Tim Egan on a city in the desert: Is there a similar point at which the city becomes imperiled? The skeptics say: No, we can engineer our way around it. Look at the ballpark where the Diamondbacks play baseball: It has a retractable roof, which is closed while the stadium is cooled by industrial-strength air-conditioning …
Things are looking rough in Alabama: Prolonged dry conditions have stunted the growth of hay and pastures, forcing Alabama cattlemen to sell off their herds because they can’t afford the cost of feed. Wayne Davis of Elmore County is slowly selling off his 150 head of purebred Charolais — a few already, more soon. “I …
From Tennessee: Jack Daniels water supply is running low and putting the century-plus whiskey business in jeopardy.
Water management, sale and delivery has traditionally been the province of government in the United States. But an interesting story out of Texas heralds some significant potential for change: In the five years since billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens started trying to sell water from beneath the vast empty spaces of West Texas, he hasn’t …
Via Coco, another scheme (this one with private money) to get water from the sparsely populated western Colorado side of the continental divide to the heavily and rapidly growing east: Time will tell whether Aaron P. Million’s plan to bring water from Flaming Gorge Reservoir to the Front Range will make him a legend in …
Christie Chisholm has a great overview in this week’s Alibi of the city of Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama water project. What I liked is the way she captured the complexity of this project. No easy answers, no free lunch when it comes to New Mexico water: Even though the city wants to drastically cut pumping from …
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Mosquitoes feasted Tuesday morning on dignitaries who gathered in the Rio Grande bosque to commemorate the release of the millionth Rio Grande silvery minnow. The minnow release was a celebration of efforts to save the fish from extinction. The mosquitoes were a reminder of an especially wet spring— nature cooperating with …
Six Month Standardized Precipitation Index Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Not exactly what you’d expect from an El Nino winter, when the typical pattern is to have wet anomalies across the southern tier of states in the continental U.S. and drier weather to the north. As obsessed as I am with southwestern climate, if you judge …
cactus flowers May 2007 Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa’s picture of one of her front yard cactus. In the desert, when it rains, they’re happy. And this May, it has rained.
Brad Udall at the Western Water Assessment has written an extremely helpful summary of the history of research into the effects of climate change on the Colorado River. It is interesting to note a consistent message in nearly 30 years of work on this question: the sign is nearly always negative. There’s not a whole …