The terrific scientist-writer Anne Jefferson, who studies what happens when water meets earth, has an excellent post up today summarizing flooding around the world. The floods in Queensland have gotten the most attention in country, because (I suspect) the people are like us, plus they have the affluence and technology to post cool flood videos …
Continue reading ‘In natural disasters, it’s the poor who suffer’ »
Residents of the arid southwestern US like to think we’re the ones who know drought. But drought’s a relative thing – not how dry it is in absolute terms, but in comparison to what you’re used to. Take New Orleans, for example, which received 2.75 inches in rain in November. Here in Albuquerque, that would …
Via Patricia McBroom, a fascinating look at a group studying tree rings in the redwoods along the Northern California coast for clues about climate: The plan is to chart the health of the trees over time and use laboratory analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes to figure out how the trees have reacted in the …
For more than a decade, I’ve written about arguments over whether the United States is building, or could, or should build “new” nuclear weapons. They are frequently silly arguments. The “newness” debate was engaged in earnest in the late 1990s when the weaponeers fielded a nuclear bomb called the “B61 Mod 11”. The B61 is …
Continue reading ‘Apparently I’m Supposed to Write a Blog Post About This’ »
While I’ve been away, my friends back in Albuquerque were kind enough to print a bunch of copies of my ruminations on La Niña and the Rio Grande and throw them on people’s driveways this morning (sub/ad req): [M]ore than La Niña is at work this year, according to Glen MacDonald, a climate researcher at …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Meanwhile, Back on the Rio Grande’ »
One of the guys at the Las Vegas Marina yesterday was sounding optimistic. Sure, the lake level’s low, he said, but they expect it to start rising soon. Plus, he said he heard they expect it to eventually come up another 60 feet. He shrugged as if to say, “Dunno, but that’s what I heard,” …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Another Place There Used To Be A Lake’ »
Down a long, dank corridor inside Hoover Dam that seems to be known as the “1211 tunnel” (things in the dam tend to be named after their elevation above sea level) and up a flight of stairs sits the top of the dam’s “stilling well”. It’s essentially a long tube that runs to the bottom …
I’m about to head off for a few days to watch Lake Mead drop, and for some reason thoughts turned this evening to G.K. Gilbert. Tomorrow is “blog action day“, and the subject is “water”, a topic about which I’ve had a few things to say of late. I’m frankly not all that excited about …
“Water year” 2010 ends next week, making this a good time to take stock of our historic position on the Colorado River. And by a couple of different measures, things are truly historic: The latest forecast (and right now forecasting amounts to tiny fractions of in inch) puts Lake Mead’s surface elevation at 1084.14 feet …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: End of the Water Year, Taking Stock’ »