Water Fact of the Day
According to Fred Pearce, ((When the Rivers Run Dry)) 130 gallons of water are required to grow a pound of wheat.
Archive of posts filed under the water category.
California Dry
California’s snowpack is collapsing, according to the LA Times: California communities face a strong possibility of water shortages and even mandatory rationing this summer because of record dry weather in March and April, a fast-shrinking snowpack and below-normal reservoir levels, state officials said Thursday. (via Aquafornia)
Desalination
Nice piece in the New Mexico Independent today by Joel Gay about desalination as a source of water here in New Mexico: Coastal communities have been taking the salt out of seawater for years, but inland cities are starting to join them out of need. El Paso was in danger of exhausting its aquifer when …
Ag, Cities, Water in Australia
Australians seem to want to confront the inevitable conflict between ag and urban water use by buying out the farmers: Australia’s government promised Tuesday to spend about $2.9 billion to buy river water from farmers in a bid to address the country’s worst drought in a century…. But a mayor in the farming district targeted …
The Inefficiences of the MWD
The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provided my introduction to the strange world of western water, so I was intrigued by the findings outlined here, in the introduction to David Zetland’s thesis: The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET), a cooperative of retail and wholesale water utilities, serves 18 million people. This case …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
overbanking on the Rio Grande
Gristmill Scorecard
Given David Roberts’ apparent conversion to the view that simply everyone who matters in the climate change community agrees that the need to adjust to the problems being caused by climate change (“adapt”, in the lingo) shares equal importance with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigate”), I thought a scorecard of Gristmill’s coverage …
Tail Wags Dog
Just when you thought this whole adaptation-mitigation discussion could not get more absurd comes this document from California’s state government interagency Water-Energy Subgroup of the Climate Action Team (WET-CAT). California faces some potentially serious climate change-related water problems, and the new report suggests some useful approaches to reduce the state’s water consumption. The reason? Reduced …
New Mexico’s Climate Change Initiative
I’d like to offer up a very concrete example that illustrates the problem with the current dynamic in the political debate over the extent to which thinking about adaptation should be explicitly made a part of the political discussion about our societal response to climate change. I wrote a story for the newspaper a year …
Water in the Desert: Fish Edition
Water in the Desert Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Took the family (Mom, Dad and Lissa) to the Rio Grande Nature Center to see the new fish channel they dug for the Rio Grande silvery minnow. I went out Monday for the newspaper as they let the first water in, and wanted to go back to …