no gas yet

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The most significant story in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal was hidden away, the sort of story that doesn’t get a lot of attention because it is about something that didn’t happen:

It’s been nearly a year since Tecton Energy began its natural gas drilling in the West Mesa.
So far, no luck.
“(Tecton) believes there is natural gas out there … The question is locating it and bringing it to the surface,” Peter Sanchez, Atrisco Oil and Gas CEO, said Wednesday.
One well, drilled to about 8,000 feet north of Interstate 40 on the west side of the property, has come up dry. But Tecton and Atrisco have high hopes for a second well to the northeast where indicators show a good probability of natural gas, Sanchez said.
Work will begin there by late summer.

stuff I wrote elsewhere

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getting paid to float down a boat on a river:

But among the river people there also is some nervousness about the future. Much of the funding for bosque habitat restoration work has come courtesy of Pete Domenici, who is retiring at the end of his current term. Love or hate those dreaded pork barrel earmarks, but this is an example on the ground of what they do. Question one is where the money comes from after Sen. D is gone.

Question two involves the effect of the city-county Water Utility Authority’s plans to begining taking its San Juan Chama water out of the river later this year or early next year. Once we start drinking it, there will be that much less water in the river for fish and the rest of an ecosystem already seriously stressed.

But really, it’s hard to worry too much about all that when you’re sitting on a raft floating down a river. Did I mention I get paid for this?

and colorful, too!

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High praise that recently showed up in a comment on an old thread on climate change adaptation and mitigation:

This website is very nice and colorful too. Its nice to have something to show others where you attend church and to show all the smiling people filled of the goodness of the Lord. You have a wonderful website here. May God rich bless you always.

I’ve taken the liberty of deleting the accompanying link to a site devoted to getting rich by stuffing envelopes.

“carba”

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Great letter from Tom Swiler in today’s ABQJournal:

I propose that carbon dioxide should also be known by the name “carba.” Other oxides are known as the elemental root followed by an “a.” For example, aluminum oxide is known as alumina and silicon dioxide is known as silica.


Like the name “water,” “carba” is not as chemically descriptive as the formal name of the compound it represents, but it is short and sweet, and it could keep us from slipping further into flawed terminology and therefore a flawed understanding regarding carbon dioxide.

Roadrunner

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Back in the day, I loved to write about supercomputers – the fastest this, the latest that. Eventually it got old. How many stories can you do about another computer being faster than the last one? But I brought the old tool kit out of retirement yesterday to mark Roadrunner breaking the petaflop barrier. Because really, any time you can get the words “petaflop” and “PlayStation” in the same story, you’re ahead of the game, right?

A team from IBM and Los Alamos has wired together what amounts to thousands of PlayStation video game chips to create the world’s fastest supercomputer.
But they won’t be playing Grand Theft Auto. The machine— capable of a million billion calculations per second— is headed to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it will be used for nuclear weapons simulations.

As an aside, it’s worth noting that I recently acquired Jonathan Richman’s Roadrunner, which I was happy to learn yesterday is number 269 on Rolling Stone Magazine’s list of the 500 greatest rock and roll songs. Am I dating myself?

A Problem the News Media Can’t Fix

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Matthew Nisbet points to some new Gallup data that I believe supports an argument I have made in the past: that lack of public understanding of climate change is not a problem the news media can fix. From the Gallup report:

While the percentage of Democrats who view the news about global warming as being exaggerated has been fairly stable, at 23% in 1997 and 18% this year, the percentage of Republicans taking this view has increased dramatically — from 34% to 59%. The result is a 41-point difference between adherents of the two major parties. Growing skepticism about news coverage of global warming clearly goes hand in hand with Republicans’ declining belief that it is already occurring.

In other words, to the extent that the news media provides information that conflicts with their political viewpoints, people are more likely to distrust the news media rather than change their views. This is consistent with my experience on issue after issue as a journalist. This is not a function of the political views of the actors involved. Depending on the issue, actors on both the left and the right, as well as actors on one side or the other of issues that do not fall on a left-right divide, routinely choose to distrust the media rather than change their views when the media presents information that is in conflict with those views.

Explaining the Temperature Record

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There has been a great deal of discussion lately about an apparent global cooling trend that conventional climate science is at loss to explain. Most recently, for example, Anthony Watts made much of the latest satellite data out of Huntsville:

Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of a much cooler than normal May, such as late spring snows as far south as Arizona, extended skiing in Colorado, and delays in snow cover melting, (here and here), the University of Alabama, Huntsville (UAH) published their satellite derived Advanced Microwave Sounder Unit data set of the Lower Troposphere for May 2008.

It is significantly colder globally, colder even than the significant drop to -0.046°C seen in January 2008.

It appears now that Noah Shachtman has the explanation: Pirate Attacks up 75 percent. This seems strong confirmation for the Venganza hypothesis:

[S]tatistics show that the rise in global temperature and the number of pirates in existence are inversely proportional…