Zimbabwe

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Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis:

This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 harvest was severely compromised by poor access to inputs, the underutilization of land and, in the south and west, by El Niño-related drought conditions.

Things are apparently being made substantially worse by Robert Mugabe’s inflation controls, which have had the effect of curbing economic production, making food harder to get:

[T]he implementation of the June price controls resulted in a run on price-controlled commodities and a decline in their production due to the erosion of profit margins. The formal market can no longer maintain a regular supply of basic goods, and sporadic deliveries of these goods are met with long lines that do not allow for everyone to make it into the store before stocks run out.

(Hat tip the excellent Reuters AlertNet)

High Desert Reports

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Added Laura Paskus’s High Desert Reports to my blogroll and feed reader. She’s a freelance journalist here in New Mexico who does a good job of paying a lot of attention to issues I’m trying to keep better track of. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I reached the point where I said to myself, “Wait, that’s by that Laura Paskus person too!” Some examples:

Still ENSO Neutral

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The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months.

The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to La Niña. However, over the last several months, the dynamical models have consistently predicted a stronger and more rapid cooling than has actually occurred. In contrast, a majority of the statistical models indicate a continuation of ENSO-neutral conditions, but some forecast weak La Niña conditions during the fall or winter. When considered collectively, recent atmospheric conditions and model forecasts suggest a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. Historically, the early fall season (August-September-October) has been a critical period for the onset of La Niña events.

The refresher: here in the southwestern United States, La Niña tends toward dry winters.

Drought of a Different Sort

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According to this story, they’ve got the water in Zimbabwe, but they don’t have the electricity to pump it to the fields:

Rensen Gasela, a farmer in Midlands Province and former chief executive for cereals at the state-run Grain Marketing Board, told IRIN, “We have enough water in the dams but we do not have enough electricty supplies to irrigate the winter wheat, and many farmers have written off their winter crop, which was affected by moisture stress or inadquate water supply.”

Drive, Don’t Walk!

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From one of those high-minded British publications:

Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated.

Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could benefit if people avoided exercise, ate less and became couch potatoes. Provided, of course, they remembered to switch off the TV rather than leaving it on standby.

The sums were done by Chris Goodall, campaigning author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life, based on the greenhouse gases created by intensive beef production. “Driving a typical UK car for 3 miles [4.8km] adds about 0.9 kg [2lb] of CO2 to the atmosphere,” he said, a calculation based on the Government’s official fuel emission figures. “If you walked instead, it would use about 180 calories. You’d need about 100g of beef to replace those calories, resulting in 3.6kg of emissions, or four times as much as driving.

“The troubling fact is that taking a lot of exercise and then eating a bit more food is not good for the global atmosphere. Eating less and driving to save energy would be better.”

This is, of course, pants. He’s picked the worst possible food source (beef) for his calculation. The obvious implication, once he does the sums with various other foodstuffs, isn’t “don’t walk.” It’s “don’t eat beef.”

Bees

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squirrelOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Some random notes arising from cleaning off my desk and related spaces in my brain. Not sure this hangs together, but I need to put it somewhere so I can get on with my afternoon:

  • Walking this morning with Lissa and Sadie along Embudo Arroyo, a concrete arroyo in Albuquerque’s Northeast heights, saw squirrels living in PVC pipes that drain into the arroyo.
  • Visited some friends a week ago who live in a neighborhood near our own. They have a beehive in their backyard. They “smoked” the bees so they would become docile and we could look inside the hive. Few things I’ve seen as cool as that tightly organized frenzy. It’s 1.75 mi. (~3 km) from our house, so very possible that the bees in our backyard come from that hive. Bee stung me on the nose.
  • Peter Kareiva’s piece in the June 29 Science on “Domesticated Nature: Shaping Landscapes and Ecosystems for Human Welfare.” Key bit:

“Conservation has often been framed as the science aimed at protecting nature, and especially protecting nature from people. We restate here what others have already emphasized: There really is no such thing as nature untainted by people. Instead, ours is a world of nature domesticated, albeit to varying degrees, from national parks to high-rise megalopolises.”

  • Julio Betancourt’s 1981 Chaco pinyon-juniper paper. Key bit:

“Instead of climate, Anasazi fuel needs may explain the drastic reduction of pinyon and juniper after 1230 years ago.”

  • Pigeons sitting on the power lines above the Embudo Arroyo as we walked this morning. Lissa noted that this was an ideal setting for them – water trickling down the floor of the concrete arroyo, out in the open, safe from predators (most likely cats).
  • Sadie, walking with us, noticed neither the pigeons nor the squirrels.


Strange Maps

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San Francisco earthquake fire mapJim Belshaw recently linked to Strange Maps, a blog that is what it says. My interest in maps involves the intersection of the aesthetic with the cognitive, and the way the decisions about what you put in and what you leave out goes a long way both toward communicating and circumscribing. Today, a map of San Francisco after the fire.

A Problem with Geoengineering

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Pumping crap into the air to cool things off has been suggested as a way of countering global warming. A new paper by Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai at NCAR makes this look like a bad idea. They used actual volcanic eruptions as an analog and looked at their effect on the hydrologic cycle:

Following the eruption of Mount Pinatubo in June 1991 there was a substantial decrease in precipitation over land and a record decrease in runoff and river discharge into the ocean from October 1991–September 1992. The results suggest that major adverse effects, including drought, could arise from geoengineering solutions.

The Tangled Bank

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Tim MoyYesterday afternoon’s service for Tim Moy was impossibly sad and impossibly beautiful. Looking around Keller Hall, I was amazed at the different communities who Tim had touched so deeply, from the other parents at Luke’s elementary school to the big thinkers at Sandia’s Advanced Concepts group to his students to the faculty to the stalwart defenders of evolution in our schools to his extended family.
I cried when I sat down and opened the program they had prepared for the service to find this:

It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

Expanding Alabama Drought

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Drought Monitor map, southeast U.S.Watercrunch points out the significant expansion of drought conditions in Alabama in this week’s drought monitor:

The Southeast: With scattered rain last week in the Southeast, drought conditions did not improve, but instead expanded in some areas. Even with recent rains, many recording stations were below normal for July. Mississippi is a good example of conditions in the Southeast: the last 30-day period is one of the wettest on record, but the last 180-day period is the driest on record. D3 and D4 conditions in Alabama also expanded to cover much of the northern and central portions of the state while D3 conditions expanded in southwest Georgia. D2 and D3 conditions expanded to include western Tennessee and into eastern Arkansas. North Carolina saw an expansion of D1 to cover the southern part of the state and D2 expanded in the west. Near record low streamflow and reservoir levels are a big concern in North Carolina.