- news of the warm: Climate change and national security in the Times of New York
- paper of the day: Schenk and Lensink discuss the difficulties associated with public discussion of greenhouse gas emission scenarios
- word of the day: fruiterer – one who sells fruit (this would be a subset, apparently, of greengrocer, sans veggies)
- reading: I had to dive back into Slaughterhouse Five: The Children’s Crusade. It does not disappoint.
Drought’s Over!
Not really. It takes more than one storm. But I had 0.7 inch in my rain gauge this morning, and check out the snow down in Silver City. Using my new Pagano scale (the daily regression model run by Tom Pagano at the NRCS), the last week’s cool, wet weather has been worth 90,000 acre feet in the Rio Grande. Not enough to pulls us back to normal, but better than having a lit cigar stuck up your nose.
Monkey Genes for Teachers
Science has done a cool thing: resources for high school biology teachers, accompanying today’s monkey gene publication. Pass the word.
And So It Goes
I cried this morning over my granola. Best explained with something I wrote a few few years back:
On Christmas round about 1973 or so, my sister, Lisa, gave me Breakfast of Champions, which changed my life in unaccountable ways. I holed up with the book all afternoon Christmas and into the next day, and came out the other side convicted to writing.
I gave that book away – to Lisa as a wedding present – so Nora a couple of years ago gave me a new copy of Breakfast of Champions, and I read it fresh with whatever wisdom I’ve acquired in the decades since. It held up well. I ended up thinking Vonnegut is wrong in fundamental ways, all dark determinism I simply can’t embrace. But he is funnier, if anything, than when I read him a quarter century ago, and the funadamental insight I had then endured, richer for the years.
The insight is this: The written word is written by someone. The book has an author. A writer has a voice.
Additional wisdom:
Land Use Change in the Amazon
Along the lines of the land use change issues Roger Pielke Sr. has been discussing, an interesting paper today in GRL looking at the differences between turning the Amazon rain forest into pasture, versus turning it into soybeans:
Results show that the decrease in precipitation after a soybean extension is significantly higher when compared to the change after a pastureland extension, a consequence of the very high albedo of the soybean.
Drought Looms!
From the Daily Express, across the rapidly rising pond, but adjacent to the smaller and rapidly shrinking pond, apparently:
BRITAIN could be plunged into drought misery within months because of the record hot summer that’s on the way.
Experts gave the warning yesterday as sailors, left, made the most of a full Bewl Water reservoir, the largest stretch of open water in South-east England.
Perhaps UK natives in the audience could help me understand better the remarkable predictive powers of your forecast community, or the remarkable journalistic standards of the Daily Express?
Framing Me
The vigorous discussion over the Nisbet-Mooney Science piece on science communication (too many to link, see Matt’s blog for a rundown) is a perfect setup for a talk I’m giving Friday at UNM: “Communicating Science: What the News Media Can Do, and What it Can’t”, or words to that effect. For the cognitive misers in the audience, I’ll be explaining that Matt and Chris are right, and that folks don’t really need to pay attention to the details, they should just take my word for it. 🙂
2 p.m., Northrop Hall, room 122 (the big lecture hall on the northeast corner of the building). Free!
Water in the Desert
This doesn’t much have the look of the dramatic engineering works you typically think of when you think of western water projects, but at the end of the line, you’ve always got to get the water out that last few miles.
In this case, it’s new pipe being laid about a mile east of my house to carry Albuquerque’s Colorado River water to home in my neighborhood. We are, indeed, on the other side of the continental divide, which make the engineering all the more classically western. Not enough water here in this drainage basin (in this case, the Rio Grande)? No problem, we’ll pipe some in from the next basin over!
It’s not really “Colorado River water”. To get our share under the 1922 Colorado River Compact, we have three little diversion dams that grab water from tributaries to the San Juan, which is a tributary to the Colorado. We pipe it under the continental divide and into the Chama River, where we then use the natural river courses to carry it down to where we use it – hence the name, San Juan-Chama Project. We currently mine groundwater to drink here in Albuquerque, but by some time next year we’ll be drinking water from yet another classic bit of western plumbing.
Eggs
Also from the bike ride: traditional holiday decor at our neighbor’s house.
