Daniel Rothberg

Why winter rains keep skipping the Southwest » Yale Climate Connections Human-caused climate change from burning fossil fuels may be involved in a persistent tilt toward dry patterns.

NOAA has just issued a La Niña Watch for late 2025/early 2026. So far this century, we've had 12 La Niña winters versus just 8 El Niño winters. What does this portend for Southwest US drought? There's some unsettling new science out on that.

yaleclimateconnections.org/2025/08/why-...

Photographs from Mono Lake and the Mono Basin, a landscape of deep silence and immense space. (And overdue for implementation of the full protections guaranteed by decades-old legal decisions.)

#monolake #monobasin #lake #nature #landscape #california #basinandrange #photography

In today’s @latimes.com:
‘It needs more water’: Calls grow for boosting Mono Lake www.latimes.com/environment/... @myungchun.bsky.social

Q&A: Groundwater loss on a global scale ASU's Jay Famiglietti on the alarming drying of Earth's land surface.

We do not talk enough about groundwater, the quiet water crisis playing out across the globe.

“Groundwater is the most precious natural resource in the dry parts of the world," said ASU's Jay Famiglietti. “And it is probably the least protected.” www.westernwaternotes.com/p/q-and-a-gr...

Why Access to Running Water Is a Luxury in Wealthy US Cities “Plumbing poverty” is surging in Houston, Phoenix, Portland, Oregon and other urban areas.

As housing costs soar, running water has become a luxury in Portland, Phoenix and other wealthy US cities. Latest for @bloomberg.com with Klara Auerbach, gift link: www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Thank you, and thanks for reading! I appreciate it. Glad you're enjoying them.

Looking forward to reading this!

What makes heat so hard to cover? Thoughtful reporting from my friends and colleagues, Meg Bernhard and Bridget Bennett, on the invisibility and difficulties of telling stories about extreme heat, a crisis that so often "turns us inward." www.cjr.org/feature-2/wh...

As a public service, people will find the original pdf files of all the U.S. National Climate Assessments, 2001-2023, publicly available at: www.patrickgonzalez.net#us_national_...

Relief From Drought in Southwest U.S. Likely Isn’t Coming, According to New Research Lyman Lake in Arizona stores water from the Little Colorado River. Pictured here in 2021, the lake was 30 feet…

“Many people still expect the Colorado River to bounce back,” Shanahan said. “But our findings suggest it may not. Water managers need to start planning for the possibility that this drought isn’t just a rough patch — it could be the new reality.”

New report maps a “severe” shortage of local journalists in the U.S. The report from Rebuild Local News and Muck Rack finds that more than 1,000 counties — one out of three in the nation — do not have the equivalent of even one full-time local journalist.

This downward spiral of the number of working journalists in communities across the country has been happening for years.

At my former shop for example, the newsroom was systematically reduced from nine reporters and three editors to just a single reporter over the course of four years.

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The Texas Flash Flood Is a Preview of the Chaos to Come Climate change is making disasters more common, more deadly and far more costly, even as the federal government is running away from the policies that might begin to protect the nation.

"In the United States, which prefers to measure its losses in dollars [rather than lives], the damage from major storms was more than $180 billion last year, nearly 10 times the average annual toll during the 1980s, after accounting for inflation" #climate www.propublica.org/article/texa...

Is this real?

'Water brings life': Plans to revive Tulare Lake take shape in the San Joaquin Valley A coalition has begun an effort to bring back Tulare Lake and its once-vast wetlands on thousands of acres of farmland in the San Joaquin Valley.

‘Water brings life’: Plans to revive Tulare Lake take shape in the San Joaquin Valley www.latimes.com/environment/...

While majority of Americans see climate change as risk almost nobody talks about it with others. This is a major reason for lack of action. climatecommunication.yale.edu/publications...

Smart piece on the future of publishing in a world after Google Zero. Written about the journalism industry, but it applies to science communication and many forms of publishing. mattdpearce.substack.com/p/ai-could-c...

From @internetarchive.eu: "Internet Archive Europe proudly announces the launch of Our Future Memory, a global campaign dedicated to safeguarding the digital rights of libraries, archives, and museums worldwide." www.internetarchive.eu/protecting-t...

Alpine granite and metamorphic mountain peaks drop into the long valley caldera.

High Sierra meets the Great Basin.

Geological "field" sketch in watercolor and ink showing a cliff; the cliff is made of two different deposits: a nearly horizontally layered lower zone consisting of hard laminated sandstone with vertical cliffs, and an upper zone consisting of white to reddish brown sand that is much softer and erodes with "badland" topography. A grassy hill is present above. A large tidepool is present below, dotted with concretions that have weathered out of the Point Loma Formation. In the foreground is a table-like rock exposure showing the repetive bedding.

My first #artwork in months - I wanted to try a geological "field" sketch - submarine fan deposits in the Cretaceous Point Loma Formation at Point Loma, San Diego, and overlying Pleistocene deposits. Locally, the PLF consists of repetitive sandstone/mudstone couplets. #watercolor #geology

💯 “These resources are more interconnected than our laws lead us to think, and as a result of that, we need to be finding ways to more explicitly consider them in seven-state negotiations,” Koebele said.

The data center boom in the desert The AI race is transforming northwestern Nevada into one of the world's largest data-center markets—and sparking fears of water strains in the nation’s driest state.

A data center boom is happening in the nation’s driest state. AI is accelerating it. An excellent and well-reported piece by @jtemple.bsky.social on a topic that deserves way more scrutiny. www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1...

Hey look it's @kbdobbin.bsky.social, Justin McBride's and my work on Water System Consolidation in California on the cover of the June 2025 edition of Journal American Water Works Association.

Another @luskininnovation.bsky.social @ucanrwater.bsky.social @ucberkeleyofficial.bsky.social collab.

"All water discharged by wells is balanced by a loss of water somewhere." - Hydrogeologist C.V. Theis writing in 1940, nearly a century ago. From "The Source of Water Derived From Wells." water.usgs.gov/ogw/pubs/The...

And just to reiterate, a lot of that subsidence is also being outsourced to rural areas via groundwater extraction and transfer

Across America, Big Cities Are Sinking. Here’s Why. A major reason is too much groundwater is being pumped out, new research shows, threatening buildings and infrastructure nationwide.

New research finds that nearly all of the 28 largest population centers in the U.S. are sinking — and a major cause is groundwater depletion. Another indicator of how important groundwater is, even if it is often invisible to us. www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Opinion | What the War on California’s Water Is Really About If we are to take seriously the threats of drought, climate change and water security, we should not reduce this place to a warring of two — or even many — sides.

"...the so-called war over California’s water is a dangerous, flawed trope that reduces certain water uses to right or wrong, and turns the Delta into a place with no local stakes." www.nytimes.com/2025/03/10/o...

The best places

From the National Integrated Drought Information System: "Abysmal" snowpack in Arizona and New Mexico www.drought.gov/drought-stat...

A grim but vital inversion of the federal birth of modern oral history under the FWP. Federal and historian friends, please participate!

NASA: FARMing with data: OpenET launches new tool for farmers and ranchers By Milan Loiacono, Science Communication Specialist A NASA and U.S. Geological Survey (USGS)-supported research and development team is making it easier for farmers and ranchers to manage their water ...

NASA: FARMing with data: OpenET launches new tool for farmers and ranchers #cawater #OpenET mavensnotebook.com/2025/03/05/n...