From this morning’s Times:
Enough fertile land could turn into desert within the next generation to create an “environmental crisis of global proportions,” large-scale migrations and political instability in parts of Africa and Central Asia unless current trends are quickly stemmed, a new United Nations report concludes.
The National Weather Service’s Tucson monsoon tracker. Tucson uses sustained dewpoint to answer the perennial question of when the monsoon starts. You can see we’re currently behind schedule there.
From today’s West Side Journal, a discussion of the bike trails (or lack thereof) on the new extension they just completed of Paseo del Norte:
“Oh my,” John says. “When you get to the top of the hill, where the road narrows, there is not only no bike lane, but no shoulder. And not only no shoulder, but in places they’ve built a curb on both sides, leaving cars no place to go to the left and bicycles no place to go to the right.”
It’s almost like I never left. When I abandoned California nearly two decades ago, they were fighting about the environmental effects of water diverted from the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta for the growing suburbs of Southern California.
Warning that a recent boost in water exports is nudging the delta smelt closer to extinction, environmentalists have asked a federal judge to order state and U.S. officials to cut back pumping that imperils the tiny fish.
Increased pumping into aqueducts that move water as far south as San Diego has swelled the number of smelt that have been sucked into pumps and killed in recent days.
When I write my “water in the desert” bits here or at work, I have this underlying image that motivates my thinking. It’s a childhood car camping vacation (one of many, the image is broad and generic). It is before the days of ubiquitous auto air conditioning. We’re driving across the beautiful deserts of the Four Corners, all hot and dusty. Every so often the thin ribbon of hot, shimmering asphalt drops into an oasis – a ribbon of cottonwood trees along some river.
That’s the image I had in mind when I tackled the issues surrounding the San Juan River in northwest New Mexico (see also the sidebar):
As New Mexicans bump up against their water limits, all eyes are on the San Juan River. Rising in the mountains of Southern Colorado and meandering through northwest New Mexico before joining the Colorado River, it is the closest thing we have in the state to an underused water resource.
# Santa Fe and Albuquerque are preparing to tap into it, via a tunnel that carries San Juan water beneath the Continental Divide to the state’s most populous region.# Gallup and the water-short communities of the eastern Navajo Nation have set their sights on the San Juan to quench their thirst.
# The Navajo Nation is looking to the San Juan for water to meet the tribe’s water rights under federal laws that give Indians water to irrigate their reservations.
This is not a blog post.
In a grand convergence of my two current hobbies (drought and Google maps), Malcolm points to a cool new product by the Australian ABC: a Google map of all of their drought coverage.
George Bush today reiterated his concerns about greenhouse gases:
And therefore, I remind those who share my concern about greenhouse gases that nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gases. If you are interested in cleaning up the air, then you ought to be an advocate for nuclear power. (Applause.) Without nuclear power here in the United States, there would be nearly 700 million additional tons of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere every year. There is no single solution to climate change, but there can be no solution without nuclear power.
Since Ban Ki Moon’s Washington Post op-ed, drought and Darfur seems to be on the agenda. Today, AP moved this feature, which seems to be getting widespread play:
Decades of drought helped trigger Darfur’s violence as rival groups fought over scarce water and arable land.
Now, experts fear the war and its refugee crisis are making the environment even worse, leaving the land increasingly uninhabitable and intensifying tensions with no end to the drought in sight.
Darfur’s tragedy could be repeated in much of North Africa and the Middle East, experts fear, because growing populations are straining a very limited water supply. Data show rainfall steadily declining in the region, possibly because of weather changes linked to global warming.