Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: ABQ Greenhouse Update

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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 signed the U.S. Conference of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement in 2005, he pledged to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Albuquerque.

By next year, according to a city estimate, emissions will have gone up 8 percent since Chávez made the pledge.

My previous story can be found here, but as part of my employer’s efforts to figure out how to compensate me for my efforts, you’ll have to subscribe to the paper or sit through an ad to read it.

Inland Desalination

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While much of the discussion of “new water” in the western United States involves desalination of seawater, there’s an experiment getting underway outside Albuquerque that is part of a new approach to the problem: desalination of brackish groundwater. My colleague Rosalie Rayburn has a story in the Albuquerque Journal on the latest testing going on here, out in Sandoval County on the northwest edge of the Albuquerque metro area:

The water is in a briny aquifer more than 3,500 feet below the Rio Puerco basin. A county drilling project discovered the aquifer in 2007. Testing last year indicated it is big enough to support a community of 300,000 people for 100 years. The water contains dissolved solids that must be removed before it is suitable for domestic use.

The technology is largely the same as used for seawater desal, generally reverse osmosis. But the difference in water sources raises a couple of problems that make inland desal quite different from ocean desal.

First, the ocean is, for all practical purposes, a sustainable water source. There are other sustainability issues, involving energy use, but you’re essentially never going to run out of ocean water. Inland desal depends on reservoirs of ancient water that will be mined if this process goes forward in a big way. So, like any groundwater mining, it’s not sustainable in the long term.

Second, you’ve got an enormous waste disposal problem. Roughly speaking, for every three gallons or so of clean water you get the residual brines concentrated in a fourth gallon. You’ve got to get rid of that somehow.

And of course the whole process – ocean or inland – is quite energy intensive.

For more, see what El Paso, Texas is doing.

The Infamous Colorado River

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A blog post showed up in my Colorado River news feed, about a winery on the west slope in Colorado, that is irrigated with water from “the infamous Colorado River” (emphasis added)

What an odd way of describing the Colorado. Is the great muddy lifeline of the West really “notoriously evil,” “having a reputation of the worst kind”?

A little googling showed me that it’s a common turn of phrase:

I was inclined to think it was just lazy writing, but in fact there were some gems that made sense:

Sometimes it’s not the River itself that’s notoriously evil. Sometimes it’s laws. Or toads.

No Dogs, No Bikes

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For my bike ride this morning, I headed north to check out the new bike path into Albuquerque’s Balloon Fiesta Park, which my colleague Rosalie Rayburn wrote about in this morning’s paper (sub/ad req). We’re a week away from Albuquerque’s famed balloon fiesta. I’ve always enjoyed riding bikes in the mornings and watching a zillion hot air balloons, but the auto traffic around the field itself is a nightmare, so I normally stick to the paved bike trails which go near the balloon field, but not too near.

This year, the newly completed trail goes right up to the balloon field itself – grade separated, zero auto, bikes only. This is great, a real positive step by the city to make one of Albuquerque’s most popular events more bike friendly. I’ve been watching the final construction for months, so I rode up this morning to see if the final bits were done.

When I got close, I found the final half mile still blocked off while workers put the finishing touches on whatever needs finishing. So I followed the old route into the balloon field, which I sadly had to share with large motorized vehicles. As, for example, the guy in the unnecessarily large pickup truck who yelled something to the effect that it would have been more convenient to him were I to have not used this particular road.

It also would have been more convenient to me if he weren’t on the road, but it’s all about sharing the space and trying to get along, right? It never occurred to me to yell at him for taking up so much space with his unnecessarily large pickup truck. But then, I don’t have a big metal cage to protect me from what might follow, so best to just smile and ride defensively.

No dogs or bikes allowed.

No dogs or bikes allowed.

When I got to the park’s entrance, where cars were heading in to do whatever it is they were heading in to do, I was stopped by a parking security person. She stepped out into the lane in front of me, waved me down assertively, and said, politely but firmly, “No bikes allowed.”

Sigh. We’re making progress, but we still have a ways to go. (Picture taken three years ago at the far end of the same park. I’m pretty sure the signs are still there.)

Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead

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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 it used to be. That’s the reality that water managers are grappling with, and it’s forcing them to confront the second reality: that stationarity – the idea that past is reasonable prologue – is fork-stuck-in-it-dead:

Stationarity, said U.S. Geological Survey senior scientist Julio Betancourt, allows you to predict future natural events “within a fluctuating but well-defined variability.”
That notion died, he said, with the realization that climate change makes the future unpredictable.
Sharon Megdal, who moderated the panel on the state’s water future, said she liked Yogi Berra’s definition: “The future ain’t what it used to be.”
Instead of variability around a stable mean, we have both a changing envelope of variability and an underlying trend in the mean.
Julio, who is both a terrific integrative scientist and an enormously articulate and effective advocate for his ideas (read my book to learn more about his work – it’s not too early to pre-order!) has been pushing this point recently, and the water community seems to increasingly get it.
The interesting thing here is that, at least in the Arizona water community, folks are getting serious about the conversation about what to do in the face of the loss of stationarity and the resulting likelihood that they’ve got less water to work with than they thought. I’m not so sure we’re there yet in the New Mexico conversation (thoughts, Inkstain readers?), but clearly the idea is now unambiguously on the table.
More on stationarity from Inkstain:

Measuring Snow

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I’ve been relatively successful over the years in ending my newspaper’s practice of getting snowfall totals from ski areas when we’re doing storm stories. I reason that the ski areas a) are built in places that get an unusually large amount of snow relatively to their surroundings, which makes the number misleading, and/or b) have an economic incentive to report large numbers. Instead, I use numbers from the real time SNOTEL network, along with spotter reports to the National Weather Service.

Via Zetland, I see this from the Chronicle of Higher Education – real evidence to support my hunch:

A team of economists at Dartmouth College has discovered that ski areas report 23 percent more new snow on weekends, but, unsurprisingly, “there is no such weekend effect in government precipitation data.”

Manure spontaneous combustion II

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Further research shows this, from C.A. Browne, The Spontaneous Heating and Ignition of Hay and Other Agricultural Products, Science, 3 March 1933: Vol. 77. no. 1992, pp. 223 – 229, DOI: 10.1126/science.77.1992.223

In 1929 the author suggested as a possible solution of the problem of spontaneous ignition the formation, by micro-organisms under anaerobic conditions, of unsaturated unstable intermediary compounds which, in the sudden exposure of the interior of the fermenting mass of hay to the air, absorb atmospheric oxygen with so much avidity that the temperature is rapidly raised not only above the death point of the micro-organisms but even to the point of ignition of the hay. This spontaneous ignition may take place almost instantly, as James, Bidwell and McKinney, of the Department of Agriculture, have observed in the case of heating horse manure, or it may take place more slowly, according to the rapidity with which the outside air gains access to the hot pocket in the interior of the hay. (emphasis added)

Manure Spontaneous Combustion

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In Vol. II of his exhaustive 1882 treatise “Legal Medicine“,  Charles Meymott Tidy, M.B., FCS, Master of Surgery; Professor of Chemistry and of Forensic Medicine and Public Health at the London Hospital, Medical Officer of Health for Islington, Late Deputy Medical Officer of Health and Public Analyst for the City of London, Etc., Etc., noted that:

of the spontaneous combustion either of heaps of damp leaves or of manure, no instance is recorded.

It is not clear what happened in the intervening 127 years, but we now have what is apparently a clear case. From the Los Angeles Times:

The Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said the fire appears to have been started by a “manure spontaneous combustion from a local ranch.”