …
I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability. My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers: Woods Houghton, the …
One of the hidden constituencies for forest health is downstream water users. Western wildfires can really muck up a watershed, creating problems when bad fire happens and therefore significant incentives to try to keep it from happening. Today’s case in point, from my colleague Rene Romo, is the Little Bear fire in southern New Mexico: …