In my continuing effort to milk the not-Twain quote for all it’s worth, there is this – in the mountains north of the well fields of the proposed Cadiz California groundwater project is Whiskey Spring. And of course, one of the big areas of fightin’ in Cadiz is the question of whether the project’s groundwater …
Continue reading ‘Could Whiskey Spring be fer fightin’ over?’ »
Pulled up from the comments on yesterday’s Cadiz post, the Aquafornia Maven shares a marvelous metaphor regarding the costs of coastal desal: I was on a tour through the Lower Colorado River last week, and we stopped at the Gene Pumping Plant and were being briefed on SoCal water issues. Some one asked Bill Hasencamp …
I have a prediction: clarifying the science will not settle the political argument over the proposed Cadiz water project in the deserts of California. Chris Clarke wrote this today about Cadiz, a proposal to pump water from beneath the Mojave Desert and pipe it to coastal Southern California cities: According to an independent hydrologists’ evaluation …
The water model in the western United States has generally involved Party A getting a bunch of water via a dam, canal, pipe, etc., while Party B (usually some broad group of taxpayers, either state or federal) pays for it. Economists will tell you that this tends to lead for building more giant concrete thingies than …
Continue reading ‘Last concrete diaries: someone has to pay for it’ »
As I write this, California’s being pounded by a particularly impressive storm. According to Mike Dettinger, it’s an “atmospheric river” storm, one of the type he and other climate/water researchers have been studying increasingly closely because of their importance to California’s water supply. As I wrote last year, California has the most highly variable precipitation …
My favorite stop on our California desert vacation was the strange and wonderful little Moorten Botanical Garden “in the heart of Palm Springs”. Between the golf courses and the ill-advised decision to try to coax palm trees out of their desert oasis canyons (they take a lot of water – per capita use here is …
While I was away last week, the House passed HR1837, the California Water’s Fer Fightin’ Over Act of 2012 (pdf). The vote was largely along party lines, with only one Republican voting against the bill. Who was that lone R dissenter? Justin Amash, a 31-year-old Michigan legislator ranked by the Club for Growth as the …
Continue reading ‘That lone Republican vote against HR1837’ »
During our just-completed trip across the deserts of southern Arizona and southeastern California, the persistence of the snowbirds was one of the most striking features. I’d noticed them when I was down in Yuma in April 2010, but that was late in the season. Late February-early March is earlier, and they were everywhere. Canadian license …
Two of Inkstain’s bedrock principles involve 1) correcting errors of fact quickly, and 2) re-running, as often as possible, the “best pork buns in town Hetch Hetchy” picture I took in San Francisco’s Chinatown last year. This one’s a twofer. In the aforementioned “Hetch Hetchy – Best Pork Bun in Town” post, I incorrectly argued …
Samuel Rhoads set out from Yuma to collect specimens from the Lower Colorado for the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia on Feb. 4, 1905. Witmer Stone, who later catalogued and wrote about Rhoads’ collection, said this: The conditions that prevailed during the expedition were peculiarly unfavorable to collecting of any sort, the rain, cold and …