I’m working this weekend on two talks, one a webinar Wednesday with Audubon and the other a lecture for UNM Water Resources grad students Thursday, that both touch on one of the fundamental challenges in getting water management right – the question of how we draw the boundaries, both geographically but also conceptually – around …
I’ll be on Colorado Public Radio this morning (Mon. 11/21/16) sometime around 10:30 a.m. mountain time, talking about the importance of water conservation and collaboration. CPR’s Rachel Estabrook, who spent some time talking with me last week about my book, did a nice writeup ahead of the interview: To avoid federally mandated cutbacks, Arizona, Nevada …
Continue reading ‘talking water cooperation this morning on Colorado Public Radio’ »
With campaign rhetoric suggesting the likelihood of a changing relationship with Mexico, it is worth asking how a Trump administration might influence ongoing binational collaborations on the Colorado River. The important caveat here is that, as one of my friends put it in the days after the election, we chose Door Number Two on Nov. …
A sweeping deal to reduce Lower Colorado River Basin water use will get its most detailed public airing to date at tomorrow’s (Nov. 7, 2016) meeting of the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California’s Water Planning and Stewardship Committee. If the deal goes through – and there are hurdles yet to clear – Arizona, California, …
Continue reading ‘On the brink of a major deal to reduce Colorado River water use’ »
As Bruce Finley notes in today’s Denver Post, we are on the brink of the first shortage declaration on the Colorado River: The next president could be faced with ordering a first-ever reduction in water siphoned from the river by 333,000 acre feet next August, a report by the Colorado River Future Project contends. That’s …
Continue reading ‘We’re already in a Colorado River “shortage”, we just don’t call it that’ »
People have been sharing pictures of my book as it travels to interesting places. This makes me so happy. Today Michael Thomas Bogan, desert fish and other aquatic critter researcher (don’t snicker, that’s a thing, desert fish are really important!) at the University of Arizona shared this one:
Folks in Nevada today are celebrating the 80th anniversary of Hoover Dam’s sort-of-semi-official power production. Hoover Dam is such a dominant feature on the history of the west in the 20th century that it’s fun to contemplate what people thought about it before it happened. One of my fascinating side trips when I was researching …
Continue reading ‘The unexpected history of Las Vegas and Hoover Dam’ »
There’s an important point I try to make when I’m out in public talking about the 2014 Colorado River Delta environmental pulse flow: the amount of water used and the size of the landscape that got wet, compared to the once-vast delta, is tiny. I get excited about the pulse flow, when water managers on …
Discussions about climate change and water supply in the western United States risk getting bogged down in pursuit of uncertainties. Those uncertainties are real, but there’s a bunch that we already know, and it’s sufficient to help us form policy responses, according to a new summary paper from the Colorado River Research Group: Assuming the …
Continue reading ‘Climate change in the Colorado River Basin’ »
Scientists have dubbed decades-long periods of aridity in southwestern North America “megadroughts“. We’ve had them in the past, and research has long pointed toward an increasing risk of them as the climate warms. New research published last week by Cornell’s Toby Ault and colleagues has generated a wave of scary headlines – A Mega-Drought Is Coming to …
Continue reading ‘Greenhouse gases and southwest “megadrought”’ »