Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Colorado River Edition

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From today’s newspaper, a look at decision-making in the face of uncertainty on the Colorado River:

Trying to follow the science of climate change and the Colorado River, it would be easy to throw up your hands. Very smart scientists (Hoerling among them) have come up with very different answers about how climate change might affect the Colorado over the next half-century.

Estimates over the past few years have varied from a modest 5 percent decrease in the river’s average annual flow by 2050 to an alarming 45 percent decline.

OK, even a 5 percent drop in the Colorado’s average annual flow ought to alarm you. “With over 27 million people relying on the Colorado River for drinking water in the United States, and over 3.5 million acres of farmland in production in the basin,” U.S. Bureau of Reclamation officials wrote in a recent report, “the Colorado River is the single most important natural resource in the Southwest.”

It would be easy to get frustrated by the uncertainty, even after new studies have reduced the range of uncertainty to a decline of between 5 percent and 20 percent.

Welcome to real science, where nature offers up answers only grudgingly, not like the tidy answers to settled questions you find in textbooks.

Calloway on Stegner

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From Larry Calloway:

I asked Wallace Stegner if he could define the history of the West, expecting a Frontier Thesis answer consistent with his Wilderness Letter and “the geography of hope.” He leaned forward as cool as his heavy drift of snowy hair and said:

“One big real estate deal.”

Yulsman on Gore

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Tom Yulsman ventures back into the political dangerous terrain left by another Al Gore exaggeration on climate change:

In an interview with the Guardian yesterday, the Nobel prize winner said business leaders are realizing that action is required on climate change because they are “seeing the writing on every wall they look at. They’re seeing the complete disappearance of the polar ice caps right before their eyes in just a few years.”

When I talk to university classes about the climate science-politics-policy interface, I use Gore as an example, pointing out that he mostly gets the science right, but sometimes (as in the case of hurricanes and the iconic logo for his film, for example) emphasizes outliers at the expense of the bulk of the science on which he builds his case.

The examples I could cite here increase in number. This concerns me.

Elephant Diaries: Clay Shirky on Why Newspapers are Just Fucked

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It’s not that we haven’t done The Right Thing. It’s that there is no Right Thing. The problems are fundamental:

The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

The thing is, no one really wanted to fund the Baghdad bureau, or the guy at the city council meeting, or at least not very many people wanted to. It was just an odd civic side effect of the old model. That’s gone.

(h/t Ken)

The Difference Between Climate Scientists and Economists

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Typical Environmental Economist

Climate scientists, apparently, are a dour, grumpy bunch, while economists have the cheerful demeanor of a plucky role model heading enthusiastically into the future.* This, at least, is the impression left by Jean-Marie Macabrey’s account** of last week’s Cophenhagen climate fest:

At the congress, it seemed that all the scientists had to share with their peers was bad news, but a number of economists saw the climate crisis rather as an historic opportunity to reorganize the world economy and develop new, clean and job-creating activities.

* I’ve never actually seen Dora the Explorer. This metaphor is merely notional.

** Cool that Climatewire stuff is now available via NYTimes.

Elephant Diaries: The Perks

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Helene Cooper on her first ride on Air Force One:

As we took off, the flight attendant motioned to the white telephone between one of my colleagues and me. “You can use the phone to make a call anywhere you want,” he said. I snatched up the phone, excitedly. “I’m going to call my sister from Air Force One!” I said.

I looked up into a solid wall of New York Times disapproval. All three of my colleagues were shaking their heads at me. “Don’t even think about it,” said one of them, Jeff Zeleny. Sighing, I put the phone back down.

Elephant Diaries: the Kids

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As I’ve gotten older, one of my great joys as a journalist has been to watch the kids come through the newsroom, young journalists starting their careers with fire in their bellies and a naive but sincere passion for using journalism to help change the world. Which is why this was so sad to read:

I did everything I could to gain experience, learn new skills and become a concerned, involved and accurate journalist and citizen. I went from general newspaper reporting to web editing to radio reporting looking for a way to become a part of the media. And once I got my job as a web producer I felt like it all paid off.