Water in the Desert: Tempe Edition

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We’ve got a standard joke around the office when it starts raining: “Drought’s over.”

You’ve gotta love the picture on Arizona Republic water guy Shaun McKinnon’s blog today of water spilling over the dam in the middle of Tempe. To non-southwestern desert types: that’s a place where you don’t usually see water. But Shaun bids us take note:

Heavy rain and snow and the excess runoff has tempted a lot of folks to suggest Arizona has been rescued from its long dry spell, which has entered its 14th dust-choked year. And it’s easy to take a breath in anticipation of a relieved sigh what with all the storms that have improbably soaked this year of La Niña.

“The wet winter has definitely been a bonanza for us,” said Tony Haffer, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service in Phoenix. “But the Southwest in general, and Arizona in particular, has been in deficit for many years. Naturally, it will take many winters like this one to get us back into balance.”

Water in the Desert: Angostura Edition

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Angostura Dam

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Lissa and I stopped at Angostura Dam on a recent drive up to Santa Fe. It’s the diversion for water used in the Albuquerque reach of the middle Rio Grande. It’s a modest affair, built in the 1930s, just building up enough head to divert water into a concrete channel that’s on the right of this picture.

It is owned and maintained by the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District, the local government agency formed in the 1920s to bring centralized management to what at the time was a disparate group of acequia-based irrigation districts.


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Boykoff Revisited

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Max and Jules Boykoff wrote a widely quoted paper back in 2004 that has been used as a cudgel to bludgeon the news media for providing a sort of false balance in coverage of climate change that amounts to a hidden bias. The argument is that mainstream U.S. media, in its instinctive search for “balance,” in fact creates a sort of hidden bias, quoting outliers among a tiny minority of scientists and thus elevating their minority view to a status it does not deserve.

The argument is not without merit, but (as I have written previously) the Boykoffs took it too far.

Max is back with an update of sorts in the 21 February Nature Reports Climate Change. But a close reading of the two papers shows that this new effort has the practical effect of quietly correcting the mistake that undercut the thesis of the earlier paper.

Continue reading ‘Boykoff Revisited’ »

Drought in Chile

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While I’m at it, another global drought report (I’m really just catching up on some news stories I set aside over the last week to read). This time Chile:

Farmers in small towns in south-central Chile have lost crops and livestock in the drought blamed on the weather phenomenon La Nina.

Rainfall records show the semi-arid region got one of its lowest levels of precipitation in half a century, and some specialists say its been 80 years since the weather got so dry.

Drought in China

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While we’ve been seeing news of extraordinary snows in China, folks in the north are in the grip of what sounds like serious drought:

The drought has led to loss of arable land, livestock and drinking water, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, the official Xinhua News Agency said late Sunday.

China’s south and central areas have been hit by the country’s worst snow storms in more than 50 years, but in the north 2.43 million people have been left without sufficient drinking water and 27 million acres of arable land and 1.89 million livestock have been affected, Xinhua said.

Take that, Vegas!

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There’s a war of words going on out West that is by turns hilarious and illustrative of the deep divisions regarding the use of water in our arid region.

The trigger was a comment by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman in response to Tim Barnett’s study suggestion Lake Mead had a 50-50 chance of going dry by 2021. Goodman’s response? Dry up the farms in the Imperial Valley! Needless to say, this has not been well received among the folks who grow our winter lettuce (free reg. req.):

Imperial Irrigation District spokesman Kevin Kelley said that kind of reasoning is typical.

“It is a kind of disconnect that agricultural areas like ours runs into. … We don’t think it’s an accident that the mayor of Las Vegas has immediately seized on the notion that fallowing in the Imperial Valley is the quick fix to an urban water shortage in Las Vegas,” he said.

The Imperial Valley grows an estimated 90 percent of the nation’s winter vegetables. In 2006 the Valley produced $1.6 billion worth of agricultural products, according the Imperial County Farm Bureau.

“Without a doubt Las Vegas is enjoying the food grown in California with the water they want,” said Nicole M. Rothfleisch, executive director of the Farm Bureau.

A Flying Village

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Sandfill cranesI stopped on the bike ride today, down by the river, to watch and listen to an enormous flight of sandhill cranes, headed north. I played a bit with the words to describe it (I often “write” while I’m on the bike), but I didn’t come up with anything quite as crisp as Laura Paskus’s description of their “sloppy V.” (picture courtesy Fish and Wildlife Service – click through to hear ’em)

Up close, they’re ungainly, clumsy things, and when they fly, it’s such a disjointed mess sometimes that you wonder how they pull it off. Yet there they are, somehow finding the cohesiveness to ride a thermal higher in a squawking, ramshackle spiral, then head off north in that “sloppy V.”

I’m not as pessimistic as Laura about their future. I view them as a success, a species that we pushed near the brink and then helped pull back. My discomfort with the result is the mistaken belief that a flock of cranes wintering at the Bosque del Apache south of Albuquerque is “nature.” It is not. They would not be there but for engineering and corn. There is very little “nature” left, only things more or less influenced by our presence. In the case of the cranes, our presence nearly pushed them out of the system completely. Then we wisely spent some of our surplus creating an accommodation.

I enjoyed watching them leave, and look forward to their return next fall.

Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem

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Let us assume, for purpose of argument, that you are deeply concerned about the potential for humans’ impact on climate, but that you have some uncertainties about the reliability of the science that lies at the foundation of that concern.

Today, you note, scientists tell us the planet is warming. But did they not argue back in the 1970s that we were at risk of new ice age?

Continue reading ‘Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem’ »