Not Quite So Great

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Jim Belshaw sends along a Felicity Barranger story on the dwindling of the Great Lakes. Per usual, climate change is blamed, though other hypotheses are also on the table:

Although the drop in levels in all three lakes is variously ascribed to climate change or new rainfall patterns, evidence is growing that people caused some losses in Lakes Huron and Michigan.

Gravel mining early in the 20th century by private companies and dredging by the Army Corps of Engineers, particularly in the mid-1960s, may have widened and deepened the St. Clair River, through which those two lakes drain into Lake Erie.

The flow may be eroding the riverbed. The erosion may in turn result in increased outflow, more than can be replenished by rain or snowmelt, according to a study by a group of Canadian coastal engineers.

Autumn’s Advance Guard

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Autumn’s Advance Guard

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

I haven’t been taking notes, so I can’t be sure, but Aug. 12 seems awfully early for roasting chiles. It’s the smell of fall here in Albuquerque, as they put the big gas-fired roasters out in market parking lots. You buy a bag and they roast ’em for you on the spot. The only other time I’ve blogged about it (which is the closest I come to keeping reliable records on such things), it was Aug. 27. A couple of nights ago, though, walking out to my car after work, it just smelled like fall. Still hotter than hell. Maybe it’s something about the quality of the light, as the sun starts to run back south, fleeing its summer peak.
I had to make a U-turn across traffic to get this, at the little mercado at the corner of Broadway and Mountain on the northeast edge of downtown Albuquerque. Hatch chile. Mmmm.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Desalination Edition

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El Paso desalination plantEveryone’s talking about desalination lately as a source of “new” water here in the southwest. The picture at right is El Paso’s new desalination plant, which opened last week. It’s the largest inland desalination plant in the United States, capable of delivering a substantial fraction of El Paso’s water. In this morning’s Journal, I join the discussion:

To many, desalination looks like an inevitable part of arid New Mexico’s future. The reason: The state’s fresh water supplies are pretty much tapped out. We have probably built our last dam, supplies of fresh groundwater are shrinking and the only fresh water option left is moving water from one use to another.
“New Mexico is a water-limited state,” said Peggy Johnson, a hydrologist with the New Mexico Bureau of Geology. “We’ve probably outgrown what our fresh water resources can do for us in the long term.”

For a reality check on the enthusiasm, Bruce Thomson offers this:

“These salt brines are really old and are not being recharged,” said Bruce Thomson, head of the University of New Mexico’s Water Resources Program. “So maybe Rio Rancho will have a water supply for 100 years, during which time the community will grow to perhaps five times its current size. After that, they’ll be out of water but with five times the current demand. Then what?”

Water in the Desert

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As deserts go, the place I live now is modest. Albuquerque is in the 10 inch (25 cm) per year range. The deserts of my youth, where I developed my fondness for arid landscapes, were the real deal – creosote and year-round sun. I can remember once as a teenager sitting with a friend on a bluff overlooking the Colorado River at Yuma, Arizona. Average annual rainfall there is 3 inches (7.5 cm). Rivers have a whole different meaning in a place like that.

Aquafornia, a blog I’ve been reading with pleasure lately, has a post today about Borrego Springs, a community on the edge of the Imperial Valley not all that far from where I sat those many years ago looking down on the Colorado. These desert places I so loved in my youth are improbable – the bone-dry creosote landscape interspersed with splotches of artificial green. From Aquafornia’s bit on Borrego Springs:

On my trip to the Salton Sea this summer, it was hard not to notice the bright, improbably green agriculture growing in the middle of the hot, dry barren desert. The town is facing fundamental questions about how to survive with limited water resources and how this could change the character of the whole town.

Journalists Killed in Somalia

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From the BBC:

Two Somali journalists have been killed in the capital Mogadishu in separate attacks within hours of each other.

The owner of HornAfrik radio and television, Ali Iman Sharmake, died when his car exploded after apparently running over a landmine.

He had just been to the funeral of one of his leading radio presenters, Mahad Ahmed Elmi, shot dead hours earlier.

Praising his colleague hours before his own death, Ali Iman Sharmake said: “Elmi was a symbol of neutrality.”

Zimbabwe

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Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis:

This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 harvest was severely compromised by poor access to inputs, the underutilization of land and, in the south and west, by El Niño-related drought conditions.

Things are apparently being made substantially worse by Robert Mugabe’s inflation controls, which have had the effect of curbing economic production, making food harder to get:

[T]he implementation of the June price controls resulted in a run on price-controlled commodities and a decline in their production due to the erosion of profit margins. The formal market can no longer maintain a regular supply of basic goods, and sporadic deliveries of these goods are met with long lines that do not allow for everyone to make it into the store before stocks run out.

(Hat tip the excellent Reuters AlertNet)

High Desert Reports

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Added Laura Paskus’s High Desert Reports to my blogroll and feed reader. She’s a freelance journalist here in New Mexico who does a good job of paying a lot of attention to issues I’m trying to keep better track of. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I reached the point where I said to myself, “Wait, that’s by that Laura Paskus person too!” Some examples:

Still ENSO Neutral

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The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months.

The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to La Niña. However, over the last several months, the dynamical models have consistently predicted a stronger and more rapid cooling than has actually occurred. In contrast, a majority of the statistical models indicate a continuation of ENSO-neutral conditions, but some forecast weak La Niña conditions during the fall or winter. When considered collectively, recent atmospheric conditions and model forecasts suggest a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. Historically, the early fall season (August-September-October) has been a critical period for the onset of La Niña events.

The refresher: here in the southwestern United States, La Niña tends toward dry winters.

Drought of a Different Sort

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According to this story, they’ve got the water in Zimbabwe, but they don’t have the electricity to pump it to the fields:

Rensen Gasela, a farmer in Midlands Province and former chief executive for cereals at the state-run Grain Marketing Board, told IRIN, “We have enough water in the dams but we do not have enough electricty supplies to irrigate the winter wheat, and many farmers have written off their winter crop, which was affected by moisture stress or inadquate water supply.”