New mapping of salt concentrations in the world’s oceans confirms what physics and climate models have long suggested: Global warming is intensifying Earth’s water cycle, speeding up the rate at which water evaporates in one area and falls as rain or snow somewhere else.
Practically every drop of water that flows through the meadows, canyons and plains of the Colorado River Basin has reams of science attached to it. Snowpack, streamflow and tree ring data all influence the crucial decisions that guide water management of the iconic Western river every day.
The West Coast had just experienced a record-shattering heat wave when news came last week of a rare late-summer snowstorm in Colorado. To those still sweltering in California, Oregon and Washington, it sounded like a dream come true. In fact, it was an omen of a greater disaster to come.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has had a busy year. Chairman Neil Chatterjee gave a keynote at last week’s virtual REFF Wall Street to sum up 2020’s regulatory challenges and victories.
Chatterjee believes in competitive markets and is happy to see renewable sources win on price on an equal playing field. He didn’t mention solar by name — but he is really enthusiastic about storage, hybrid generation, and the changing regulatory landscape around these new resources.
For more than 20 years, negotiations among the seven states that rely on the Colorado River have avoided lawsuits, even as drought and population growth threaten the river’s flows.
That may change as a promise to rush the environmental review of a diversion project between the Colorado River’s upper and lower basins has six states suggesting lawsuits challenging the project could topple years of agreements.
Long before climate change severely parched California, priming it to burn at a record scale, federal foresters made an inventory of trees in the southern Sierra Nevada. The year was 1911, and the goal of the fledgling U.S. Forest Service was to document the amount of timber in the area. More than a century later, however, the historical data set proved invaluable to researchers with a far different purpose: assessing how much the forest, and the inherent threat of fires within it, had evolved.
Historic wildfires raging from California to Colorado are weakening watersheds and setting the stage for deadly mudslides and flooding and, in some places, threatening to poison critical water supplies.
Climate forecasters said Thursday that the world had entered La Niña, the opposite phase of the climate pattern that also brings El Niño and affects weather across the globe. Among other impacts, La Niña has the potential this winter to worsen what are already severe drought conditions in the American Southwest.
Like millions of people in the western United States this week, I woke up to deep red, sunless skies, layers of ash coating the streets, gardens, and cars, and the smell of burning forests, lives, homes, and dreams. Not to be too hyperbolic, but on top of the political chaos, the economic collapse, and the worst pandemic in modern times, it seemed more than a little apocalyptic.
Too much of the western United States is on fire, and many areas not suffering directly from fire are enveloped in choking, acrid smoke.
Two weeks ago, the Pine Gulch Fire became the largest wildfire in Colorado history when it grew to an area nearly the size of Chicago. The 139,000-acre blaze, ignited July 31, was fueled by another record: The area where the fire occurred experienced its hottest August in at least 126 years.
