The garden’s going all nutso pretty all of a sudden, and Lissa got some nice pictures for me this afternoon, that we might share with y’all.
The parrot tulips are the showiest of all right now.
Meanwhile, the grape hyacinth are everywhere right now – sprinkled through our big iris bed, scattered among the meadow plants under the big tree in the front yard, just everywhere:
One of the great little New Mexico films, Tony DellaFlora’s High Strange New Mexico, is now available on line. (Hat tip The Fix.)
In July, 1921, the United States Patent and Trademark Office granted Walter Meyner, of New York City, a patent for the radioactive pencil. Meyner’s idea was to mix ordinary graphite with “self-luminous material of the type ordinarily employed in so-called `radium paints.'”
The self-luminous pencil, or crayon, would be, Meyner told the patent office in his application, “relatively inexpensive and … entirely practical.”
The little miniature white iris in our front yard started blooming this week.
Conservapedia is threatening to ban Nora. Her offense? An entry on the shovel:
A shovel is a tool used for moving earth, sand and other granulates. It differs from spades because it is a real tool and not a suit of cards.
My little girl is growin’ up good.
Sadie’s primary job is to protect us from monsters. From her observation deck (a stool at the front window), she can monitor the approaches to the house.
Sometimes the monsters are delivering the mail or taking away our garbage. Sometimes they merely walk by our house for no apparent reason. But without fail, if she barks well enough – with enough clarity of moral purpose – she drives them away.
This morning we’ve got a quiet rain falling, and there seem to be no monsters out. But Sadie’s at the ready, alert, just in case.
Andrew Dessler and Chris Reddy had an op-ed in the Newport Daily News March 16 (the text is in a blog entry by Andrew here) that took a very interesting approach to the scientization problem. It was in response to an op-ed that resurrected the hoary old “water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas therefore CO2 is irrelevant” canard. Rather than try to argue the scientific details (a scientist’s usual instinct in these cases), Dessler and Reddy explained the process by which the scientific community had arrived at and explained the scientific consensus.
Down in the comments, Andrew explains the reason behind their approach:
When confronted with an editorial like the offending one, you have the choice of either arguing the scientific facts or arguing the process. The problem with arguing facts is that most people tune out — it’s just too boring. And the fact have been argued before. We decided that an argument addressing process would be more effective. The simple fact that a massive conspiracy involving thousands of people is so much less likely than one guy with no knowledge being wrong needed to be pointed out.
I just got around to reading Wally Broecker’s interesting piece in the March 9 Science about “the carbon pie.” One of Broecker’s arguments is that market carbon emissions trading will be insufficient to meet atmospheric carbon goals, and that carbon capture will inevitably be required:
Because CO2 sales would serve only as a temporary stopgap, capture of CO2 from the atmosphere would be necessary. CO2 capture from the atmosphere is feasible, but has yet to be implemented, and faces several technological challenges.
Steve Aftergood’s Secrecy News is off my normal blog topics, but it’s a blog worth a read. Steve’s been toiling in the trenches for years, documenting government secrecy issues and publishing about them long before there were blogs. Today’s entry is particularly relevant to my professional duties:
In what is being characterized by subordinates as an act of “managerial dementia,” the Director of the Congressional Research Service this week prohibited all public distribution of CRS products without prior approval from senior agency officials.
“I have concluded that prior approval should now be required at the division or office level before products are distributed to members of the public,” wrote CRS Director Daniel P. Mullohan in a memo to all CRS staff (pdf). “This policy is effective immediately.”
As a regular user of CRS reports, I find this troubling.
We’re seeing some extraordinary snowmelt right now. Coming a month early, it’s setting this-date-in-history records up in the Rio Grande Gorge:
Never, in more than a century of record keeping, have we seen a March snowmelt like that flowing down the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico right now.
Record warmth across the mountains of northern New Mexico and Colorado is rapidly turning a middling snowpack into soup. The question is how much of that soup ends up in New Mexico’s rivers and reservoirs and how much evaporates before it gets to water users in New Mexico and points south.
So far, according to National Weather Service hydrologist Ed Polasko, it looks like the rivers are winning.
“Even though the snowpack is coming down like a rock, the rivers are coming up like crazy,” Polasko said Wednesday.
It’s worth revisiting Tom Pagano’s EOS paper on the 2004 March melt, which was a memorable epic early spring. Also Dan Cayan’s paper from 2001 using phenological data to look patterns of early spring onset. And Phil Mote’s work on declining mountain snowpack in the West.
I don’t want to misstate the importance of what’s going on here. In terms of water supply, there is some argument to be made that a big part of what’s happen is merely earlier melt – that it all ends up in the reservoirs anyway, just at a different time. With the enormous buffer of the big southwestern reservoirs, timing is irrelevant. (Different story in the Pacific Northwest, but I’m less familiar with the issues there.) But to the extent that part of what goes on in these early springs is increased evaporation/transpiration, this signals an interesting regime change for those of us living here in arid country.
Update: Down in the comments, Dano makes a good point worth pulling out:
A slower snowmelt generally means slower percolation thru the soil, making soil moisture last longer. Not always, but a good rule of thumb. Native grasses are adapted to that moisture being there in April-May. Just because it ends up in the reservoir anyway doesn’t do the biota adapted to a different regime any good. We’re conducting an experiment with no control.
He’s absolutely right, and I didn’t mean to give the ecosystem issue short shrift. I’m real focused on water supply issues right now, but we shouldn’t ignore the various other systems influenced by the changes underway.
