Daniel Rothberg
@danielrothberg.bsky.social
2.7K followers 1.1K following 120 posts
Environmental writer and researcher focused on how people and communities relate to water. • Master's student @ UC Davis invisiblewaters.substack.com 🏔🏜
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Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
bhensonweather.bsky.social
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-...
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.
yaleclimateconnections.org
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
gdanmitchell.com
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
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
ianjames.bsky.social
In today’s @latimes.com:
‘It needs more water’: Calls grow for boosting Mono Lake www.latimes.com/environment/... @myungchun.bsky.social
danielrothberg.bsky.social
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...
Q&A: Groundwater loss on a global scale
ASU's Jay Famiglietti on the alarming drying of Earth's land surface.
www.westernwaternotes.com
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
danielrothberg.bsky.social
Thank you, and thanks for reading! I appreciate it. Glad you're enjoying them.
danielrothberg.bsky.social
Looking forward to reading this!
danielrothberg.bsky.social
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...
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
patrickgonzalez.bsky.social
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_...
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
virginiagewin.bsky.social
“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.”
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…
www.jsg.utexas.edu
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
timlambert-pa.bsky.social
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.

1/
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.
www.niemanlab.org
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
chanceofrain.bsky.social
"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...
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.
www.propublica.org
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
envpolicycenter.bsky.social
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...
danielrothberg.bsky.social
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...
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
archive.org
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...
www.internetarchive.eu
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
dustinmulvaney.bsky.social
High Sierra meets the Great Basin.
Alpine granite and metamorphic mountain peaks drop into the long valley caldera.
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
coastalpaleo.bsky.social
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
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.
danielrothberg.bsky.social
💯 “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.
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
gregspierce.bsky.social
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.
danielrothberg.bsky.social
"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...
Reposted by Daniel Rothberg
fkearns.bsky.social
And just to reiterate, a lot of that subsidence is also being outsourced to rural areas via groundwater extraction and transfer
danielrothberg.bsky.social
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/...
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.
www.nytimes.com
danielrothberg.bsky.social
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/...
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.
www.nytimes.com