When I write my “water in the desert” bits here or at work, I have this underlying image that motivates my thinking. It’s a childhood car camping vacation (one of many, the image is broad and generic). It is before the days of ubiquitous auto air conditioning. We’re driving across the beautiful deserts of the …
In a grand convergence of my two current hobbies (drought and Google maps), Malcolm points to a cool new product by the Australian ABC: a Google map of all of their drought coverage.
Conditions in Georgia are not the worst you’ll find in the southeast, but they look plenty bad – so bad that in this age of cool URL’s, someone down there had the foresight to register GeorgiaDrought.org. From last week’s drought monitor: In Alabama, 68 percent of the cotton crop, 48 percent of peanuts, and 78 …
From Zhengxin: In a problem that is pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a …
paper of the day: From Jia-Lin Lin at the Climate Diagnostics Center in Boulder, more evidence that the models don’t get El Nino right real climate: From the Climate Prediction Center: La Nina’s roaring back real climate II: I saw on yesterday’s bike ride that the Rio Grande is back down, under 1,300 cubic feet …
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 …