In early 2008, I did some inquiries on the data underlying Albuquerque’s “green” claims and we published what I found in the newspaper. With a mayoral election underway and the city pushing forward on a “Climate Action Plan”, it seemed like a good time to revisit the issue. The results: When Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: ABQ Greenhouse Update’ »
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead’ »
JPL climate scientist Bill Patzert wrote a nice op ed in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune about weather, climate and fire that got me thinking about my old home turf of Southern California yesterday: What set us up for these fires? Rain has been scarce. A large-scale drought has strangled the American Southwest for almost …
In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation’ »
I’m in the midst of a story for the newspaper about drought and climate change that looks at the importance of temperature. It is not simply whether more or less rain falls, but also how much evaporation there is. This is the critical message from Richard Seager’s 2007 paper about the permanent Dust Bowl. That …
I’m sure there are a lot of things suffering right now because of the Texas drought. Few are as charismatic, though (sorry Michael), as the whooping crane: A drought in Texas severely affected the whooping crane’s foods of blue crabs and berries. Corn feeders were set up to supplement the cranes’ diets, but only about …
There are supply droughts, where the amount of rain falling from the sky drops precipitously, and the amount of water evaporating from plants and transpiring from their leaves, rises. And there are demand droughts, where the main problem is not in the supply of water nature offers, but in the way we use it. The …
Continue reading ‘What Kind of Drought is South Texas Having?’ »
Oil industry behind “energy citizens rallies” The U.S. oil industry’s main lobbying organization is behind a series of “energy citizens rallies” against pending climate change legislation, including two in New Mexico later this month, according to a memo obtained by the environmental group Greenpeace. “We don’t want critics to know our game plan,” American Petroleum …
I rode up South 14 in the Manzano Mountains this morning with a couple of friends. It’s been hot in town, and the ride seemed like it would offer some mountain cool. Albuquerque spreads across an alluvial plain at the base of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains, and once you get out of town and …
I’ve wanted to write about Klaus Lackner’s air capture ideas for a long time. They originated in his work at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the ’90s, and I met him and talked about the work at the time. But I didn’t really get it, and never wrote about it. In recent years I’ve been …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Puzzling Politics of Air Capture’ »