The Tree Rings Tale

Posted by on

Coming November 2009, from the University of New Mexico Press, The Tree Rings Tale: Understanding Our Changing Climate, by John Fleck.

It’s the story of western weather and climate, told through the work of a series of vignettes about some of my favorite scientists, written for middle school-aged kids. A little climate change, a lot of dendrochronology, not much actual use of the word “dendrochronology”. I don’t think you can pre-order it yet, but it’s not too early to add it to your preliminary Christmas lists for all the kiddos in your lives. You can read it yourself if you want.

Can I confess that I ran around the house squealing with excitement when I saw that it had appeared on Amazon?

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Sandpile Edition

Posted by on

On Joshua Cooper Ramo’s Age of the Unthinkable:

Instead of tanks and planes and armed battalions, we face “adaptive microthreats and ideas,” like improvised explosive devices made of cheap cell-phone components.
Because of such thinking, Ramo writes, “no major power has been able to defeat an insurgency anywhere in the world” since World War II.
“People are trying to explain the world using models that just don’t work,” Ramo said this week from New York, where he will make the rounds of television appearances to promote the book.

Elephant Diaries: “between systems”

Posted by on

One of the occupational hazards of being a journalist (at least the way I do it) is an embarassing lack of original ideas. My job is to entertain, understand, sort and pass judgment on the ideas of others, then explain the ones that meet some sort of preliminary test of usefulness and/or relevance. Ideas of my own is not a habit of mind I have developed over the years.

That doesn’t mean there are not journalists who can also be innovators. But I am not one of them. I had a conversation the other day with a friend, a good writer and smart contributor to the infosphere who is a non-journalist trying to figure out where he might fit into the new ecosystem, and I realized I had pretty much nothing to say beyond what won’t work, which is not a terribly helpful approach to the problem.

This is a long introduction to Jay Rosen doing what I described above as journalism, which is to collect a lot of really smart and really inconclusive writing done by others over the last month about the future of my industry:

I don’t know what will replace the newspaper journalism we have relied on. It’s a terrible loss for the public when people who bought the public service dream lose their jobs providing that service, and realizing that dream. I do not look forward to explaining to my students the contractions in the job market and why they’re likely to continue for the near term. It feels grim to have to say: “There is no business model in news right now. We’re between systems.”

Elephant Diaries: Measuring the Effect

Posted by on

This paper, a study of the effect of the closure of the Cincinnati Post on elections, got a good ride in the metamedia blogosphere a few weeks back when it came out, but I just got around to reading it. Interesting stuff, and you can see why it was popular with we inkstained scribes:

The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year’s Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win re-election, and voter turnout fell.

I’d love to see some clever data maven look at Albuquerque in the same way since the Tribune closed.

The authors conclude the paper with a bit of poetry that recalls the Albuquerque Tribune’s lighthouse:

The logo of the E.W. Scripps Co., printed on the front page of all its newspapers, is a lighthouse. This paper describes what happened when one of Scripps’ lights went out. The Cincinnati Post was a relatively small newspaper, with circulation of only 27,000 when it closed. Nonetheless, its absence appears to have made local elections less competitive along several dimensions: incumbent advantage, voter turnout and the number of candidates for office.

Imagine One of the World’s Largest Cities, Without Running Water

Posted by on

Daniel Hernandez, on Mexico City:

Reserves of the city’s largely imported water supplies from the Cutzamala plant are at their lowest in years. Hoping to prevent a larger disaster, for three days a month, the municipal water utility has decided to run the city’s supply at 50% its normal flow. March 14 was the first time this measure was taken — and from what I’m seeing and hearing, the water hasn’t been back on yet.

Navajo Water Bill Passes

Posted by on

Everybody’s calling the big omnibus public lands bill that passed the House yesterday a wilderness bill, but we water wonks know better, right:

Legislation to settle a long-standing dispute over the Navajo Nation’s rights to water from the San Juan River won final congressional approval Wednesday.

The legislation acknowledges the Navajo Nation’s right to 600,000 acre-feet per year of water from the San Juan — an amount equivalent to about six times the city of Albuquerque’s annual water use.

The bill formally ratifies a deal between New Mexico officials and the Navajo Nation worked out in 2005 intended to end legal uncertainty over the Navajo Nation’s legal entitlement to San Juan water. It now goes to the White House, where the president is expected to sign it next week.



Elephant Diaries: How Important is Andy Revkin’s Blog?

Posted by on

Last Sunday night, I read an excellent New York Times story via the Web about Steven Chu’s introduction to the ways of Washington. I cover the Department of Energy at my day job, and the DOE is a major employer in New Mexico, so I made a note of the story to include a link to the piece in my Monday morning links roundup on the work blog.

When I got to the office Monday and plucked my copy of the Times out of my mailbox, I noticed that the Chu piece was on the front page of the Times. “Made the front page,” I said to myself.

Why did that matter? Why did I care about the fact that the Times chose to use a piece of its most precious real estate to feature John Broder’s story about Steven Chu?

In the comments on a recent post here, a number of people offered variations on the point made most explicitly by David Zetland:

Paper is EXPENSIVE (time, editorial, etc.), so things in the PAPER (even if you read them online) are “better” as far as the signal to readers of what to read…

Chris Dunford, Kim Hannula and Keith Kloor made variations of this same point (I love my blog commenters!), but it was Zetland who captured the key piece of jargon I needed (I loves my jargon ’cause it gives me stuff to look up, and words to sound smart.): signaling.

The classic econ textbook example of signaling is a college degree, which signals the job-worthiness of an individual. Huge debate about how truly valuable that degree is in many fields in terms of actual worker productivity, but it continues to be used as a hiring decision shortcut.

Just like the trouble taken to get a college degree, all the trouble spent packaging up all that information, printing it up, driving it around town and throwing it on people’s driveways is no longer essential to the actual transmission of information. But it sends a signal.

What does this have to do with DotEarth, the blog run by Andy Revkin at the New York Times?

Chris Dunford said this in the comments on my last post (“Post” here is the Washington Post, subject of my last missive):

Anything printed in a major newspaper has more of it than anything posted in any blog.

There are a lot of reasons for this, but one of them is surely the feeling that “Someone important at the Post has looked at this and judged it worthy of its very limited and very valuable space.” There’s a journalistic professionalism that’s associated, rightly or wrongly, with major newspapers and magazines that simply is not associated with blogs and such.

So what’s the signaling associated with DotEarth? As a journalist trying to understand how to function in the new mixed environment where some of my work gets the “print signal” and some lives only in the ether, I view Revkin’s approach as the model: a platform that feeds into his print work, and off of his print work.

What signaling, if any, is associated with DotEarth’s presence at NYTimes.com? Does it get some of the gravitas to which Dunford is referring? Is that part of the signal? Or does the signal only exist on paper?

A related question, as Kim Hannula notes in her comments on the previous post: is there signaling associated with the move of her (terrific) blog to ScienceBlogs, which is affiliated with Seed magazine? Which is printed on paper?

Transboundary Issues: Where Are All the Water Wars?

Posted by on

Wendy Barnaby has an excellent piece in last week’s Nature (free for now, behind the paywall soon) challenging the conventional wisdom that wars of scarce water supplies are a likely result of the collision between population growth, aridity and climate change.

Barnaby had set out to write a book about water wars. But the more research she did, the more she realized they didn’t happen. Why is that? Her answer seems straightforward and persuasive: Water shortages show up in their most extreme form as a shortage of water needed to grow food. Nations that cannot grow all their own food import it from elsewhere. Conflict over a lack of water, she found, is routinely addressed by nations through food imports rather than going to war:

The relationship of food trade to water sustainability is often not obvious, and often remains invisible: no political leader will gain any popularity by acknowledging that their country makes up the water budget only by importing food.

This is not some arm-waving theoretical argument, but rather an empirical assertion. To the extent there are wars that might look like wars over water, Barnaby argues, they in fact are wars over more complex power relations between nations, with water a bit player rather than a central cause.

Barnaby may have scuttled her own book, but she seems to be on to something here:

Book or no book, it is still important that the popular myth of water wars somehow be dispelled once and for all. This will not only stop unsettling and incorrect predictions of international conflict over water. It will also discourage a certain public resignation that climate change will bring war, and focus attention instead on what politicians can do to avoid it: most importantly, improve the conditions of trade for developing countries to strengthen their economies. And it would help to convince water engineers and managers, who still tend to see water shortages in terms of local supply and demand, that the solutions to water scarcity and security lie outside the water sector in the water/food/trade/economic development nexus. It would be great if we could unclog our stream of thought about the misleading notions of ‘water wars’.