Spring in Switzerland
This Rutishauser and colleagues have been tracking the blooming of flowers in Switzerland (can you think of a more delightful job as a scientist?). In a paper just published in GRL, they concluded that 2007 was a remarkable spring:
Anomalously high temperatures led to a very early onset of plant phenological spring phases, including 98 record early observations out of a possible total of 302 (32%) for selected phases in Switzerland.
To me, one of the most revealing conversations I’ve had with a scientist was a discussion about the variables that govern the timing of plants leafing out, and flowering, and dropping their leaves. We were walking in the woods, and he explained how relatively poorly studied the question of timing is. It’s the sort of data that, comprehensively collected, would be incredibly useful for climate change studies. But the comprehensive collection of such “phenology” data is still in its infancy.
For more on the importance of this issue and the efforts to collect better data: US National Phenology Network.
(Thanks to Garrulus for the picture.)
One Track Mind
Me: “Did you have snow at your house this morning?”
Unnamed friend: “Yeah, but we could have ridden.”
Note: I wasn’t asking about a bike ride. I just wanted to know if it was pretty.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Expanding Deserts
Andrew Revkin writes this morning about a paper in Nature Geoscience showing an expansion of barren desert-like regions of ocean.
NMSR Podcast
My homeys at New Mexicans for Science and Reason have a great radio show on Saturday afternoons (2 p.m., 1350 a.m. in Albuquerque). But the only place I have an am radio is in the car, and I’m almost never in my car at the right time.
Now, thanks to the magic of PodGoobers, you can listen any time you want: NMSR Podcast.
loading docks and commercial buildings
Inkstain Google search string of the day:
are loading docks required on new commercial buildings
(Here’s what they found. Hope it was useful.)
Breakfast of Champions
To the guy in the Wheaties jersey out on the bosque bike trail this morning: Dang that was fun!
I was out by myself, but (as often happens) I ended up amidst a train of like-minded riders. In this case, our like minds involved going fast. There are so many families with strollers and kids on trike and stuff on much of the trail that you can’t play go-fast games. But down in the south valley, south of the Bueno chile plant, things thin out and it’s easier to get things cranked up.
Since I got the book done in January, I’ve had the freedom to really crank up the miles, and I can feel my body changing. I can see it in the data, too. I’m a bit of a bike riding data freak, and I’ve got heart rate, speed, elevation, mileage, etc. About two weeks ago, I saw this big non-linear jump as my body all of a sudden clicked into bike riding mode.
South of the chile plant, there’s this sweet S-curve where the bike trail crosses a ditch. As we were approaching it I had the legs to jump out of the front of our little train so I could take it by myself. It’s been a couple of years since I’ve had the legs to do that. Wheaties Shirt got back on my wheel pretty quickly. I’m still a slow old guy. But the rest of the way through the south valley, we were just flying.
The Creative Class and the Golden West
Having recently read Richard Florida’s “The Rise of the Creative Class“, and having heard a great deal of rhetoric locally about the importance of creative class economy issues to Albuquerque’s future, it occurs to me that it will be interesting to see how our community’s leadership responds to Thursday’s fire that destroyed the Golden West and caused extensive damage to the two music venues on either side of it.
At least one prominent local institution has taken up the discussions with fervor. Let’s hear it for the bottom-up nature of the creative class.
Don’t Blame the Sun
A lovely bit of amateur climate science from Tim Haab:
Follow the bouncing ball of logic. C02 concentrations and temperatures are correlated. Sunspot activity and temperatures are not and neither are CO2 concentrations and sunspot activity. Therefore, sunspots activities are not a causal factor in determining long-term temperature trends.
Don’t worry. His work is easily dismissed. He’s an economist.