Does it matter whether the current southwestern US drought is caused by anthropogenic climate change? Or, to be slightly more precise, in what ways does it or does it not matter? This isn’t a rhetorical question. Let me know what you think in the comments below. The question arises anew in the context of the …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Southwest Drought – Is It Happening Now?’ »
From the morning paper, a look at money for the a Navajo Nation water project in the Indian water rights settlement bill the president signed last week: A century of federal investment in dams and canals was built to serve cities and farms — “a long tradition in water politics in which states receive federal …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Navajo Settlement’ »
Update: The papers are all on line here, and seem to be freely available. It stands as a cliché in western water circles to say that John Wesley Powell was right. But yeah, he pretty much was. “Powell’s conclusion in 1876,” John Sabo and his colleagues write this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy …
A month of warm, dry weather left Lakes Mead and Powell with 24.8 million acre feet of water at the end of November, 169,000 acre feet less than had been forecast a month earlier. The crux of the Colorado River Compact lies in Article III (d): The States of the Upper Division will not cause …
Continue reading ‘River Beat Weekly Report: What’s 169,000 Acre Feet Among Friends?’ »
Working today on a piece for the newspaper on Indian water rights, I followed a trail of Google crumbs trying to figure out who was the “Winters” in what’s called “the Winters doctrine”. The doctrine is a pillar of U.S. water law, which grows out of a 1908 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court in …
The windmill, using wind to pump water from the ground, is an iconic image of the American west. But the question of the cumulative effect of a bunch of little wells – these days often out behind tract homes powered by electricity rather than the wind – has become one of the central arguments in …
Some of us who live in arid parts of the world think about water with a reverence others might find excessive. When I was visiting Hoover Dam in October, the folks who were showing me the stilling wells inside the dam took me on a side trip out onto the walkway outside the power plants …
Desalination of seawater along the coasts is the west’s water supply backstop, the reason we won’t in the worst case scenarios abandon southwestern cities. The water is very expensive as compared to the current system of dams, canals, pipes and pumps, but it’s cheaper that bailing out of the region entirely. So what does this …
Chris Brooks notes the good news: Lake Mead is finally beginning to climb. At this writing, its surface elevation is at 1082.30, after dropping below 1082 during the last week of November. And DG points us to some other good news. That’s snow pack as of Friday in the Upper Colorado River Basin. Those of …
Residents of the arid southwestern US like to think we’re the ones who know drought. But drought’s a relative thing – not how dry it is in absolute terms, but in comparison to what you’re used to. Take New Orleans, for example, which received 2.75 inches in rain in November. Here in Albuquerque, that would …