Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored: So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at …
With a nuclear power plant proposal taking shape in Green River, folks in Utah are trying to get out in front of the energy-water nexus. From the Salt Lake Tribune: In parts of the country with dependable water supplies, nuclear power naturally fits with plans to boost the nation’s investment in clean energy sources. While …
The terrific scientist-writer Anne Jefferson, who studies what happens when water meets earth, has an excellent post up today summarizing flooding around the world. The floods in Queensland have gotten the most attention in country, because (I suspect) the people are like us, plus they have the affluence and technology to post cool flood videos …
Continue reading ‘In natural disasters, it’s the poor who suffer’ »
The bemused Brits at the Economist paid Pat Mulroy a visit: The main reason why Lake Mead, currently only 40% full, has been getting emptier is a decade-long drought. Whether this is a cyclical and normal event, or an early sign of climate change, is unclear. But even if the drought ends, most scientists think …
Continue reading ‘Having to rip out your lawn is not the worst thing that can happen’ »
Struck by the numbers on dairy industry groundwater contamination in New Mexico, I’ve been poking around in the regulatory issues involved. Here’s a bit of what I found (sub/ad req): Dairies are found throughout New Mexico, but are especially concentrated in the southeastern part of the state, where growth of industrial dairy operations has made …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Dairies and Groundwater’ »
The folks at Arizona’s Salt River Project are soliciting ideas from the public for the time capsule they plan to bury as part of Roosevelt Dam’s centennial celebration this spring. “What would you lock away for 50 years and give to the future people of Phoenix?” My question is how many acre feet you could …
From this morning’s newspaper, a look at the implications of Santa Fe and Albuquerque shifting from groundwater to surface water imported from the Colorado River Basin (sub/ad req): For 40 years, San Juan-Chama water has been added to the Rio Grande. You could think of it as “bonus water,” and its loss should in theory …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Changing Ways New Mexico Manages its Water’ »
This is one of those headline cheats that my journalism friends heap merciless scorn upon, the question lead for which the answer is “no”. Sometimes thinking through the implications of the doctrine of prior appropriation pretzels my brain. The idea, in short, is that the people who were there first get to use the water, …
Over at Columbia University’s “Water Matters”, Debbie Cook has been making the case against desalination as a water supply solution. She has a number of lines of argument, but it all boils down (pardon the pun) to cost, and to a series of societal tradeoffs that flow from that. Consider Saudi Arabia’s decision to use …
Lee’s Ferry is a storyteller’s delight, one of those connect-the-dots places that is simply irresistible. On the Colorado River just downstream from Glen Canyon Dam, it is where John D. Lee was sent into hiding (exile?) following the Mountain Meadows Massacre, where John Wesley Powell split his second Grand Canyon trip in two, where the …
Continue reading ‘“He called the place Lonely Dell, and it was not a misnomer”’ »