This week’s column, in which I play the national security card (sub/ad req): These are the same folks responsible for maintaining our nuclear deterrent. They are thinking this way because the language of risk and uncertainty is familiar to people in the national security community, and it is their job to think about and help …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: In Uncertainty Lies Risk’ »
U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is reported to have said in a talk this morning (Thurs. 2/24) in Washington D.C. that he believes the ongoing drought on the Colorado River could be the spark to shift conservative political opinion on climate change. From the Las Vegas Sun: In comments he delivered at a symposium hosted …
Continue reading ‘Will an Empty Lake Mead Sell Skeptics on the Reality of Climate Change?’ »
Peter Fawcett has a terrific paper in Nature this week on southwestern megadrought. I’ve been “upstream” (as the science journos like to say) for a while, having been along when Peter and others did some of their very first field work in the Valle Grande in Northern New Mexico back in 2003, and I’ve been …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Endangered species grow pals – the climate change connection’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Explaining the Cold’ »
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’ »