Barro and McCleary get to the bottom of one of the central questions in 21st-century economics – beatification: We classify these blessed persons regionally in accordance with residence at death. These data are combined with time-series estimates of regional populations of Catholics, broadly-defined Protestants, Orthodox, and Evangelicals (mostly a sub-set of Protestants). Regression estimates indicate …
While shopping recently at the Dollar Store, Nora and I came across the new frontier in climate change communication – inexpensive toys. The Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition, is apparently collectible, and was a bargain at just $1. (It’s the Dollar Store.) Its package includes this helpful background: Penguin populations have decreased by nearly …
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So what if we pump California’s Central Valley aquifers to empty? On The Public Record twiddles on the back of an envelope: Before this report, my rough feel was that about one million acres of irrigated lands in CA are supported by unsustainable groundwater withdrawals. If overdraft is 10 MAF/year in the Central Valley, it …
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Forecast flow on the Colorado River as a whole and major tributaries is down. I was otherwise occupied yesterday and missed the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center’s monthly briefing, but Kevin Werner has posted his slides. Some high points: January, as you can see from the accompanying image, was remarkably dry across the basin, a …
It’s interesting to see Aaron Tilton’s approach to selling Utah officials on his proposed Green River nuclear power plant proposal’s economic use of water: “Water use in a nuclear power plant is very economic,” Tilton said, calculating the power’s dollar output at $127,569 per million gallons, to agriculture’s $5,080. “The benefits are real in terms …
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New analysis of the tricky problem of quantifying California’s groundwater depletion uses data from NASA’s GRACE satellite to come up with some startling numbers: Here we use 78 months (October, 2003–March, 2010) of data from the Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment satellite mission to estimate water storage changes in California’s Sacramento and San Joaquin River …
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Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored: So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at …
From the morning paper, a look back at how New Mexico’s natural gas outages happened (sub/ad req): Eventually, as the cold gained the upper hand and gas lines emptied, crews closed valves, cutting one community after another off of the gas grid — first Tularosa, then down to La Luz and Alamogordo on the gas …
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With a nuclear power plant proposal taking shape in Green River, folks in Utah are trying to get out in front of the energy-water nexus. From the Salt Lake Tribune: In parts of the country with dependable water supplies, nuclear power naturally fits with plans to boost the nation’s investment in clean energy sources. While …
From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req): [I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees …
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