Lissa’s picture of one of her front yard cactus. In the desert, when it rains, they’re happy. And this May, it has rained.
Another Google Map Attempt
Last Sunday’s bike ride, and this is almost certainly invalid HTML, but if a map shows up, I’ve been victorious!
Carless in Albuquerque
J.A. Montalbano has been doing a delightful series this week in the Albuquerque Tribune on his adventures of going a week without driving his car. Today is telecommuting. My favorite bit of business was from day two at the bus stop:
I left the house at 11:25 a.m. and got to the Rapid Ride stop outside Presbyterian Hospital on Central two minutes later. The message board at the stop promised a bus in five minutes, and it was right on time.
That brief window, though, let me witness a transaction among three men involving some sort of tobacco product that, apparently, when used properly, made tiny cigarettes.
The Tweet of the Killdeer
The hilarity over the Washington Post’s take on Albuquerque continues on today’s front page via my friend Jim Belshaw. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve not heard the stumbling of mountain lions, but I did hear a killdeer this morning on the way in to work.
Global Warming or Climate Change
There’s a longstanding debate about whether we should use “climate change” or “global warming” in describe the global climate change-warming thingie. In that regard, this data from Google’s new search terms trends monitoring tool:
This is the relative use by people searching on Google of the terms “global warming” (blue line) and “climate change” (red line). It suggests the general public searching on Google uses “global warming” far more often. It validates a technique I’ve used in my work. I believe “climate change” more accurately describes what we’re talking about, because many of the relevant issues involve things other than merely rising temperature. On the other hand, “global warming” is the buzz phrase people will have already heard. So I try to use both, talking primarily about “climate change” but at least once, early in a story, invoking the phrase “global warming” to clue people in to what I’m talking about using language they’re already familiar with.
The bottom graph is espcially instructive. That’s the relative frequency of the two phrases as used in the news media searched by Google News. You can see they match up quite closely, suggesting the media is using the two phrases interchangeably.
Climate Change and the Colorado River
Brad Udall at the Western Water Assessment has written an extremely helpful summary of the history of research into the effects of climate change on the Colorado River. It is interesting to note a consistent message in nearly 30 years of work on this question: the sign is nearly always negative. There’s not a whole lot of reason to think the Colorado River, which provides water for seven states in the western U.S., is going to get wetter over the coming century, but much reason to think it could get drier.
In particular, Brad includes an accessible discussion of the latest work by Niklas Christensen and Dennis Lettenmaier at the University of Washington. Their modeling shows a decrease of 6 to 11 percent in Colorado River flow over the next century on average, a change dominated by temperature increase.
Going Metric
For the more sophisticated in the Inkstain audience (either scientifically or geographically), I usually try to translate units from those we use here in America to their metric equivalents. But I realized I had no idea what the standard metric equivalent was for our quaint river flow metric – cubic feet per second. Malcolm to the rescue!
The current flow in the Rio Grande through Albuquerque is 3,600 cubic feet per second (102 kilolitres per second). Now you metric folks know the ugly truth: our “rio” is not really very “grande” at all.
“the grumbling of mountain lions”
From today’s Washington Post:
At 9 a.m. on the very edge of the dusty, desolate collection of adobe homes and Vietnamese restaurants that seem to form this city, David Iglesias begins his run through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This is not easy terrain. The footing is terribly uneven. The altitude can be unbearable. At certain times one can hear the grumbling of mountain lions and the feasting of coyotes.
I personally have never heard the grumbling of mountain lions or the feasting of coyotes in my nearly two decades in Albuquerque, but I clearly am not half the creative writer Sridhar Pappu is. Maybe that’s why.
Update: For the record, I have eaten at several Vietnamese restaurants here, though I had never considered them to be a signature feature of our growing community, unless you happen to live near my friend Andrew, over by the fairgrounds, in which case, holy mother of Ho Chi Minh there are a lot of Vietnamese restaurants ’round here.
Discussing the Coming Dust Bowl
Roger Pielke Sr. and I have been having a polite disagreement today over at his blog on how to think about Richard Seager’s paper last month in Science on the risk of future drought in the southwest.
Roger argues Seager’s work is contradicted by a 1997 paper by Trenberth and Hoar arguing for stronger El Ninos in a globally warming world, which would lead to a wetter southwest. I argue that Roger is misusing the Trenberth and Hoar paper and misunderstanding the Seager paper.
Various Canaries
the “canary in the climate change coal mine”
- wine (see also Napa Valley)
- the boreal forests of Quebec
- Perth
- Australian ski resorts
- the Sahel
- polar bears
- trout
- Alaska (see also the Arctic, which has been subject to expert peer review)
- the Northeast (this would be US)
- mountains
- November
- Tuvalu
- Flamingo (the former Florida town, not the bird)
- the marine pelagic ecosystem
- the black guillemot
(Full disclosure: I’ve done it too: “Mountain ecosystems are a canary in the climate-change coal mine.”)