Let’s play the urban heat island game, shall we? This is not about whether global warming is real or not. I’m prepared to stipulate that the various groups analyzing global temperatures are doing a fine job of correcting for the UHI in their global temperature trend calculations. This is about the way we’re creating cities …
Notes on a water meeting
Based on all the reporting I’ve been doing for the Albuquerque Journal, it seems to me that you could easily substitute “New Mexico” for “Colorado” in this story: The issue is critical in Western states such as Colorado, where even in wet years almost every river already is “over-appropriated,” with insufficient water to satisfy demand. …
I’ve written at some length (and with some enthusiasm) about Phil Mote’s work on declining western snowpack. Here’s an interesting counterpoint: We conclude that only about one third of the gages exhibit significant trends with time but over half of the gages tested show significant relationships with discharge. Therefore, runoff timing is more significantly correlated …
paper of the day: More melting, this time in British Columbia. “The recent rate of glacier loss in the Coast Mountains (17.0 km?3a?1) is approximately double that observed for the previous two decades.” reading: Super Crunchers – yet more on why the algorithms are smarter than the humans and will eventually take over the world …
On California drought.
On geo-engineering: In pursuing the idea, Wingenter is entering a scientific-political minefield— the field of what is called “geo-engineering.” The most widely discussed geo-engineering proposal, pushed by Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California, involves a fleet of jets spewing aerosols that would deflect the sun’s rays, cooling the planet in the process. …
The latest drought monitor notes the current state of our reservoirs here in the western U.S.: Despite the summer showers, many Western reservoirs remained unusually low, signaling ongoing hydrological drought. At the end of July, reservoir storage stood at 82 percent of average for this time of year in Arizona. Storage ranged from roughly two-thirds …
Continue reading ‘Drought: The Supply and Demand Question’ »
Mike Campana seems to be channeling Coco in this post about Las Vegas: It may be time to tie land use planning directly to water planning. The subject is Las Vegas, which is running out of water. Or, more accurately, is running into more people. There’s plenty of water for fewer people. The subject is …
The New York Times has a story today about Eli’s summer vacation project: The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the …