A few years back, the U.S. Forest Service funded historian Dan Scurlock to prepare an environmental history of the middle Rio Grande basin. It’s a treasure, referred to lovingly by researchers and folks in the climate/water/environmental policy community here. But it’s very hard to come by a copy. I recently discovered that the Forest Service …
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Here’s a fascinating bit of business in GRL (I’ve only seen the abstract, haven’t read the paper): Summer soil moisture increased significantly from 1958 to the mid 1990s in Ukraine and Russia. This trend cannot be explained by changes in precipitation and temperature alone. To investigate the possible contribution from solar dimming and upward CO2 …
U.N. rights advocate sees more malnutrition Jean Ziegler, a U.N. expert on food rights, said that some 852 million people were “gravely, permanently undernourished on this planet” at the end of 2005, an increase of 11 million from the year earlier. Much of that increase came in Africa, where drought, climate change and poor farming …
Some interesting discussion in today’s drought monitor about the way the early water year is shaping up in the Pacific Northwest: [T]he 2006-07 wet season is off to a slow start in parts of the Northwest. From October 1 to October 24, Washington rainfall totaled just 2.48 inches (36% of normal) in Quillayute and 1.00 …
art: Apropos of nothing except that I happened to have just listened to it, a marvelous old NPR piece from a few years back on Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks”. paper of the day: Multi-Century Tree-Ring Reconstructions of Colorado Streamflow for Water Resource Planning, by Connie Woodhouse and Jeffrey Lukas. The tree ring people have …
Perhaps our resident translator of things Japanese can help explain this: A 60-year-old man from Mobara, Chiba Prefecture, recited pi to 100,000 decimal places early Wednesday, smashing the world record. It took clinical psychologist Akira Haraguchi–who also held the previous record–more than 16 hours to achieve the feat, which ended with the number 6. The …
Not bottled water, apparently: The United Church of Canada (UCC) is advising its 590,000 members to stop buying bottled water, and expressing concern at a number of levels around the issue of water consumption. “The main thrust is our concern about the privatization of water,” UCC social policy coordinator Richard Chambers told the Canadian Press. …
San Juan Chama Intake Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. This is the intake structure for the city of Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama project water. It’s just south of Alameda on the east side of the Rio Grande. (here on Google maps, but it hadn’t been built yet when this satellite image was taken.) The water comes across …