Piers Corbyn, Twitter Spammer?
Posted on | September 16, 2011 | 1 Comment
The following appeared in my twitter feed last night:
Corbyn tweet
Could it be that the legendary “forecaster” is resorting to twitter spamming to drum up business? (I have suggested the good folks at Twitter look into that possibility.) I counted 115 identical messages that went out at the same time last night in his twitter feed. I guess in spamming terms, that’s not a lot. So if Corbyn is a spammer, he’s not a terribly good one.
Unpacking the water storage question
Posted on | September 14, 2011 | 1 Comment
Great job by Jay Lund in unpacking the issue of California water storage – how much it has, how it’s used and what role it might play going forward:
Climate warming is reducing the ability of California’s snowpack to store water seasonally. Fortunately, downstream reservoirs on many streams are already large compared to seasonal changes in streamflows and flood peaks. Model results show that with the right management, climate warming might be inconvenient, not catastrophic, for most water uses.
It’s not all about climate change, it’s really about how the system fits together. I recommend the whole thing.
Albuquerque circa 1893
Posted on | September 13, 2011 | No Comments
Some fun with the newly released USGS historical map collection – here’s Albuquerque circa 1893:
Albuquerque circa 1893
update: Ooh, I missed this. From the top left corner of the map – U.S. Geological Survey, J.W. Powell, Director:
J.W. Powell, Director
Shifting Water
Posted on | September 13, 2011 | 3 Comments
NASA’s great Earth Observatory published satellite images of the Aral Sea showing changes over the last year as the sea (really four distinct bodies of water now) shrinks as water that once flowed in is diverted for human consumptive use.
Which led me, thanks to a helpful twitter tip, to this great pair of satellite images showing 1989 and 2008:
Aral Sea, 1989 and 2008
The politics of flood control
Posted on | September 12, 2011 | 2 Comments
From Steven Solomon’s Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization:
So closely correlated was river management and governing power that the very Chinese character for “politics” is derived from root words meaning flood control.
Desal is apparently now a jobs program
Posted on | September 12, 2011 | 1 Comment
I’m all for a serious discussion about the costs and benefits of desalination as a source of water supply in the arid southwestern United States. But I find this argument, from Ted Owen of the Carlsbad, Calif., Chamber of Commerce, less than helpful:
Jobs. Everyone in business and government is talking about the need to create jobs, but so few seem to have any real jobs to offer. On Tuesday, the Carlsbad City Council will be put to the test, and we will witness a display of leadership that will help reaffirm our faith that local government can be part of the jobs solution.
On the City Council’s agenda is an agreement between the city and the San Diego County Water Authority that will advance the long-awaited Carlsbad Desalination Project. The agreement probably doesn’t give the city everything it originally wanted, and the same is likely true for the County Water Authority. And it is this compromise that exemplifies what leadership is all about —- having the foresight to put the greater good of the region above parochial interests.
The desalination project is one of the largest shovel-ready water infrastructure projects in the state of California. It will support 2,000 skilled jobs and generate more than $350 million in economic stimulus during construction, and contribute more than $50 million per year to the regional economy once operations begin in 2014.
It is also the case that having Carlsbad City Council hire hooligans to go around breaking windows downtown would create jobs for people who fix windows. But that is not sufficient motivation for hiring the hooligans. Now, to be fair, Owen does mention in passing the argument that the desal project offers some water policy benefits as well. But desal only works if it’s affordable, which has been one of the rips against the Carlsbad project. And the notion of the desal plant as a jobs program works best if it’s extravagantly expensive. It seems the two lines of arguments are at cross purposes here.
Badlands Express
Posted on | September 11, 2011 | No Comments
If our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses*, what does the “Badlands Express” ride at the New Mexico State Fair tell us about the modern West? Are these kids standing in for our lost Hayduke?
Badlands Express, New Mexico State Fair, September 2011
*Note: I don’t think our carny rides are reflections of our deepest cultural impulses. I just thought the cactus and fake little 4×4′s were hilarious. They had Fords too.
Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians
Posted on | September 10, 2011 | 1 Comment
While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians:
By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires occurred frequently, about once every 2-10 years. He found some trees with scars dating back to the mid-1600s.
As we’ve seen here, the anthropogenic influence is easily detectable:
[F]ires showed a dramatic decrease after the 1930s.
“That’s about the time the U.S. Forest Service and other agencies started to increase public awareness of forest fires, and they introduced the ‘Smokey the Bear’ campaign to tell people that they could prevent forest fires,” he says. “And when a wildfire did occur, they suppressed it to halt its spread. Their efforts worked — the trees show that it did because they are fewer fires in the last 50 to 70 years.”
There’s lots more on the stories tree rings tell in my book, The Tree Rings’ Tale.
The farm bill and water policy
Posted on | September 7, 2011 | 9 Comments
Wayne Bossert, who manages the Northwest Kansas Groundwater Management District No. 4 on the famed Ogallala Aquifer, raised the interesting issue recently in testimony at a Senate field hearing of the effect of federal agricultural policy on water:
Historically the farm bill has been blamed for promoting fencerow-to-fencerow corn production due to it’s design and implementation, which of course, does little for curbing water use in irrigated ag areas. So, we were thinking that a farm bill that would promote less water intensive cropping choices – especially in water stressed or enhanced management areas – could conserve water at no additional program cost. This is apparently a very difficult thing to do, but we asked again, anyway.
We also asked for a crop insurance program that would insure limited irrigation operations. This would actually reduce liability and be less expensive than the current program. It’d allow irrigators to implement a water conserving, limited irrigation plan on land that had been fully irrigated, but also receive a critical level of crop insurance discounted proportionately with the expected yield goals of their limited irrigation plan. This could save a lot of water as well, so we asked for it.
We also asked that NRCS EQIP and AWEP programs support partial water use set asides – allowing producers to enroll the least efficient portions of their irrigation operations rather than the entire irrigated acreages. The water conservation would be the same, at reduced program costs, while returning a higher economic return for the producer.
When I asked around about this issue, I couldn’t find folks here in New Mexico tracking this issue in terms of water use here, but a friend pointed me to the work of George Frisvold (this from 2004):
Agriculture accounts for 80% of U.S. consumptive use of freshwater and has been identified as the largest contributor to nonpoint source water pollution. Over the last 20 years, agricultural policy reforms have greatly reduced, though not eliminated, incentives to overuse water and chemical inputs and have improved targeting of conservation programs to achieve environmental benefits. Recent changes provide greater incentives for voluntary reallocation of water from agriculture to other uses.
I’d love pointers to other folks thinking about this issue.
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: It didn’t all burn like that
Posted on | September 7, 2011 | 1 Comment
From yesterday’s newspaper, a reminder that not all the area within the boundaries of this year’s big New Mexico forest fires is burned to an ugly, indecipherable ecological cinder (sub/ad req):
There is good reason to visit the moonscape, and to talk about what happens next to the ecosystem there — the subject of a future story, and the main reason Adolphe and I asked Allen to show us around. But there is something misleading about the way journalists cover disasters. We are drawn to the worst of the worst — the most devastating flooding, the epicenter of the earthquake damage zone, the moonscape around St. Peter’s Dome.
Remember this as you watch us going into disaster mode. The situation is likely not as severe as the parts we’re showing you.