Boating in Albuquerque
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Archive of entries posted by jfleck
“sewage epidemiology”
The residents of Lubbock use more cocaine on the weekend. How do we know this? Science! Influent to the Lubbock (Texas) Water Reclamation Plant was sampled twice a week to assess weekly variations in estimates of cocaine consumption over a 5-month period. BE was extracted from influent wastewater samples using solid phase extraction and analyzed …
The Sacramento Delta and the Colorado River – a comparison
Barry Nelson had an insightful post today comparing and contrasting the Colorado River and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta systems. There are important similarities – crashing (or crashed) ecosystems and water supplies for human systems that are stretched beyond the point of sustainability. But the institutional frameworks for addressing those problems and the prospect of …
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River Beat: only one color needed on the Colorado
The June forecast on the Colorado River is almost an academic exercise at this point. What we’ve got is what we’ve got. But it’s nevertheless notable that the folks at the Colorado Basin River Forecast Center only needed one color this month for their map:
Stuff I wrote elsewhere: climate change and megafires
With the Whitewater-Baldy fire pushing 260,000 acres (New Mexico’s largest by a wide margin), I spent some time talking with the forest-climate community about climate change, forest health and the role of natural variability in creating the conditions for the southwest’s recent megafires: Global warming is playing a role in the conditions in the Gila …
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Sacramento Delta sinking faster than sea level is rising
The risk from sea level rise to California’s Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta system is frequently discussed. As sea level rises, the argument goes, the risk of failing levees increases. With a substantial share of California’s farmland and population depending on water supplies that flow through the delta, failed levees is an enormous risk. Levee failures, as …
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Inkstain Weather Central: a dry May
Let us stipulate that my home weather records are subject to what Tversky and Kahneman would likely call “the law of small numbers“. Which is to say that, when I tell you May is the driest month of the year around here, you should suspect my statistical reasoning. That said, it is factually correct to …
Inkstain CSFC Index at a grim 2
Consistent with Friday’s dismal US jobs report, the latest Inkstain CSFC Index, my key indicator of local economic health, does not look good. On the morning bike ride, I swung by the local Walmart Superstore and counted just two big storage containers out back.
In Arizona, a Colorado River shortfall would hit ag first
What’s the Colorado River failure mode? By which I mean, with as much specificity as we can muster, when the water begins to run short, who will get less? I’m pushing this question because of a frustration with the doom scenarios generated by simply extrapolating the diverging supply and demand curves forward in time and invoking …
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Science literacy, numeracy and science policy challenges
Dan Kahan, the Yale “cultural cognition” guy, has a new paper highlighting the problem with the argument that a more scientifically literate public will solve all our scientized problems, things like climate change, GMOs and nuclear stuff where the scientific argument has become intractably embedded in a political context. (The paper’s actually targeted at climate …
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