Westward Ho! Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. From today’s bike ride, the Westward Ho motel along old Route 66 on Albuquerque’s west side. I love the saguaro and battered neon. I’m guessing the pun in the motel’s name is not intentional.
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’ »
New Mexico’s June 2009 gasoline sales were the lowest for the month since 1994:
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 …
From this morning’s newspaper, UNM ecologist Jim Brown sketches out dire scenarios: On one hand, Brown wrote in his 1995 book “Macroecology,” humans are just one of the millions of species that inhabit Earth, “formed by the same processes that produced all other species, and our abundance and distribution are governed by the same natural …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Ecologists and Peak Oil’ »
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 …
New Mexico water law is a tangle in many ways, not least of which is our inability to adjudicate water rights and therefore implement priority calls to restrict usage when there is not enough water to go around. But in one area, we’re ahead of a number of other western states: the regulation of groundwater. …
One of the most difficult parts of science communication is understanding what your audience knows and doesn’t know going in. Mark Justice Hinton recently steered me to a great blog that solves that problem with extraordinary grace. It’s Gambler’s House, a blog about Chaco Canyon, written by Teofilo, a seasonal employee at the park. Teofilo …
Continue reading ‘Science Communication: Understanding Audience’ »
Friday bird blogging: in which I visit the sewage treatment plant and see nature. (Trying to lighten up the wonkery at the work blog.) Albuquerque’s water future: in which I invoke Zetland’s argument regarding the western approach to water planning, as it applies to Albuquerque’s mayoral politics.
I haven’t had enough brainshare lately to track energy issues the way I was last spring and summer when thinking about $4 gasoline was such a teachable moment, but on popping in over at the EIA this evening, I note that we New Mexicans are continuing our frugal ways: By my quick calculation, consumption in …