Riding the Coal Avenue bridge over the railyard this morning I saw this: the California Zephyr, a string of cars in the old fashion, being towed behind the Amtrak. I had to stop and chat up the proprietor, a fellow named Alvin Bishop. The cars were built in 1948, when streamlined meant something. Bishop’s company restored them, and does high-end tours out of California. They were headed for Santa Fe. The Amtrak drops them in Lamy, and the local hauls them up to the Capitol City.
Dissension in the Ranks
From Jay Lindsay:
Jim Riccio, of Greenpeace, said nuclear advocates are exploiting global warming fears to try to revive an industry that’s too risky to fool with.
“You have better ways to boil water,” Riccio said.
But environmentalists aren’t in lockstep on the issue. Bill Chameides, chief scientist for Environmental Defense, said anything that helps alleviate global warming must be an energy option.
“I think it’s somewhat disingenuous that folks who agree that global warming is such a serious issue could sort of dismiss it out of hand,” he said. “It’s got to be at least considered.”
Australian Drought Could Be Nearing End
From the Melbourne Herald Sun, Mills Looks to End Drought:
Australian golfer Joanne Mills is confident she can win her first European title in 10 years, as she heads into the final round of the Ladies Open de Portugal.
Fun with Google News.
A Climate Tax
In the June 19 Eos, Vergana and colleagues itemize the impending costs to Andean communities as glaciers, their source of water for both consumption and electricity generation, disappears as a result of climate change:
These consequences are akin to a climate tax imposed by energy-intensive societies on populations that have contributed little to the climate change problem.
Mayor M’s Bottled Water
Mike Campana on the bottled water incident:
I remember watching Albuquerque Mayor Martin “El Jefe” Chavez on his cable TV show a few years ago. He had bottled water on his desk. I emailed him, saying that sent the wrong message to viewers. He emailed back, saying that for what it was worth, the bottle had tap water in it. Uh-huh, Marty!
Sunday Services
Biblical scholarship has never been my specialty, but one of my favorite bits has always been the part where the Lord God makes all the beasts of the field and fowl of the air and then brings them to Adam to check out His handiwork:
And whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof. ((Genesis 2:19))
It’s not so much the making that interests me (I have another theory about how that happened), but the naming. I love to know the names of things, because in naming things we provide a hook into the catalogue of the body of human knowledge.
Things I Have Seen
Stopped on my bike at a red light this morning, a scooter pulls up behind me. I glance over my shoulder and smile in greeting at an elderly couple – perhaps 70 – both in shorts. As they speed past me when the light turns green, I notice that the woman, sitting on the back, is clutching what appears to be a case containing a French horn.
Desertification
From this morning’s Times:
Enough fertile land could turn into desert within the next generation to create an “environmental crisis of global proportions,” large-scale migrations and political instability in parts of Africa and Central Asia unless current trends are quickly stemmed, a new United Nations report concludes.
Watching for the Monsoon
The National Weather Service’s Tucson monsoon tracker. Tucson uses sustained dewpoint to answer the perennial question of when the monsoon starts. You can see we’re currently behind schedule there.
The Bike Trail to Nowhere
From today’s West Side Journal, a discussion of the bike trails (or lack thereof) on the new extension they just completed of Paseo del Norte:
“Oh my,” John says. “When you get to the top of the hill, where the road narrows, there is not only no bike lane, but no shoulder. And not only no shoulder, but in places they’ve built a curb on both sides, leaving cars no place to go to the left and bicycles no place to go to the right.”