What we call here the “water year” runs from October to the end of September. It’s a useful tool, capturing the fall-winter-early spring water collection season, in which snow builds up in the mountains for later use by humans and ecosystem, followed by the water use season. So the end of March is a nice …
Continue reading ‘Halfway through the water year: fear and the attention economy’ »
I’ve been addled by influenza for the better part of a week, tortured by feverish dreams of men in dark robes (were there robed women too?) in a great white-fronted building holding solemn rituals to try determine whether I might be healed. But it was like Plato’s cave – you couldn’t see the robed tribal …
Continue reading ‘A fevered first reading of the National Research Council’s Bay-Delta Report’ »
In my continuing effort to milk the not-Twain quote for all it’s worth, there is this – in the mountains north of the well fields of the proposed Cadiz California groundwater project is Whiskey Spring. And of course, one of the big areas of fightin’ in Cadiz is the question of whether the project’s groundwater …
Continue reading ‘Could Whiskey Spring be fer fightin’ over?’ »
Pulled up from the comments on yesterday’s Cadiz post, the Aquafornia Maven shares a marvelous metaphor regarding the costs of coastal desal: I was on a tour through the Lower Colorado River last week, and we stopped at the Gene Pumping Plant and were being briefed on SoCal water issues. Some one asked Bill Hasencamp …
It’s easy to blame climate change when you’re in DC begging for money to subsidize your water problems. OK, maybe not easy, on account of DC not believing in climate change and stuff. Also not having any money even if it did. But the dynamic in this Steve Tetreault story as Pat Mulroy visits our …
Continue reading ‘You mean we have to pay for our own water?’ »
I have a prediction: clarifying the science will not settle the political argument over the proposed Cadiz water project in the deserts of California. Chris Clarke wrote this today about Cadiz, a proposal to pump water from beneath the Mojave Desert and pipe it to coastal Southern California cities: According to an independent hydrologists’ evaluation …
My whole “what’s all the fuss? we can cope with far less water than we’re now using” agenda is on display in this screed in the morning newspaper about the implications of Albuquerque’s drop from 252 gallons per person per day a decade-and-a-half ago to 150 today: There are, I think, two key messages to …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: on our ability to cope with reduced water supply’ »
The water model in the western United States has generally involved Party A getting a bunch of water via a dam, canal, pipe, etc., while Party B (usually some broad group of taxpayers, either state or federal) pays for it. Economists will tell you that this tends to lead for building more giant concrete thingies than …
Continue reading ‘Last concrete diaries: someone has to pay for it’ »
In a puzzling decision, the board of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California seems to have overridden a board committee and the board’s staff and decided to sit out the argument over HR1837, Rep. Devin Nunes’ legislation to revamp California water distribution. If you’re not into the arcana of California water wars policy discussions, you …
Neal Neil Pederson and colleagues have a new paper (pdf) using tree rings to reconstruct flows in the Apalachicola–Chattahoochee–Flint that offer another stark reminder of a classic water management dilemma: make water management decisions during a wet time and you’ll be screwed by the regression to the mean. We’ve seen this story before, with the Colorado …