I’ve been increasingly concerned about the rigor I’m able to offer here, so I recently made the decision to add a climatologist to the Inkstain staff.
Big Toe has a Masters Degree in Science, and has read several of the books on the desk behind me.
The Fundamental Issue
This map from Platts says it all. You can’t make a dent in greenhouse gas emissions without tackling the China problem.
Framing: Getting Practical
One of PZ Myers’ criticisms of the whole idea of framing scientific communication is the lack of specifics about how to implement the ideas Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are pushing. I’ve been feeling as well that the whole discussion has been a bit lacking in the way of concrete examples (Gavin’s attempt to anchor by example notwithstanding).
This morning, over at the WorkBlog, I wrote about what is, to me, an intriguing example that raises questions about the argument Chris and Matt are pushing. It’s a story from the Joliet Herald News about a public meeting regarding the U.S. Department of Energy’s Global Nuclear Energy Partnership. If you read through the story, you see the key opponents using what seem to me to be framing strategies. The DOE official uses the “nuclear power can play a key role in meeting our nation’s energy needs” frame. The project’s critic frames it thusly: “We are all electricity addicts.”
But if you read the story, you find a third frame, which appears to have been chosen by the reporter: the nuclear transportation safety frame.
How can a scientist be successful framing, as Matt and Chris suggest they must, if the news media doesn’t play along? And what is and should be the role of the news media in choosing the frames to highlight?
I’ve got no answer here. The floor’s open for discussion.
Commuter Rail
It was beautiful this morning, and I didn’t need my car today for work, so I rode. I did not, however, check the weather forecast re the return trip. When I looked up the weather at 4 p.m. and saw 25 mph (40 kph) winds out of the south, with stiffer winds forecast by the time I would have been riding home, I needed a plan B. My commute takes me essentially due south.
There’s a reasonably convenient bus route, but I’ve been wanting to try a commute on the new RailRunner. There’s a stop a couple of miles from my work, and the train runs in to downtown. From there, just a three mile ride up heart attack hill (note to Chantal: I was wearing relatively sensible boy shoes) to get home. That means total bike miles are really just a mile shorter than riding direct. But that wind!
The numbers:
By car, 15 minutes one way.
By bike this morning: 40 minutes (with a tailwind)
The return commute: 14 minutes to the train station by bike, 10 minutes on the train, 22 minutes home from downtown, plus incidental waiting around – you don’t wanna cut things too close. Bonus points: riding the train is fun. And I loves me that hill.
Defining the Australian Drought
William Connolley stumbles into the minefield that is defining the Australian drought:
Australia hasn’t got a mega-drought, only a 10-15% reduction in rainfall.
Many commenters complain, mostly offering up the absolutely useless evidence offered by alarmist news stories from the Australian press. Lab Lemming nails it by noting that drought is best defined by societal impact, not raw measures of precipitation falling from the sky.
By that measure, the lack of precipitation and warmer temperatures is colliding with a growing population and agricultural industry. But by any measure, it’s been darn dry over the last six years or so.
Blue iris 4-20
Our big iris bloom is getting underway – my favorite garden time of the year. And, based on previous phenology, right on schedule.
California Drought
A riff on skin moisturizers might seem a bit frivolous by way of explaining California’s current drought conditions, but it would not be the first time the reality of Southern California clashed with its iconic image:
Julia Sandoval, an aesthetician at the Ra Organic Spa in Burbank, has been living it up with creams containing alpha lipoic acid, an antioxidant.
“I have seen the dry season reflected on everyone’s skin who comes in,” Ms. Sandoval said.
That’s Jennifer Steinhauer, at the end of an interesting piece on current conditions in Southern California, where the hills I grew up beneath are in danger of burning up. LA has had it driest winter since people started counting such things, and if you look at the long term along coastal Southern California, you’re really looking at essentially six years of dry.
This week’s drought monitor offers up an unusually lengthy and truly grim look at the tail end of winter across the west:
After hoping for a wet and cool March, the opposite occurred instead – unseasonably dry with near-record warmth – and nearly every Western basin registered a decline in snow packs with significant meltouts.
In central California, they’re shipping out their cattle to other places where there’s something to eat. The Hollywood sign almost burned down.
Water in the Desert
I wish I’d had a camera, but I’ll have to attempt a word picture instead.
I was out riding in the foothills with some friends yesterday morning, doing repeats up the road to the Elena Gallegos picnic area. It’s a gentle and persistent climb that winds up an alluvial fan splaying out of the Sandias. It’s a classic desert landscape, where Albuquerque’s wealth has found a bit of elbow room, meaning the road is lined with discrete adobe-style houses. Big houses.
Off to the right as we were riding up the first time, I saw the spray of sprinklers from one of these big houses, backlit by the sun, watering some sort of big expanse of lawn. The backlighting highlighted the effect of the wind, which was blowing away a significant fraction of water the homeowner was apparently attempting to get on some sort of lawn. The home was on a slight hill above the road, so we couldn’t see the lawn, just the water blowing south, to someplace presumably other than its intended destination.
It’s a beautiful desert landscape, just below the edge of the piñon juniper, with sage and yucca and a gravelly alluvium well suited for not lawn. The water was still running when we made two more repeats up the hill, meaning at least half an hour.
This is groundwater, being pumped out of an aquifer at a rate substantially higher than it is being recharged. This is how we use water in the desert.
Framing: The Results
Yesterday I pointed to framing by Bob Loux, head of the Nevada’s effort to block Yucca Mountain. Loux used the nuclear transportation danger frame in a presentation before the Sparks City Council, urging the council to pressure the Walker River Paiutes to block rail transportation of waste to Yucca Mountain. Today, we see the results:
The tribal council passed a resolution Tuesday removing the tribe from a federal environmental impact study that included a rail segment for shipments of spent nuclear fuel along the outskirts of tribal lands north of Walker Lake.
“After considering the information we had gathered to date and discussions with our membership, the tribal council made the decision not to continue with the Department of Energy’s process,” tribal Chairwoman Genia Williams said in a statement.
“The tribe will not allow nuclear waste to be transported on rail through our reservation,” Williams said.
The Walker River Paiutes had faced pressure from tribe members and from nearby communities worried about the possibility of nuclear waste traveling through northern Nevada.
An Example of Framing
Press release today from the Coal-to-Liquids Coalition:
A leading energy developer told Congress today that liquefied coal offers the United States an extraordinary opportunity to take control of its energy destiny in the face of the nation’s growing reliance on foreign fuels and rapidly escalating prices for imported oil.
“At today’s prices, coal-to-liquids is economical and has the power to enhance energy security, create jobs here at home, lessen the U.S. trade deficit, and provide environmentally superior fuels that work in today’s vehicles,” said John Ward, vice president of Headwaters Incorporated, a provider of clean coal technologies for power generation and transportation fuels refining.