Daybook

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Quiet MorningOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

It’s quiet Saturday morning in Albuquerque, the sort of quiet you get when a light blanket of snow dampens the sound and keeps everyone inside, including the dogs. We’re going to be in trouble today when the mailman comes. There’ll be no dogs out to protect us.

  • music: Django (the 1954 Modern Jazz Quartet, not the software). Milt Jackson makes sense on a quiet Saturday morning.
  • paper of the day: Michael Notaro and colleagues’ incorporation of vegetation into climate models, with useful results: “While the radiative effect of rising CO2 produces most of the warming, the physiological effect contributes additional warming by weakening the hydrologic cycle through reduced evapotranspiration.”
  • drought: From Australia: “With a nearly countrywide drought now in its fifth year, reservoirs along Australia’s central eastern coast are down to 14 percent of capacity, and restrictions on water use are getting tough.”
  • climate news: Apparently, according to Andy Revkin, there’s some new report about to come out that says humans are responsible for the whole global warming thing. Who knew?
  • cycling: Tyler Hamilton found a ride.
  • days: Jan. 20 is the feast day of St. Sebastian, one of history’s great underachievers. He’s the one who, back in the day, was supposed to protect folks against plague. Good job, Seb!
  • quote of the day: “Nearly half of the lands of the United States, exclusive of Alaska, are arid.” – John Wesley Powell, stating the obvious in Century Magazine, March 1890

Jack Straw from Wichita

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Hundred Year Hall album cover

I had a college chum named Brian Muir who was a serious Deadhead. During those years I was working in radio, as was Brian, and it was a tossup as to who was forced to deal with more offensive music. I was working for KEXI – “the valley’s entertainer” – a station that played “adult contemporary” – Barry Manilow and the like. In those days, before satellite feeds, canned music at stations like that came on these big reel-to-reel tapes, and we had a computer that would mix from one tape deck to the next: hot hits on one machine, instrumentals on another (to segue into the newscasts) and a couple of machines that played classic adult contemporary oldies. In the whole playlist, there was exactly one song that any of us liked: Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. We all knew which reel it was on, and we waited anxiously for it to come up in rotation – probably once a week – hoping it would be on our shift. We could have cheated, I suppose, but that would have ruined the game.

Brian was working at a KTEL, a country station that required the actual playing of vinyl records. Brian hated country music. So he’d bring a little portable tape deck on which to play his Dead tapes. He’d leave the country turned down, listening to the Dead, until the record was about to end. He’d stop the tape, do the mix, cue up the next record, then go back to the Dead. This was country top 40, so the longest cuts were 4 minutes, tops, so it was a bit disjointed, and took a certain amount of concentration, but it did the trick.

Brian and I were also doing radio journalism on our college station, and one day we went out together to interview the warden at the State Penitentiary. When we were introduced, the warden repeated Brian’s name back to him. “Muir? Are you any relation to John Muir?” The warden was an old mountaineer, and revered John Muir. Brian said yes, and explained a somewhat byzantine family connection, the details of which I have long forgotten.

There ensued a long and enthusiastic conversation between the two of them about John Muir.

Later, as we were walking through the parking lot, I said to Brian, “I didn’t know you were related to John Muir.”

“I’m not,” he said.

ACA sticker

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ACA sticker

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

With three large projects going simultaneously in addition to the day job, I’ve been a bit oversubscribed lately, so I’ve been getting a lot of my bike time indoors on a trainer. It allows me to multi-task, getting some reading done while I exercise. And I do enjoy it. But it’s not riding. Riding is fun.

I’ve got a couple of days off work, and today I was watching the weather (big storm coming in) and just assuming it’d be indoor bike time for me. But when my friends at the National Weather Service issued their latest short term forecast just before noon, suggesting the snow wouldn’t hit until 3 or 4, I saw the opening, threw on the winter gear and slipped out into the cold grey of an impending snowstorm.

If you look closely at the picture, you can see my reflection in the car bumper, to the right of my ACA sticker. That’s my neon green winter wind vest. It was a bit on the cold side (37F, 3C), a little windy, and fun.

Radioactive animal carcasses

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Spiderman exposed to radiation

I’m crossposting this from the NukeBeat because I think it would be insanely cool to be the number one result when you google “radioactive animal carcasses”, and this blog has more googlejuice.

No, that’s not an early ’80s British punk band. It’s the amusingly grotesque harvest of a nuclear waste cleanup project at Hanford:

Carcasses of animals used in radiological experiments at Hanford are among more than 40,000 tons of waste workers dug up and reburied on the nuclear reservation.

Closure Hanford remediation manager Mark Buckmaster told the Hanford Advisory Board last week that up to 1,000 animals at a time were kept at a farm near F Reactor along the banks of the Columbia River.

They included rodents, cats, dogs, cows, sheep, goats, pigs and alligators. No alligator carcasses were found, however.

One can imagine the conversation here between the reporter and editor about the latter:

Jameson: “Alligators? Get me a picture of the radioactive alligator carcasses!”

Parker: “Sorry, Mr. Jameson. No alligator carcasses were found.”

Peak Oil

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One of my favorite science journalists, Alex Witze, had an excellent recent piece in Nature on peak oil (sub. req.). It’s a terrific bit of work because of the thoughtful way Witze embraces the uncertainty, explaining to us why smart and reasonable people disagree about this issue, rather than trying to tell us which answer we should believe.

Both sides issue regular, well-referenced reports that come to opposite conclusions on whether the world is running out of oil. “There’s just no middle ground,” says Kenneth Deffeyes.

I’m all for embracing the uncertainty.

(As an aside, this also reminds me of a piece I wrote a couple of years back on a related topic.)

Scaaary

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It is rare that my two journalistic specialties, climate and the blinding tools of nuclear Armageddon, converge as they have today in Chicago. The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has moved up the hands on its famed Doomsday Clock – not just because of those pesky Norks with the nuclear testing and the plutonium and the wacky dictator with the big hair, but also because of global warming!

As in past deliberations, we have examined other human-made threats to civilization. We have concluded that the dangers posed by climate change are nearly as dire as those posed by nuclear weapons. The effects may be less dramatic in the short term than the destruction that could be wrought by nuclear explosions, but over the next three to four decades climate change could cause drastic harm to the habitats upon which human societies depend for survival.

Peak Water

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Marty Hoerling’s discussion of western U.S. drought in the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report model runs (which I wrote about last fall) is out:

Our study reveals that a sustained change in moisture conditions is unfolding within the broad range of natural variations. The Southwest is likely past the peak water experienced in the 20th century preceding the signing of the 1922 Colorado Compact: a decline in Lees Ferry flow will reduce water availability below current consumptive demands within a mere 20 years. These projections further expose the risky reliance by Colorado River water users upon the Compact as a guarantee that streamflows will always materialize to match legislated requirements.