[A]n informed and properly motivated risk communicator would proceed deliberately and cautiously. In particular, because efforts to quiet public fears about vaccines will predictably create some level of exactly that fear, such a communicator will not engage in a high-profile, sustained campaign to “reassure” the general public that vaccines are safe without reason to believe …
In a Greek forest, tree rings telling a familiar story – a history of surface fire, but a trend toward much more destructive blazes: the size of the area burned as well as the type of fire seem to have changed, with the 2007 event being the most extended crown fire encountered so far. Our …
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)