A forest burns down. Humans rescue fish, keep ’em alive in an Albuquerque warehouse. Maybe 80 years before the drainage that feeds their forest creek recovers. Maybe 200. This is life in the anthropocene: Angela James’ fish tanks don’t look much like Whiskey Creek. But for 68 imperiled Gila trout, the tanks in a northeast …
Continue reading ‘Anthropocene diaries: a fish story I wrote elsewhere’ »
Evapotranspiration is the combination of water evaporated from soil, surface water, etc., and water transpired from the leaves of plants. It’s an incredibly important measure of what’s going on in the hydrologic system. Which is why I love this new map: From Estimation of Evapotranspiration Across the Conterminous United States Using a Regression With Climate and …
Continue reading ‘Insanely cool new evapotranspiration maps from USGS team’ »
Via the economist Tyler Cowen, I learned today that the artist Ed Ruscha is from Oklahoma. When I mentioned this to Lissa, she wisely observed that many of the people we think are from California are not. That’s one of the central points of Carey McWilliams’ classic “California: The Great Exception”, which I am rereading. …
My friends at Carpe Diem West, who’ve been doing some interesting work on the science/politics/policy interface of watershed restoration, are holding one of those ghastly named but increasingly useful “webinar” things next week: Join the Academy’s first extended webinar taking a closer look at how to value watersheds and the services they provide to downstream …
Nearly every time I give a talk on water (which seems to happen frequently lately – wonder if I’ll be less popular as a speaker once the drought ends) I get asked about desalination. It is, as Bettina Boxall noted in a recent LA Times story, the stuff of dreamers: “an inexhaustible, drought-proof reservoir in …
To say that it is unpopular in northern California when the state ships water from north south is to understate things. So here’s a fun little bit of history on the willingness of the Record Searchlight, in Redding, to buck the will of its readers. From Bruce Ross, the paper’s current editorial page editor, great …
Continue reading ‘On the unpopularity of peripheral thingies in northern California’ »
(Apologies to regular readers, this is one of my examples for Daily Lobo students)
View Daily Lobo in a larger map (Apologies to regular readers, this is one of my examples for Daily Lobo students)
Apologies to regular readers, these are some links for UNM Daily Lobo crew, with whom I’ll be chatting this afternoon: Google My Maps tutorial Buildings named after Pete Domenici Journal crime map The Broad Street Pump My favorite balloon-watching spots An example of a screen grab map Downloaded Drought Monitor map Sunday bird blogging, Cormorant …
Continue reading ‘#lobocamp (move along, nothing to see here)’ »
The “broken windows fallacy” is the economic argument that spending money on X is of intrinsic value because of the jobs created, regardless of the value of the thing being done. The reference to broken windows is the argument’s reductio ad absurdum – hire one person to break a bunch of windows, and a second …