My first serious exposure to Roger Pielke Jr.’s work was at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Albuquerque in 2001. He gave a talk laying out the basic thrust of his hurricane vulnerability argument: that societal changes (essentially building stuff on the beach) are the dominant variable in the societal hurricane risk equation. It’s an …
On paleoclimate in caves: In most parts of the world, New Mexico included, there have only been rain gauges and thermometers to record the weather for a little more than a century. To figure out what happened before, scientists are exploiting a growing arsenal of tricks, from layers of ice in Antarctica to corals that …
Roger Pielke Jr. notes a remarkable coincidence between the text written by Bjorn Lomborg in the Guardian earlier this week and something Roger wrote last month. First Pielke: Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be “policy neutral,” were reported in the media to …
Much interesting discussion today about the issue of “framing” in the politics of global climate change – see, for example, Ellen Goodman’s column in the Boston Globe, along with useful discussion by Matthew Nisbet and Tom Yulsman. Useful stuff, but ignores the “sleeveless tops in February” frame. 🙂 From the Fix: What’s with the weather …
For the last six months or so, Journal photographer Marla Brose and I have been hanging out with University of New Mexico grad student Mel Strong, watching him do science: To the lay outsider, science can look like an edifice of fixed knowledge— the facts in textbooks. The day-to-day business of science is different, a …
This’ll probably come as good news to my drought-plagued Australian friends. El Niño’s just about done. For us here in the U.S., the precipitation pattern – dry in Arizona, wet in Seattle – suggests that no teleconnection really got engaged in any sort of a big way, reflective of either how weak it was, or …
Famous Rock in New MexicoOriginally uploaded by scithdekaffa. “The land here is crappy, it is hot and nothing grows. ” – scithdekaffa (hat tip Chantal)
Our most spectacular neighborhood bird, the Northern Flicker, paid a visit to the backyard pond this morning. The pond is really a stock tank whose purpose, in addition to the entertainment provided by its undirected ecosystem, is to serve as a watering hole for neighborhood birds. Last weekend, Lissa banged through the ice and within …
Alameda DamOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. John Wesley Powell would be proud. From his 1878 “Report on the Arid Lands“: There are two methods of storing the waste waters. Reservoirs may be constructed near the sources of the streams and the waters held in the upper valleys, or the water may be run from the canals …
If you want to understand the contradictions of life in 21st century west, there are two books you must read: John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Arid Lands, and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. You also must understand that both were deeply insightful, and that both were also full of crap, and thinking through …