The week that was, 7/6-12/2009
“El Nino arrives.” Click on the map of sea surface temperature anomalies to be taken to the July 9 announcement from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
”If I was a water manager in southern Utah, I’d be paying attention.” Larry Dunn, meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service’s Salt Lake City office on the prospect of an El Nino. Salt Lake Tribune
“A Christmas gift in July?” The Redding Record Searchlight on the prospect of an El Nino, via Aquafornia
“If next year is average or below average in water, we’ll have very serious problems.” Lester Snow, director of the California Department of Water Resources, Wall Street Journal via Aquafornia…
The week (and a day) that was 6/28-7/5/2009
- “…people are looking for responsible luxury.” From a July 4 Los Angeles Times roundup of fashionable private swimming pools
- “Many of us think the situation is even more dire.” Jet Propulsion Laboratory climatologist William Patzert on the White House Climate Change report
The week that was, 6/21-27/2009
- “There are lots of ways to lose an audience with a discussion of global warming, and new ones, it seems are being discovered all the time.” From “The Catastrophist,” Elizabeth Kolbert’s New Yorker profile of NASA scientist James Hansen
- “Eli Raz was peering into a narrow hole in the Dead Sea shore when the earth opened up and swallowed him.” AP / Denver Post on Dead Sea sinkholes
- Water seeping through Howard Hanson Dam is picking up speed … the Army Corps of Engineers doesn’t know why. Seattle Times
- “The Sacramento politicians are at it again. They’re back to try and take your water softener away.” Savemysoftener.com ad aimed at scuttling California Assembly Bill 1366.
- “It’s hyperbole. Clearly, it’s a very reckless and irresponsible attempt to engender fear…” Assemblyman Mike Feuer (D-Los Angeles), author of AB 1366, Los Angeles Times.
- “We cannot put off the future.” Nancy Pelosi
The week that was, 6/14-20/2009
- “Paper water is an illusion. It is a term used in the water industry that represents an entitlement, existing only on paper, which agencies can expect to receive from state and federal water projects based on projections and expectations.” Orange County grand jury.
- “The past century is no longer a reasonable guide to the future for water management.” Multi-agency and White House Global Climate Change Report.
- The Clean Water Restoration Act, “would allow for government regulation of virtually all interstate and intrastate waters and their tributaries, including rivers, intermittent streams, mudflats, sandflats, prairie potholes, wet meadows, playa lakes, natural ponds and others,” US Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID)
- Udall’s colleagues should see The Clean Water Restoration Act as the housekeeping measure that it is and give it quick passage, Santa Fe New Mexican
- Fresno farmers to Schwarzenegger, “Turn on the pumps.”
- Schwarzenegger to farmers, “We will get a water deal
In Defense of Salt Cedars
Those gorgeous plants are bad, right? They’re the invasive riparian trees sucking Western water ways so dry that in 2006 Congress dedicated $80 million to study how to get rid of them.
Wrong.
Yes, millions have been spent trying to kill them, but it turns out that they may be good for the West.
WaterWired spotted the story in the May / June issue of Southwest Hydrology and today zapped it straight into the echo chamber. It turns out that the much vilified Salt Cedar, aka Tamarisk, does not gulp inordinate amounts of water. Moreover, it cohabits nicely with native vegetation except where native vegetation is stressed by human pressure on the rivers. Evidently, tamarisk is even a good habitat for birds.
To read the article by Edward P. Glenn of the University of Arizona and Pamela L. Nagler and Jeffrey E. Lovich of the US Geological Survey, click here…
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