Jeff Mount from UC Davis: The San Francisco Bay Area business community should be taking notes. This trifecta of high tides, storm surge and intense rain is also a Bay Area scenario. Scientists and a host of government agencies have been warning about such an event for years. It may not appear so on a …
On a quick weekend dash to Ogden earlier this month, I squeezed an hour out of my return trip to the Salt Lake City airport to make the drive out the causeway across the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island. When G.K. Gilbert, under the direction of John Wesley Powell, was trying to sort out …
Continue reading ‘Antelope Island and the notion of climate variability’ »
When I wrote The Tree Rings’ Tale, its organizational premise was that tree rings are storytellers. And how. Park Williams latest research, which I featured in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, combines tree ring records for the southwestern United States with contemporary climate data, fire data, tree mortality data and future modeling results to tell a …
So what’s up with that full court PR madness from the folks in the Tarrant Regional Water District in Texas? Is the future of the many interstate water management compacts that govern water distribution among the western states really under threat. This may seem obscure, but if you follow water, you can’t help but have …
From a great Circle of Blue interview, Pat Mulroy of the Southern Nevada Water Authority has some great insights into how we value water, but also how we think about paying the resulting costs: [W]e in the water business stand back, and we become amazed that somebody is willing to pay $US 80, $US 90, $US …
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 …
Here in the arid West, land of the pioneer spirit and the rugged individual, we have a longstanding tradition of sticking someone else with the bill for our water projects. The carefully constructed edifice that is Law of the (Colorado) River is complex set of legal and institutional deals among the basin’s water users built …
Regional water planning, it turns out, is the first step toward One World Government: The Integrated Regional Water Management Plan may sound harmless, but it is part of this “regionalization” program. Control of water on rural lands will transfer from landowners to government control agents or “water masters,” who will begin their work imposing limits …
At the risk of a “dog bits man” blog post, yet another analysis has concluded that droughts in the southwestern United States are likely to be worse, and rivers drier, as a result of rising greenhouse gases. This time, it’s the Verde in Arizona, part of the watershed that feeds the greater Phoenix area: Results …
Continue reading ‘Another look at increasing aridity under climate change in the West’ »
One of the problems with droughts is that, eventually, they end. That is by definition, because “drought” is the dry part of the range of variability for a given place. When you’re in one, the marginal value of water (and therefore marginal cost you’re willing to pay) is high. When you come out of it? …
Continue reading ‘Coping with drought – a question of marginal costs’ »