The Phoenix Experiment

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Tim Egan on a city in the desert:

Is there a similar point at which the city becomes imperiled? The skeptics say: No, we can engineer our way around it. Look at the ballpark where the Diamondbacks play baseball: It has a retractable roof, which is closed while the stadium is cooled by industrial-strength air-conditioning and then opened in the evening.

Or behold the great veins of the Central Arizona Project, bringing water from the Colorado River to fountains in Scottsdale. The fast-evaporating water courses through the city as it bakes, making it livable.

To their credit, residents are using less water, deploying the sun to power air-conditioning, putting in desert landscaping — cacti and stones, not bluegrass and ponds. I do not doubt that innovation will continue to make it easier to defy the heat. But it’s one thing to bring runoff from the Rocky Mountains to the desert floor. It’s another to bring alpine air to streets and parks and backyards, unless you put a dome over the whole city.

Wallace Stegner always said it was his hope that the West could build cities to match the setting. He never predicted that the setting would be the problem.

(Hat tip Belshaw)

Climate and Darfur

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Ban Ki Moon has an op-ed in today’s Washington Post linking the calamity in Darfur to climate change:

Almost invariably, we discuss Darfur in a convenient military and political shorthand — an ethnic conflict pitting Arab militias against black rebels and farmers. Look to its roots, though, and you discover a more complex dynamic. Amid the diverse social and political causes, the Darfur conflict began as an ecological crisis, arising at least in part from climate change.

Two decades ago, the rains in southern Sudan began to fail. According to U.N. statistics, average precipitation has declined some 40 percent since the early 1980s. Scientists at first considered this to be an unfortunate quirk of nature. But subsequent investigation found that it coincided with a rise in temperatures of the Indian Ocean, disrupting seasonal monsoons. This suggests that the drying of sub-Saharan Africa derives, to some degree, from man-made global warming.

(Hat tip Belshaw.)

This is an interesting argument well engaged, but at this point is not at all a settled point. I was reading an article this morning in the June 2 New Scientist about some folks looking at the climate-conflict link, which had this to say:

Marc Levy at Columbia University in New York, who is working with the ICG, is one of the few researchers who have been able to support these speculations with data. In a forthcoming paper, he and colleagues combine databases on civil wars and water availability to show that when rainfall is significantly below normal, the risk of a low-level conflict escalating to a full-scale civil war approximately doubles in the following year.

So there appears to be some data to support the narrower point of a link between climate variability and bad shit happening, which seems to me unsurprising. But then….

“Research has not succeeded in establishing robust, systematic connections between climate and conflict,” says Halvard Buhaug of the International Peace Research Institute in Oslo, Norway. With the connection still under debate, it may be too early to talk about climate change wars. “So far, climate change has not been powerful enough to be the main driver of conflict,” says Jack Goldstone at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia. “Drought was a contributory factor in Darfur, not the main cause.”

Alabama Drought

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Things are looking rough in Alabama:

Prolonged dry conditions have stunted the growth of hay and pastures, forcing Alabama cattlemen to sell off their herds because they can’t afford the cost of feed.

Wayne Davis of Elmore County is slowly selling off his 150 head of purebred Charolais — a few already, more soon.

“I can’t feed the cattle year-round on high-priced hay,” said Davis, whose farm is outside Wetumpka. “It’s not economically feasible.”

Worth noting here: economic dislocation. Davis isn’t going to starve. But this is real: parts of Alabama have been dry for four years. And over the last six months, parts of Alabama and Tennessee are by far the driest – measured relative to their norms – in the U.S.

Private Water

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Water management, sale and delivery has traditionally been the province of government in the United States. But an interesting story out of Texas heralds some significant potential for change:

In the five years since billionaire oilman T. Boone Pickens started trying to sell water from beneath the vast empty spaces of West Texas, he hasn’t had any paying customers.

Not one city or local agency has signed on, even after years of drought conditions and soaring water usage by Texas’ booming population, which is expected to more than double by 2060.

However, officials at Pickens’ company aren’t concerned. And water law experts say they shouldn’t be because, quite simply, the second-most populous state in the nation is running low on water.

Happy Together

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Back to work on the morrow, I’ll leave my weeks’ vacation with one last bit of business.

There are competing tales of the origin of the fortune cookie. Everyone agrees it was born in the United States, but beyond that its history is the product of a classic Northern California-Southern California rivalry, each claiming provenance and both sides lacking in the definitive evidence to seal the deal.

The Northern California origin myth has the cookie invented by Makota Hagiwara, who ran the Japanese Tea Garden in Golden Gate Park. According to this version, a racist city government kicked Hagiwara out in 1907, only to succumb to political pressure from Hagiwara’s more liberal-minded supporters. Hagiwara, the story goes, invented the cookie as a way of quietly conveying thank-you notes to his supporters.

I kind of like this version, if only for sentimental reasons. When we went to the tea garden last week, this was the fortune I received with my tea:

You and your wife will be happy in your life together.

That seems about right.


Albuquerque Bicycle Map

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Albuquerque Bicycle Map

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

The city of Albuquerque has published a new bicycle map. I point this out because I went on a wander this morning on the bike, deciding to follow the green “bike route” signs north out of my neighborhood. It was a bit of an adventure, especially the part where the bike route signs directed me onto Montgomery NE, which seems to me one of the class A bike unfriendly streets in this town. Sunday morning, not so, though. And mostly, the signs offered a reasonable way through neighborhoods I don’t normally ride through, so it was a plus. I used the map afterward to figure out where I’d been.

It’s a good map, though I can’t help but think there’s room for some sort of Google maps/Google Earth/kmz mashup here. I’m not saying here that “they” should do it. This is a perfect opportunity for some sort of Wiki-Creative Commonsish sort of thing, so I suppose if I think it should exist there’s no reason not to make it myself. I dunno. Maybe this is the sort of thing that works better on paper. It’s not like I’ve got Google Earth along on my bike rides. And I did send for a paper copy.

Daybook (Nightbook?)

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  • reading: Endangered Species, Steve Younger’s discussion of the complexities of being a pacifist nuclear weapons designer
  • reading II: Just finished – Howl on Trial, a collection of letters from in and around the time of the publication of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, along with transcripts of the obscenity trial that are an absolute hoot.
  • music: Epistrophy, on the recommendation of the guy at Natural Sound in Albuquerque. It’s a performance by Charlie Rouse, a longtime sideman to Thelonious Monk, doing a tribute of Monk’s music.
  • writing/paper of the day: I’m working on a piece about Maya Elrick and Linda Hinnov’s collection of deep paleo records in sedimentary rocks ((Millennial-scale paleoclimate cycles recorded in widespread Palaeozoic deeper water rhythmites of North America, Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology,Volume 243, Issues 3-4, 22 January 2007, Pages 348-372)) suggesting that millennial-scale variability is a permanent feature.
  • line of the day: “listening to the crack of doom on the hydrogen jukebox,” from Howl, though it’s a sound that Steve Younger (see reading, above) also has heard up close