Thinking About Aridity
Here’s a nice way of thinking about aridity: If all the water that flows in each river during an average year were spread evenly over the area drained by the river, the depths would be: Delaware 20.9 in.; Columbia 13.1 in.; Mississippi 6.7 in.; Colorado 1.15 in. Source: Water and Choice in the Colorado Basin, [...]
The Colorado, Then and Now
I’m reading Frank Waters’ The Colorado, which offers an odd vantage point on the history of the river basin. It was written in 1946 when, as Waters points out in an introduction written when it was republished in the mid-1980s, Phoenix was the only city in the basin of any heft whatsoever. It is clear [...]
Westward Ho!
Westward Ho! Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. From today’s bike ride, the Westward Ho motel along old Route 66 on Albuquerque’s west side. I love the saguaro and battered neon. I’m guessing the pun in the motel’s name is not intentional.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation
In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. [...]
Texas Drought
I’m in the midst of a story for the newspaper about drought and climate change that looks at the importance of temperature. It is not simply whether more or less rain falls, but also how much evaporation there is. This is the critical message from Richard Seager’s 2007 paper about the permanent Dust Bowl. That [...]
8-?-2
Don DeLillo has a great line in “Underwold” describing how, at a night baseball game, under the lights, “the players seem completely separate from the night around them.” Something in excess of a quarter of a century ago, Lissa and I went to baseball games while we were falling in love, and we’ve been going [...]
Charismatic Megafauna
I’m sure there are a lot of things suffering right now because of the Texas drought. Few are as charismatic, though (sorry Michael), as the whooping crane: A drought in Texas severely affected the whooping crane’s foods of blue crabs and berries. Corn feeders were set up to supplement the cranes’ diets, but only about [...]
In Memory
My newspaper column today, an expansion of something I wrote several years ago, on what happens when you don’t have health insurance (sub. or ad or something req.): Consider this, published by a team of U.S. health care researchers in 2004: “Lack of health insurance causes roughly 18,000 unnecessary deaths every year in the United [...]
In the Long Emergency, Will I Be Able to Buy Bike Tires?
The Ghost Mall Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Wandering on my bike Thursday morning, I ended up at “the ghost mall,” the old Winrock Center a few miles from my house. It’s one of those enclosed shopping malls circa the ’60s, when air conditioning and indoor shopping was all the rage. It’s now largely empty, discarded [...]
Time Trials
Time Trials Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. This is where I’ve been spending weekend mornings for the month of August (mostly Saturdays, one Sunday) – out along the Interstate 25 frontage road north of Bernalillo, New Mexico, where my bike racing team puts on its annual time trial series. I’ve been working the start line. The [...]
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