Ever surprising. Although increased irrigation efficiency is one of the most widely promoted solutions to increased water demand, its actual effects on the water balance are complex and even paradoxical. The cost to farmers of delivered irrigation water is minimal, meaning that there is little benefit from installing expensive water-conservation technology in terms of reducing …
Nora, over at Escape Pod, captures something remarkable about the Manhattan Project: [T]he more I learn about the Manhattan Project the more it feels like a fabricated story. Oppenheimer is said to be the father of the atomic bomb, but really he’s just the only person in the world that rolled high enough Intelligence, Wisdom …
Is it legal in New Mexico to catch the rain that falls on my roof and put it in a barrel for later use? Kinda. Sorta. Maybe? I love this question, which I’ve written about in the newspaper (sub/ad req) in the past, and which came up last week when I was talking to the …
In watching New Mexico’s fires the past few weeks and talking to my forest ecosystem brain trust, I’ve been repeatedly struck by the set of questions Emma Marris raises in her new book Rambunctious Garden (great, recommended) about what baseline we’re thinking about when we talk about restoring natural systems that are currently badly out of …
It rained this afternoon at my house. The physics of raindrops, I once learned, means that the largest raindrops falling out the bottom of a thunderhead hit first, and I was sitting in my office at the back of the house writing when I heard them banging onto the metal roof. I went out to …
Been a busy week (what with New Mexico burning down) with little to show for it other than an overactive Twitter feed, but I caught my breath this morning and threw together some thoughts on weather, climate, forest management, drought, and the unnerving fact that I had to cut my morning bike ride short because …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Weather, Climate, Forest Management, Fire, Drought’ »
From the morning paper, some thoughts (sub/ad req) from my recent trip on the west-wide linkages, and the institutional problems those linkages have created: “We’ve got a system that is not sustainable,” said Curt Schmutte, Met’s top official working on the Delta problem. Given the political rancor that surrounds California’s Delta discussions, it is unclear …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the California-NM connection’ »
We’ve received 2.15 inches (5.46 cm) of precipitation since Oct. 1 (the “water year”) at the Heineman-Fleck house in Albuquerque. That’s 44 percent of average for the first 8 months of the water year. (My average is based on data going back to the 1999-2000 water year.) A sidelight: 1.41 inches of that (3.58 cm) …
When Lissa and I were up in Santa Fe a few months back, I took along the binoculars and took a walk along the Santa Fe River as it passes the old city’s downtown, hunting birds. I found few. Because it’s not much of a river, really. As David Groenfeldt notes, there’s an effort underway …
From the morning paper, a look at the way this year’s drought has laid bare a Byzantine argument over how to properly divide up the waters of the Lower Rio Grande between Texas and New Mexico farmers (sub/ad req.): Water flows down the Rio Grande in southern New Mexico today, past parched farmers who cannot …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: A Feud Over Lower Rio Grande Water Distribution’ »