More Kind Words for “Tree Rings’ Tale”
Over at Scienceblogs, hydrologist/geomorphologist/etc. (Anne – I love the difficulty in labeling you!) Anne Jefferson includes The Tree Rings’ Tale on her list of science gifts for the kiddies in your life.
Archive of entries posted on December 2009
What Exactly is a “Watershed” Any More
John Wesley Powell famously argued in the 19th century that the West’s political jurisdictions should be shaped around watersheds, rather than the often arbitrary rectangles that had been used to establish our governmental geometry as the nation moved across the great plains. In an odd sort of way, we seem to be carrying out Powell’s …
Water in the Desert: Ring-Billed Gull Edition
Rio Grande from Alameda Bridge, Albuquerque Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. One of my favorite spots in Albuquerque is the old Alameda Bridge at the north end of town. When they built a new multi-lane bridge across the river, they kept the old one, turning it into a foot-bike-horse bridge. It’s about 10 miles from my …
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Chance of Rain Reviews “Tree Rings’ Tale”
Emily Green had some kind words for my book in the LA Times: Many texts about climate change begin with rapidly melting polar ice, but Fleck’s opens instead with the 19th century explorer John Wesley Powell and his navigation of the Colorado River. Ferociously wild in Powell’s time, the Colorado is tamed by dams and …
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The Great Unraveling
Michael Gardner has a nice summary of what’s at stake in the litigation blocking the complex deal under which California agrees to throttle back its use of Colorado River water: Southern California’s water managers insist it should be easy to overcome the latest challenge to a landmark, seven-state pact to share the Colorado River that …
Keep On Pumping
Even as California pumps its aquifers dry, the feds are sudsidizing more wells.
Odds of Extra Water for Mead Drop
It remains too early to say a whole lot about what to expect in the 2009-2010 water year on the Colorado River, but the odds of extra water to buck up Lake Mead are dropping. Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation put the chances at 50-50 that there would be enough water in Lake …
Drought and Politics in Ecuador
One of the points that Mickey Glantz makes is that drought, as a societal rather than a meteorological event, requires not just the rain to fail, but also a society’s institutions. So what’s happening in South America right now, in particular the political fallout from a reduction in precipitation, is intriguing. From Ecuador: A drought …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: E-Mails Don’t Put Water in the Colorado River
From this morning’s newspaper: Here in the Southwest, the question of whether we can trust climate science — not the few scientists involved in the e-mails, but the enterprise as a whole — matters a great deal because of what the science’s leading practitioners have been telling us in recent years. Tucked away in a …
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Where’d All That Water Go?
New data being presented by NASA scientists at this week’s AGU meeting shows how truly remarkably fast California’s aquifers are being sucked dry: New space observations reveal that since October 2003, the aquifers for California’s primary agricultural region — the Central Valley — and its major mountain water source — the Sierra Nevadas — have …