On the Risk of Overstating
Two of my favorite climate scientist-communicators recently posted on the risks of overstating. First is Simon Donner on Ketsana, the tropical storm that devastated the Philippines: The climate policy talks in “nearby” Thailand have led to a number of sloppy media reports and climate activist statements about the role of climate change in Ketsana. For [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: ABQ Greenhouse Update
In early 2008, I did some inquiries on the data underlying Albuquerque’s “green” claims and we published what I found in the newspaper. With a mayoral election underway and the city pushing forward on a “Climate Action Plan”, it seemed like a good time to revisit the issue. The results: When Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez [...]
Water and Renewable Energy in the Southwest
Where I’d be Oct. 22-23 if I had plane fare, registration fees and a few free days (none of which I have): Water and Land for Renewable Energy in the Southwest.
Inland Desalination
While much of the discussion of “new water” in the western United States involves desalination of seawater, there’s an experiment getting underway outside Albuquerque that is part of a new approach to the problem: desalination of brackish groundwater. My colleague Rosalie Rayburn has a story in the Albuquerque Journal on the latest testing going on [...]
Tower of Babel
Tower of Babel Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I love the New Mexico State Fair. This is why: a giant Lego rendition of the Tower of Babel. Everyone’s strange and wonderful obsessions come together at the fair.
The Infamous Colorado River
A blog post showed up in my Colorado River news feed, about a winery on the west slope in Colorado, that is irrigated with water from “the infamous Colorado River” (emphasis added) What an odd way of describing the Colorado. Is the great muddy lifeline of the West really “notoriously evil,” “having a reputation of [...]
No Dogs, No Bikes
For my bike ride this morning, I headed north to check out the new bike path into Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, which my colleague Rosalie Rayburn wrote about in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req). We’re a week away from Albuquerque’s famed balloon fiesta. I’ve always enjoyed riding bikes in the mornings and watching a zillion [...]
Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than [...]
Measuring Snow
I’ve been relatively successful over the years in ending my newspaper’s practice of getting snowfall totals from ski areas when we’re doing storm stories. I reason that the ski areas a) are built in places that get an unusually large amount of snow relatively to their surroundings, which makes the number misleading, and/or b) have [...]
Manure spontaneous combustion II
Further research shows this, from C.A. Browne, The Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Hay and Other Agricultural Products, Science, 3 March 1933: Vol. 77. no. 1992, pp. 223 – 229, DOI: 10.1126/science.77.1992.223 In 1929 the author suggested as a possible solution of the problem of spontaneous ignition the formation, by micro-organisms under anaerobic conditions, of [...]
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