Take that, Vegas!

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There’s a war of words going on out West that is by turns hilarious and illustrative of the deep divisions regarding the use of water in our arid region.

The trigger was a comment by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman in response to Tim Barnett’s study suggestion Lake Mead had a 50-50 chance of going dry by 2021. Goodman’s response? Dry up the farms in the Imperial Valley! Needless to say, this has not been well received among the folks who grow our winter lettuce (free reg. req.):

Imperial Irrigation District spokesman Kevin Kelley said that kind of reasoning is typical.

“It is a kind of disconnect that agricultural areas like ours runs into. … We don’t think it’s an accident that the mayor of Las Vegas has immediately seized on the notion that fallowing in the Imperial Valley is the quick fix to an urban water shortage in Las Vegas,” he said.

The Imperial Valley grows an estimated 90 percent of the nation’s winter vegetables. In 2006 the Valley produced $1.6 billion worth of agricultural products, according the Imperial County Farm Bureau.

“Without a doubt Las Vegas is enjoying the food grown in California with the water they want,” said Nicole M. Rothfleisch, executive director of the Farm Bureau.

A Flying Village

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Sandfill cranesI stopped on the bike ride today, down by the river, to watch and listen to an enormous flight of sandhill cranes, headed north. I played a bit with the words to describe it (I often “write” while I’m on the bike), but I didn’t come up with anything quite as crisp as Laura Paskus’s description of their “sloppy V.” (picture courtesy Fish and Wildlife Service – click through to hear ’em)

Up close, they’re ungainly, clumsy things, and when they fly, it’s such a disjointed mess sometimes that you wonder how they pull it off. Yet there they are, somehow finding the cohesiveness to ride a thermal higher in a squawking, ramshackle spiral, then head off north in that “sloppy V.”

I’m not as pessimistic as Laura about their future. I view them as a success, a species that we pushed near the brink and then helped pull back. My discomfort with the result is the mistaken belief that a flock of cranes wintering at the Bosque del Apache south of Albuquerque is “nature.” It is not. They would not be there but for engineering and corn. There is very little “nature” left, only things more or less influenced by our presence. In the case of the cranes, our presence nearly pushed them out of the system completely. Then we wisely spent some of our surplus creating an accommodation.

I enjoyed watching them leave, and look forward to their return next fall.

Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem

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Let us assume, for purpose of argument, that you are deeply concerned about the potential for humans’ impact on climate, but that you have some uncertainties about the reliability of the science that lies at the foundation of that concern.

Today, you note, scientists tell us the planet is warming. But did they not argue back in the 1970s that we were at risk of new ice age?

Continue reading ‘Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem’ »

Truffles

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First Burmese pythons, now this:

At the Aups market, the black truffle’s price has more than doubled over the past five years, to about €850 per kilo ($560 a pound).

Farmers say production is down by 50-75 percent this winter season and they blame global warming, warning that if thermometers keep rising — as many scientists predict they could — France’s black truffle will one day be just a memory.

Will the madness never end?

“Study Debunks ‘Global Cooling'”

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Via Stoat, I see a nice story in USA Today about an interesting new analysis by some clever folk* on the history of the old “global cooling” canard:

The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is a myth, according to a survey of the scientific literature of the era.

The ’70s was an unusually cold decade. Newsweek, Time, The New York Times and National Geographic published articles at the time speculating on the causes of the unusual cold and about the possibility of a new ice age.

But Thomas Peterson of the National Climatic Data Center surveyed dozens of peer-reviewed scientific articles from 1965 to 1979 and found that only seven supported global cooling, while 44 predicted warming. Peterson says 20 others were neutral in their assessments of climate trends.

* For full disclosures, read last paragraph of USA Today article.

On the Combinatorics of Language

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I find the combinatorics of language simply staggering.

In today’s Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith has a character say:

“When Mark Twain is picture smoking a pipe, he certainly looks contented.”

A Google search shows that not only has that sentence never been committed to the Googleverse, but that a simple five word subset has never been digitally uttered within earshot of Google’s bots. I find that richness of variety in language simply staggering.

Irrational Exuberance

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My modest attempts to understand energy economics have left me unprepared for today’s hundred-dollar-a-barrel milestone. With the U.S. economy teetering on the brink of recession, future demand is expected to be low, which the smarty-pants economists tell me should mean lower oil prices. Yet…

Thankfully for my ego, the folks at the Daily Diary of the American Dream are similarly puzzled:

The U.S. economy is slowing, and so is China’s. The growth in gasoline consumption is ebbing, particularly in the U.S., as three years of steadily increasing pump prices bite. The International Energy Agency has cut its forecast for 2008 oil-demand growth by nearly half a percentage point. U.S. supplies of crude oil and gasoline are rising.

So today, for the first time ever, oil closed above $100 a barrel. To be precise: $100.01.

What gives?

The Future of Science Journalism

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Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post up today about the future of science journalism. He sees it in things like Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth, or the excellent Yale Forum on Science and the Media. Nisbet wonders whether these sorts of non-traditional approaches are the future of my business:

With fewer and fewer outlets for science coverage at the mainstream news organizations, The Observatory, Dot Earth, and the Yale Forum represent the future of science journalism. The future will be online, in film, and/or multi-media, merging reporting with synthesis, analysis, personal narrative, and opinion. The goals will be to inform but also to persuade and to mobilize. And most importantly, it will be non-profit, sponsored by universities, museums, think tanks, foundations, professional societies such as AAAS, or government affiliated organizations such as NSF or the National Academies.

I strongly disagree.

As I said in the comments on his blog, I love the sites Nisbet cited. I expect a large proportion of you, at least the science wonk part of Inkstain’s modest readership, already read Dot Earth and the like. But Inkstain and Dot Earth have a self-selected readership. I love what Revkin’s doing on the blog, but it does not come close to the importance of what he does in the main paper. This is because the newspaper thrown on readers’ driveways (do New Yorkers have driveways?) reaches a broad audience, not merely the self-selected audience that adds Revkin to their RSS reader. I love reading the New York Times (I read it in paper form) as much for the exposure to ideas I never would have sought out. I love writing for the Albuquerque Journal because I think the issues I cover are important, and working for a broad circulation newspaper allows me to get those issues in front of the eyeballs of people who might not have sought them out, but who I believe will benefit by being exposed to them.

Dot Earths and Flocks of Dodos are great, but in terms of reach they will never replace the opportunity afforded by broad circulation mainstream media.