Desalination

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Nice piece in the New Mexico Independent today by Joel Gay about desalination as a source of water here in New Mexico:

Coastal communities have been taking the salt out of seawater for years, but inland cities are starting to join them out of need. El Paso was in danger of exhausting its aquifer when it decided to build a desalination plant, according to El Paso Water Utilities. Opened in 2007 at a cost of $87 million — including $27 million in federal funding — it churns out 27.5 million gallons of fresh water a day, or roughly a quarter of the city’s demand.

Tucson, Phoenix and Las Vegas are pondering desalination projects, too.

In early April, the state District Court in Alamogordo cleared the way for that city to tap the Tularosa Basin for about 1.3 billion gallons of brackish water a year. Work has already started on the desalination plant.

(I’ve been meaning to blog about the Independent – cool project, involving a number of former colleagues of mine for whom I have a great deal of respect. Good journalists, pursuing a different model. I’m excited about it.)

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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More on climate science in the New Mexico Republican Senate race, this time printed on pieces of paper and thrown in people’s driveways, old school style. (the Intertubes version is here):

In taking those positions, Wilson and Pearce are out of step with the vast majority of climate scientists, who agree that Earth is warming and that humans are very likely to blame. The stability of the majority of climate scientists on the issue is about as solid as scientific views on a public policy question ever get. But climate scientists won’t be selecting the Republican party’s candidate for U.S. Senate come June 3 — New Mexico Republican voters will. And in staking out the positions they have, Pearce and Wilson appear to be in sync with Republican voters.

What I need from climate science

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Enough already with the global numbers. I get it. What I need from you smarty-pants climate scientists is better regional-scale modeling. Which is the point of this piece by Fred Pearce:

“POLITICIANS seem to think that the science is a done deal,” says Tim Palmer. “I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, especially for regional climate change, are immensely uncertain.”

What I Love About Scientists

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Say it, Kim:

I do geology because it’s beautiful. I love being outside, scrambling through brush, and then looking up and seeing the mountain across the valley, or the potholes in a streambed, and feeling as though the breath has just been knocked out of me. I’m fascinated by the stories hidden in the textures of metamorphic rocks. I like to spin the stage on a petrographic microscope and watch the pretty colors. (Come on. I can’t be the only person who does this.) I like the twisted shapes of multiple crenulations seen in thin section, and the smoothness of slickenlines on a fault plane. And I like being confused: walking up to an outcrop and wondering what on earth could have made it like that, and does it really make sense given what everyone else has said about it.

Ag, Cities, Water in Australia

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Australians seem to want to confront the inevitable conflict between ag and urban water use by buying out the farmers:

Australia’s government promised Tuesday to spend about $2.9 billion to buy river water from farmers in a bid to address the country’s worst drought in a century….

But a mayor in the farming district targeted by the water purchasing plan cautioned that the it would reduce Australia’s agricultural exports at a time of global food shortages and inflation.

“The cost of food will certainly rise. The nation’s exports will drop,” Brian Sharp told Australian Broadcasting Corp. radio.

The Inefficiences of the MWD

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The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California provided my introduction to the strange world of western water, so I was intrigued by the findings outlined here, in the introduction to David Zetland’s thesis:

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California (MET), a cooperative of retail and wholesale water utilities, serves 18 million people. This case study explains how MET—as a cooperative—is inefficient and how its member agencies suffer from this inefficiency. I show that MET is inefficient by demonstrating that its members have heterogeneous preferences over outcomes: Members that are more dependent on MET prefer policies that increase water supply; others prefer lower rates. Although heterogeneity had existed since at least the 1940s, MET avoided conflict well into the 1970s.