In the U.S. western water community, John Wesley Powell is a legend for his insight about the difficulties of building a society in an arid land. But we can be a bit parochial here in the states, so until today I’d never heard of his (sort of) Canadian counterpart, John Palliser. Palliser explored the northern …
It looks yesterday’s premise is holding – despite the extraordinary blanket of white in my backyard, the snowpack in the Rio Grande Basin, source of a big chunk of New Mexico’s water supply, didn’t pick up a whole lot from the Great Storm of ’06. Tom Pagano, who does the runoff forecasts for us out …
Andrew Revkin does a nice job in this morning’s New York Times in characterizing those scientists that Roger Pielke Jr. has described as the “nonskeptical heretics”: A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate. They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe …
I wandered the airport yesterday chatting up stranded passengers for the paper. My favorites (I know, this sucks, but in a profoundly ironic way) – the couple who drove down from Colorado to Albuquerque, figuring they had a better chance of flying out here than out of Denver: Ron and Ruth Shaw were supposed to …
Storm ’06 – cactus Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. This is the sort of thing tailor-made for Us Media, and we “people of the year” are in full flower today in Albuquerque.
Dec. 30, 2006 Colorado Snowpack Map Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. It’ll be another few days before the InterWeb data sources catch up with what the eastern two Four Corners states must call the Big Storm of 2006, but the preliminary data suggests that the water supply implications are less significant than the enormous pile of …
Continue reading ‘Storm of 2006: Water Supply Implications’ »
Apologies for those outside of New Mexico for today’s digression, but we’re having a shared experience, a kind of community hug. Snowmen. People walking in the middle of the street because the tire tracks are the easiest place to walk. Cars going slow and being polite about the people walking in the middle of the …
From our friends at the National Weather Service: 00 SXUS75 KABQ 300848 RERABQ RECORD EVENT REPORT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBUQUERQUE NM 148 AM MST SAT DEC 30 2006 …RECORD DAILY MAXIMUM SNOWFALL SET AT ALBUQUERQUE NM… A RECORD SNOWFALL OF 11.3 INCHES WAS SET AT THE ALBUQUERQUE SUNPORT YESTERDAY. THIS BREAKS THE OLD RECORD OF …
A new paper by Wenju Cai and Tim Cowan at CSIRO in Victoria argues that anthropogenic climate change can explain some, but not all, of the marked decline in rainfall over the last half century in southwest Western Australia: “An ensemble result from 71 experiments reveals that anthropogenic forcing contributes to about 50% of the …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Australian “drought”’ »
Here’s a lazyweb word problem: John rides his bicycle to work, thus saving a half gallon (1.9 liters) of gasoline, consuming 700 calories in the process. If John replaces those calories by eating beef, what is the net reduction (increase?) in greenhouse gas emissions? If he gets the calories from soy protein? Etc? (Ideally, the …