Toward a More “Patient-Centered” Climate Science
Academia’s institutional culture fails to reward the critical work of tailoring climate science to the people who most need to understand its implications, according to a fascinating new paper by Kristen Averyt, in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Averyt is deputy director of the Western Water Assessment, a University of Colorado-based [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Teaching About Nature Around Us
From this morning’s newspaper, a piece about the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program (sub/ad req). I’ve been hearing great things about BEMP for ages, and finally did what I should have done years ago, which is call up Dan Shaw, one of the program’s directors, and ask if I could come hang out and do a [...]
Western Water in the Health Care Debate?
How seriously do Westerners take their water conflicts? Arizona Sen. John McCain brought it up yesterday during the White House health care debate. From the Washington Post’s transcript: There’s two examples right now of medical malpractice reform that is working. One’s called California, the other called — called Texas. I won’t talk about California, because [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: More on Feinstein and the Minnow
Because some things should be printed on paper and thrown on people’s driveways, in this morning’s paper I revisit Dianne Feisntein’s comments on the Rio Grande silvery minnow: Rio Grande silvery minnow, meet California’s delta smelt. Y’all have a lot in common. But perhaps not as much as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., would have Californians [...]
Green River Nukes and Water
The energy-water nexus is an issue all over the western United States. Many new sources of energy, from concentrating solar plants to oil shales, need water. New sources of water, whether pumping it long distances or desalinating brackish groundwater or ocean water, take energy. Few examples on the energy side are as interesting as the [...]
The Recycling of Falsehoods
One of the things my colleagues and I found when reviewing the history of the ’70s global cooling myth was the consistent way alleged evidence was recycled through the literature by those perpetuating the myth. It was easy to verify the recycling in two ways. First, there were characteristic mistakes and elisions introduced early that [...]
Boslough in SI: Playing By Different Rules
Writing in the latest issue of Skeptical Inquirer, physicist Mark Boslough argues that scientists are being held to a higher standard in the media and political debate over climate change than those who oppose them: Denialists have attempted to call the science into question by writing articles that include fabricated data. They’ve improperly graphed data [...]
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Feinstein and the Silvery Minnow
From the work blog: Is Dianne Feinstein misrepresenting New Mexico history in her search for a precedent for reducing water for the delta smelt?
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The View from Rattlesnake Point
From this morning’s Journal, the struggle to help a river get to its destination when it doesn’t really want to go there on its own (sub/ad req): RATTLESNAKE POINT — Without Jason Thibodaux’s help, the Rio Grande would have a hard time making it past this sediment-choked desert flood plain. Around a bend in the [...]
The Colorado River, Looking South, Circa 1889
It must have seemed like a good idea. Southwestern Colorado had coal. California needed it. And the Colorado River provided what seemed like a relatively level route to get from Point A to Point B. Thus was R.B. Stanton dispatched in 1889 to survey a route for the Denver, Colorado Canyon & Pacific Railroad. The [...]
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