Over the last couple of days’ riding: A pair of crows harassing a hawk. Two guys up in a cherry-picker using a high-pressure hose to clean pigeon shit off of the Blakes Lotaburger sign. A couple of old hippies with a shopping cart. Asked us where we were going. “Up in the mountains,” we told …
Climate wonks with a key to get through Science’s gate should check out Andy Dessler’s excellent discussion in today’s issue of the water vapor feedback. For those who don’t, here’s the nut graph: [A]lthough there continues to be some uncertainty about its exact magnitude, the water vapor feedback is virtually certain to be strongly positive, …
There’s a cliche that keeps popping up in the discussion of newspapers’ futures that links the fate of my business today with railroads of old. Railroads, the argument goes, lost out to the trucking industry because they thought they were in the railroad business, rather than the transportation business. Newspapers, by analogy, are failing because …
Continue reading ‘Elephant Diaries: The Railroad Metaphor’ »
The global price of food is down 27 percent from a year ago, says the Economist. I’d link, but I’m typing this on my iPod.
My employer was kind enough to publish my thoughts on George Will’s Sunday column for our print subscribers. (Sub/ad required for that, I think. Commens closed here, I set up an open thread over there.)
Links to my work from Daily Kos and FiveThirtyEight in the same day. Barb raises the question of whether that’s 30 total minutes.
Birds Flee Changing Habitats (ad/sub req.): Birds and butterflies offer the earliest signs that ecosystems are changing in response to a changing climate, according to Craig Allen, an ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey. “They’re mobile,” said Allen, an expert on the effect of climate change on New Mexico’s environment. Climate has always changed, Allen …
Continue reading ‘More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Back on the Bird Beat’ »
The global cooling mole pops up its head again. Whack. (Comments closed here. If you’ve got something to say, do it there.)
From the department of shameless self promotion, if you’re in the Albuquerque area you should block out some time this evening around 7 p.m.-ish to watch In Focus on KNME, public telly channel 5, where I will be trying to explain brackish groundwater issues. Then watch this space tomorrow, as I try to walk back …
Frequently, when I’m driving to work, I see what I think is one of the clearest examples of an economic externality: big gravel trucks with lousy covers and a shower of greater or lesser extent of little bits of gravel flying off, threatening the windshields of all who would come near. On the mud flaps, …