Years ago Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were on Letterman, and Dave was complaining about the problem posed for movie audiences when one of them gave a movie a thumbs up and the other a thumbs down. Dave came up with a brilliant solution: he had them shoot basketball free throws for it. As many …
Hurricane John has developed something called a “pinhole eye,” which Chris Mooney declares “spooky“. I don’t know from pinhole cameras, but apparently this is a big deal, according to Chris: The same thing happened when Hurricane Wilma put on a record burst of intensification last year, building up from a tropical storm into a Category …
A helpful colleague points out hurricane John, which is strengthening as it runs up Mexico’s west coast. Happily for the folks living in Baja, most of the models show John living out its life over water. Of course it would be wrong of me to hope that John follows the GFDL model track up into …
Continue reading ‘In Which I Finally Get My Own Hurricane’ »
Courtesy Avelino Maestas: Here’s the thing to notice: a bright sunny day, a creek that apparently is normally dry (else the plants alongside would be different), yet look at the muddy chocolate milk thing going on. Years ago, I was hanging out on a hillside in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon with a group …
Jim Giles has a story in last week’s Nature (sub. req.) pointing to some preliminary work linking warm Atlantic temperatures to last year’s devastating Amazon drought: The drought first caught scientists’ interest because its cause was unusual. Dry spells in the Amazon usually occur in El Niño years, when warm water off the Pacific coast …
The latest drought monitor, out this morning, pretty much wipes out drought conditions completely across much of New Mexico: In New Mexico, D1 and D0 conditions were reduced over much of the state. A large area free of drought designation exists in central New Mexico and a new drought-free area was introduced in northeast New …
Summer rains usually don’t do much good at Elephant Butte, New Mexico’s major storage reservoir. (I touched on this a bit last week in my on line Journal chat.) But this summer’s been extraordinary. So how’s the Butte doing? One of my water geek contacts sent me this link, to daily numbers from the Bureau …
So I’m now fully prepared to look stupid. This morning’s front page of the newspaper included a short story by me about the rains finally shutting down. Umm. Hold that thought. Hurricane Ileana is changing the picture in a hurry, with the possibility of a big slug of moisture come the weekend: AT LEAST SOME …
One of my arguments against Chris Mooney’s thesis (“The Republican War on Science“) is that all disputants in scientized political debates cherrypick. Chris has argued from the specific – Well-documented examples in which conservatives have done this. – to the general – The problem is that conservatives do this. My view is that we have …
jones_arroyo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Another sight from Saturday’s bike ride: This is the Jones arroyo (and by “arroyo,” I mean “concrete channel”) that Coco wrote about last week. If you click through to the big version of the picture, you can see where they whacked out the bridge’s concrete sidewalls to let the water …