By Brad Udall and John Fleck Earlier this year, we argued in a Science magazine editorial that Colorado River forecasting must take the growing risk of climate change seriously. The latest five-year projections from the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation offer a practical example of the challenge. Published July 8 (see here and here) with an …
Continue reading ‘Is the Colorado River “Stress Test” stressful enough?’ »
Not gonna lie – watching Colorado River reservoirs decline so precipitously has been painful. But it is important to cultivate optimism, and there is, in fact, reason to be hopeful about our ability to deal with the challenges. That’s the message the University of Arizona’s Bonnie Colby and I shared in a recent conversation with …
Continue reading ‘Walking and chewing gum: mixing crisis narratives and messages of optimism’ »
Between the wildfire smoke and two important meetings for which I am unprepared, I intended to stick to a quick indoor Zwift bike ride this morning before getting on with my day. Until I checked the gauges. 57 cubic feet per second. It’s a morning ritual, the little iPhone app while I’m curled up in …
Brad Udall on twitter yesterday ran through a striking series of graphs of the current state of the Colorado River. With his permission, I’m posting them here along with a slightly polished version of his accompanying commentary. Some key points that grabbed my attention: Second-lowest Powell inflow in a period of record we use dating …
Continue reading ‘Brad Udall: Second-worst Powell inflows in more than half a century’ »
Thanks to Megan Kamerick and KUNM, our New Mexico public radio juggernaut, for offering the platform and leverage to help boost our message about climate change response on the Colorado River: [N]obody’s going to sort of voluntarily raise their hand and say, ‘Yeah, we’re happy to have less.’ And so negotiating those agreements where everybody …
Holed up in a UNM Water Resources Program conference room, my book co-author Bob Berrens and I spent an afternoon last week trying to make sense of the graph above. The 1920 U.S. Census description of the greater Albuquerque area (Bernalillo County) captures a remarkable moment in our city’s history. We were a community of …
Continue reading ‘Bernalillo County Agriculture, a Very Brief History’ »
A colleague sent me this neat paper by Nicholas Irwin and colleagues at the University Nevada Las Vegas about how water use patterns shifted under initial COVID lockdowns. As you would expect, home water use went up while institutional use went down. But was it just a one-for-one offset? No… [W]e find an initial and …
Continue reading ‘Changes in municipal water use under pandemic shutdown – a neat case study’ »
By Eric Kuhn and John Fleck Unlike the Lower Colorado River Basin States, which have traditionally taken pragmatic and self-serving views of the 1922 Colorado River Compact, the Upper Basin States have largely shown the century-old document unwavering reverence. The reverence comes from the way the agreement protected Wyoming, Colorado, Utah, and New Mexico against …
Continue reading ‘Reverence or Pragmatism? The Upper Colorado River Basin’s Compact Dilemma’ »
On a call this morning, Smart River Person made a really simple point that goes to the heart of my frustration about our current discussions about water shortfalls on the Rio Grande. The discourse involves blaming – mostly downstream people, in this case Elephant Butte Reservoir users, blaming upstream people for mismanaging the river. You …
Continue reading ‘“This is climate change stealing your water.”’ »
We’re having a moment right now on central New Mexico’s Rio Grande as we gird for a drying river through the Albuquerque reach for the first time since 1983. Expect drying to first start showing up below the Rio Bravo bridge sometime in July, between the bridge and the Albuquerque wastewater treatment plant, where the …
Continue reading ‘What’s next on New Mexico’s Rio Grande – bearing witness to a drying river’ »