In a problem that is pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a final effort to halt the advance of the Tengger and Badain Jaran deserts.
“I don’t want to move,” said Chen Ying, 58, sitting in a sparsely furnished bedroom dominated by a red, wall-sized poster of Mao, the communist founding father who sought to catapult Chinese farming and industry into modernity with the so-called Great Leap Forward.
“But if we keep using the groundwater, it will decline,” said Chen. “We have to think about the next generation.”
The photographer known as bhaskins1 offers up some great evidence that Albuquerque is warming to the idea of throwing its collective bicycle on the train for its morning commute.
. (Check out the other bike photos taken by bhaskins1.)
Here’s the worst part: As I rushed back into the house to tell Liz, I couldn’t stop thinking that this was going to make a good column.
Once again, Philip Roth came to mind. He said nothing that happens to someone who writes for a living is bad because everything that happens is material. He’s right.
The corollary is that nothing that happens to someone who writes happens outside of the context of thinking about writing about it.
real climate II: I saw on yesterday’s bike ride that the Rio Grande is back down, under 1,300 cubic feet per second through Albuquerque, exposing some beautiful sandbars. The official high was 94 F (34.5 C) in Albuquerque, 99 F (37 F) on the urban heat island at my house.
My attempt at sketching in the background behind the House Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee’s proposed cuts in the U.S. nuclear weapons program:
Nuclear weapons spending has long seemed an entitlement for New Mexico.
With two of the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories located here, a big chunk of the U.S. nuclear weapons budget is inevitably spent in the state.
But a restive Congress, uneasy with the way the U.S. nuclear weapons program is managed, is beginning to question that.
The state that has seen a long-running boom in nuclear weapons spending now faces the potential for a bust.
I’ve been wanting to make cool Internet maps for a while, but making them click-by-click by hand was such a chore. The idea is to use Google Earth and Google maps, so people who might want to use the bike trails can zoom in and figure out exactly where they are. It’s worth noting that there already exist some nice resources for this – the city’s bike map and the New Mexico Touring Society’s routes page (“routes” in the left rail of their web site). Both have the significant disadvantage, from my point of view, that they weren’t made by me, and I wanna make stuff myself. 🙂 But if you really want good bike info, go to them.
With my new GPS bike goober, it’s a lot simpler to make the route maps, and more fun, so here goes.
It’s fitting that my first formal entry in the Bike Rides of Inkstain is pretty much the crappiest bike trail in Albuquerque. Along the side of Interstate 40, it is best known for its prodigious goathead farms, and for the homeless guys who sleep in the underpasses. This ride is not without its virtues, including the prairie dogs cheering you on as you zip by like some breakaway rider in the tour. And the skate park, which is always worth a stop for a few minutes. Those kids are some sick ollies, or something. I do not recommend this trail. Unless you happen to be at Tramway and Central and are looking for a quick way back into town.
The trail begins at Los Altos Park, between the skate park and the freeway. Taking the bridge over the freeway, you go left (eastish) toward the mountains. It’s a little less than 3 miles to Central and Tramway, no street crossings, a bit less than 300 feet elevation gain.
Is there a similar point at which the city becomes imperiled? The skeptics say: No, we can engineer our way around it. Look at the ballpark where the Diamondbacks play baseball: It has a retractable roof, which is closed while the stadium is cooled by industrial-strength air-conditioning and then opened in the evening.
Or behold the great veins of the Central Arizona Project, bringing water from the Colorado River to fountains in Scottsdale. The fast-evaporating water courses through the city as it bakes, making it livable.
To their credit, residents are using less water, deploying the sun to power air-conditioning, putting in desert landscaping — cacti and stones, not bluegrass and ponds. I do not doubt that innovation will continue to make it easier to defy the heat. But it’s one thing to bring runoff from the Rocky Mountains to the desert floor. It’s another to bring alpine air to streets and parks and backyards, unless you put a dome over the whole city.
Wallace Stegner always said it was his hope that the West could build cities to match the setting. He never predicted that the setting would be the problem.
Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand — an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.
Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming.
This is an interesting argument well engaged, but at this point is not at all a settled point. I was reading an article this morning in the June 2 New Scientist about some folks looking at the climate-conflict link, which had this to say:
Marc Levy at Columbia University in New York, who is working with the ICG, is one of the few researchers who have been able to support these speculations with data. In a forthcoming paper, he and colleagues combine databases on civil wars and water availability to show that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles in the following year.
So there appears to be some data to support the narrower point of a link between climate variability and bad shit happening, which seems to me unsurprising. But then….
“Research has not succeeded in establishing robust, systematic connections between climate and conflict,” says Halvard Buhaug of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway. With the connection still under debate, it may be too early to talk about climate change wars. “So far, climate change has not been powerful enough to be the main driver of conflict,” says Jack Goldstone at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Drought was a contributory factor in Darfur, not the main cause.”
Prolonged dry conditions have stunted the growth of hay and pastures, forcing Alabama cattlemen to sell off their herds because they can’t afford the cost of feed.
Wayne Davis of Elmore County is slowly selling off his 150 head of purebred Charolais — a few already, more soon.
“I can’t feed the cattle year-round on high-priced hay,” said Davis, whose farm is outside Wetumpka. “It’s not economically feasible.”
Worth noting here: economic dislocation. Davis isn’t going to starve. But this is real: parts of Alabama have been dry for four years. And over the last six months, parts of Alabama and Tennessee are by far the driest – measured relative to their norms – in the U.S.
– great essays from the statheads at 