Cecil Adams goes through the thought experiment of how an Evil Genius might melt Earth’s icecaps, discarding one idea after another until landing on this: See how this grabs you. We come up with a process that traps energy in the atmosphere rather than letting it radiate away, perhaps involving an accumulation of gases such as …
While shopping recently at the Dollar Store, Nora and I came across the new frontier in climate change communication – inexpensive toys. The Endangered Species Grow Pal, Penguin Edition, is apparently collectible, and was a bargain at just $1. (It’s the Dollar Store.) Its package includes this helpful background: Penguin populations have decreased by nearly …
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Anne Jefferson has a look at last year’s Pakistan flooding that explores the intriguing question of how you get people to listen to forecasts. It turns out that they had forecasts in enough time to take action to reduce risk, but the forecasts were apparently ignored: So the Pakistani government did forecast the flood – at …
From the morning paper, a look back at how New Mexico’s natural gas outages happened (sub/ad req): Eventually, as the cold gained the upper hand and gas lines emptied, crews closed valves, cutting one community after another off of the gas grid — first Tularosa, then down to La Luz and Alamogordo on the gas …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Brutal Cold, Brutal Choices’ »
From this morning’s newspaper, explaining our remarkable cold in a continental context (sub/ad req): [I]t was as if someone left a giant freezer door open and all the arctic cold leaked out. While New Mexico lay beneath a mass of arctic air 30 or more degrees colder than normal, central Canada saw temperatures 20 degrees …
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We’ve been remarkably cold here in New Mexico this week. Yesterday, it turned into a major infrastructure problem, which forced me to very quickly get up to speed on how our state’s natural gas infrastructure works, on account of because a bunch of people had theirs turned off. From the morning paper (sub/ad req): The …
The terrific scientist-writer Anne Jefferson, who studies what happens when water meets earth, has an excellent post up today summarizing flooding around the world. The floods in Queensland have gotten the most attention in country, because (I suspect) the people are like us, plus they have the affluence and technology to post cool flood videos …
Continue reading ‘In natural disasters, it’s the poor who suffer’ »
Residents of the arid southwestern US like to think we’re the ones who know drought. But drought’s a relative thing – not how dry it is in absolute terms, but in comparison to what you’re used to. Take New Orleans, for example, which received 2.75 inches in rain in November. Here in Albuquerque, that would …
Via Patricia McBroom, a fascinating look at a group studying tree rings in the redwoods along the Northern California coast for clues about climate: The plan is to chart the health of the trees over time and use laboratory analysis of carbon and oxygen isotopes to figure out how the trees have reacted in the …
For more than a decade, I’ve written about arguments over whether the United States is building, or could, or should build “new” nuclear weapons. They are frequently silly arguments. The “newness” debate was engaged in earnest in the late 1990s when the weaponeers fielded a nuclear bomb called the “B61 Mod 11”. The B61 is …
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