Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Agenda: Hard Times On The Colorado River: Drought, Growth And The Future Of The Compact, University Of Colorado Boulder. Natural Resources Law Center, Western Water Assessment (Program), Colorado Water Conservation Board, Center For Advanced Decision Support For Water And Environmental Systems, Hydrosphere Resource Consultants, Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, Colorado Foundation For Water Education, Patrick, Miller & Kropf, P.C., William & Flora Hewlett Foundation

Hard Times on the Colorado River: Drought, Growth and the Future of the Compact (Summer Conference, June 8-10)

Sponsors and Contributors: Colorado Water Conservation Board, Center for Advanced Decision Support for Water and Environmental Systems, Western Water Assessment, CU-CIRES/NOAA, Hydrosphere Resource Consultants, Rocky Mountain Mineral Law Foundation, Colorado Foundation for Water Education, Patrick, Miller & Kropf, P.C., William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

The Colorado River is approaching a crossroads. For the first time in its history, satisfying water demands in one state may require curtailing legally-recognized uses in another. This is not the first instance of water shortages in the region, and conflict among the seven Colorado River states is certainly not new. But the potential shortages on …

Stormwater Utility Fees: Considerations & Options For Interlocal Stormwater Working Group (Iswg), New England Environmental Finance Center

Water

Stormwater utilities are a concept whose time seems to have arrived. Established by relatively few communities in the 1970s as a method of funding flood control measures, stormwater utilities now exist in over 400 municipalities and counties throughout the United States. During the next 10 years, their numbers are expected to swell dramatically – by one estimate to over 2,000 by the year 2014.

The reasons for this growth are multifold. Federal stormwater regulations passed in the 1980s (Phase I of the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System Program, or NPDES), motivated many larger communities to seek alternative funding sources and …

Is Climate Change The 21st Century’S Most Urgent Environmental Problem?, Indur M. Goklany

Center for Applied Economics

Some have argued that the Kyoto Protocol and other schemes for immediately mitigating greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are justified because human-induced global warming is, in the words of the 42nd U.S. President, William J. Clinton, “the overriding environmental challenge” facing the globe today.1 Another argument, advanced by those who are more cautious and perhaps less prone to hyperbole, is that the impacts of global warming – on top of myriad other global public health and environmental threats – may prove to be the proverbial “straw that broke the camel’s back.” They suggest that climate change will overwhelm human and natural …

Frederic-Andre Engel (1908-2002), Robert A. Benfer Jr.

Andean Past

No abstract provided.

Gardens In The Desert: Archaeobotanical Analysis From The Lower Ica Valley, Peru, Anita G. Cook, Nancy Parrish

Andean Past

No abstract provided.

Decline And Recovery Of A High Arctic Wolf-Prey System, L. David Mech

USGS Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center

A long-existing system of wolves (Canis lupus), muskoxen (Ovibos moschatus), and arctic hares (Lepus arcticus) in a 2600 km² area of Canada’s High Arctic (80° N latitude) began collapsing in 1997 because of unusual adverse summer weather but recovered to a level at which all three species were reproducing by 2004. Recovery of wolf presence and reproduction appeared to be more dependent on muskox increase than on hare increase.

Un vieux système biologique composé de loups (Canis lupus), de boeufs musqués (Ovibos moschatus) et de lièvres arctiques (Lepus …

The Impact Of Non-Stationarities In The Climate System On The Definition Of "A Normal Wind Year": A Case Study From The Baltic, S C. Pryor, R J. Barthelmie, Justin T. Schoof

Publications

Wind speeds over the Baltic significantly increased over the second half of the 20th century (C20th), with the majority of the increase being focused on the upper quartile of the wind speed distribution and in the southwest of the region. These changes have potentially profound implications for the wind energy resource. For example, based on the National Centers for Environmental Prediction–National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCEP–NCAR) reanalysis data it is shown that, owing to this non-stationarity, using the normalization period of 1987–98 to determine the wind resource (as in the Danish wind index) leads to overestimation of the wind energy …

Trends In Extreme Daily Temperature Events In The South-Central United States, Gregory S. Bohr

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Extreme daily temperatures are meteorological events that can have significant impacts on human and natural systems. As natural and anthropogenic climate changes occur, the frequency of extreme events is likely to change. Because extremes do not change linearly with mean temperatures, it is important to directly examine the record of extremes. This dissertation analyzes the temporal pattern of daily extremes over 1948-2001 in the south-central United States, and identifies significant changes in frequency and persistence, as well as relationships between extreme events and atmospheric circulation.

A global warming of approximately 0.6 Centigrade has occurred over the past century, and further …