My friends in the nuclear weapons community have, over the years, helped me understand the tools for thinking about low-probability, high-consequence events, like a warhead accidentally going off. You really don’t want that to happen, so even though averaged across all possible futures the average badness might be relatively low, it’s worth spending some time …
Continue reading ‘On High-Probability, High-Consequence Events’ »
Daniel Hernandez, on Mexico City: Reserves of the city’s largely imported water supplies from the Cutzamala plant are at their lowest in years. Hoping to prevent a larger disaster, for three days a month, the municipal water utility has decided to run the city’s supply at 50% its normal flow. March 14 was the first …
Continue reading ‘Imagine One of the World’s Largest Cities, Without Running Water’ »
Everybody’s calling the big omnibus public lands bill that passed the House yesterday a wilderness bill, but we water wonks know better, right: Legislation to settle a long-standing dispute over the Navajo Nation’s rights to water from the San Juan River won final congressional approval Wednesday. The legislation acknowledges the Navajo Nation’s right to 600,000 …
Gayle Leonard has made a word cloud of all the various transboundary waterblogger talk. Cool stuff.
Wendy Barnaby has an excellent piece in last week’s Nature (free for now, behind the paywall soon) challenging the conventional wisdom that wars of scarce water supplies are a likely result of the collision between population growth, aridity and climate change. Barnaby had set out to write a book about water wars. But the more …
Continue reading ‘Transboundary Issues: Where Are All the Water Wars?’ »
Richard Seager plays his traditional role of scaring the crap out of Westerners: What is permanent drought? It’s pretty much just like it sounds. When I ask (with serious journalistic intonation, I might add) how long a permanent drought would last, he answers simply: “It would just become the new climate.” Duh. (h/t Laura Paskus) …
From today’s newspaper, a look at decision-making in the face of uncertainty on the Colorado River: Trying to follow the science of climate change and the Colorado River, it would be easy to throw up your hands. Very smart scientists (Hoerling among them) have come up with very different answers about how climate change might …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Colorado River Edition’ »
L and I took a drive out on the eastern side of New Mexico’s central mountains today, up the Pecos River through the little villages of Villanueva and Ribera. You can think of the Pecos as a dividing line between the country’s great flat middle and the broken geology of the southwest. The phrase “west …
Daniel Collins at Crikey Creek has a great suggestion for folks in the water blogging community: In the spirit of World Water Day, and in an effort to contribute towards transboundary cooperation, I propose that all us waterbloggers (and other bloggers too!) dedicate one or more of our posts that day or beforehand specifically to …
David Zetland, on the emphasis on water supply (at the expense of discussion of demand) in a new federal report on water and climate change: I just wish that more than two percent of the report was concerned with demand-side strategies. Relying only on the supply side is like one hand clapping.