Inkstain Hearts Malcolm Gladwell

Posted by on

In which Malcolm Gladwell gives his less-well-paid brethren a nice slap on the back:

We’ve spent a lot of time, post-Enron, criticizing the flaws in the investment community’s gatekeeping activities. But I think we should also recognize what the Enron case tells us about the value of newspaper journalism. Maybe, in other words, we have underestimated the value of impartial, professionally-motivated, under-paid and overworked generalists in tackling the kind of information-rich, analysis-dependent “mysteries” that the modern world throws at us.

(Hat tip Romenesko)

The Canadian John Wesley Powell

Posted by on
John Palliser and James Hector

In the U.S. western water community, John Wesley Powell is a legend for his insight about the difficulties of building a society in an arid land. But we can be a bit parochial here in the states, so until today I’d never heard of his (sort of) Canadian counterpart, John Palliser.

Palliser explored the northern Great Plains in the 1850s, a region now known as Palliser’s Triangle. According to Michael Collier and Robert Webb, in their book Floods, Droughts, and Climate Change, Palliser “warned that southeastern Alberta and southwester Saskatchewan would not reliably sustain human (i.e., agricultural) life. The land was fundamentall arid, receiveing 400 or fewer millimeters (mm) of rain a year; some years there might as well be no rain at all.”

Like Powell, Palliser found his observations about the problems of aridity swept aside by boosters eager to spread across the continent in ways that ultimately turned out to be unsustainable. The Dust Bowl took impressed its will on the farmers of Palliser’s Triangle, just as it did to the folks beyond Powell’s 100th meridian.

Water Supply Update

Posted by on

It looks yesterday’s premise is holding – despite the extraordinary blanket of white in my backyard, the snowpack in the Rio Grande Basin, source of a big chunk of New Mexico’s water supply, didn’t pick up a whole lot from the Great Storm of ’06.

Tom Pagano, who does the runoff forecasts for us out of the NRCS Portland, Ore., office, has built a handy new tool that provides daily runoff forecast updates. The link gets you to an FTP directory of Excel spreadsheets. Open the one named SummaryOutput.xls to see an overview of the whole data set, then look at the individual spreadsheets for each of the major stream gauges to look at the trends (the naming convention is provided in SummaryOutput.xls). The charts directory has graphics for each gauging station. It’s early in the season yet, but the daily updates can give you a feel for how each storm effects the long term outlook without having to wait for the once-a-month official forecasts. It’s pretty geeky, and Tom’s slapped a caveat at the top of each spreadsheet: “Disclaimer: This is a completely automated unofficial experimental product based on SNOTEL data.” But with that in mind, it’s an incredibly useful tool.
The bottom line: The Rio Grande at Otowi, the central measuring point in New Mexico, only picked up a tiny bit for the storm, while the Pecos and Jemez picked up a lot.

Revkin on the nonskeptical heretics

Posted by on

Andrew Revkin does a nice job in this morning’s New York Times in characterizing those scientists that Roger Pielke Jr. has described as the “nonskeptical heretics”:

A third stance is now emerging, espoused by many experts who challenge both poles of the debate.

They agree that accumulating carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases probably pose a momentous environmental challenge, but say the appropriate response is more akin to buying fire insurance and installing sprinklers and new wiring in an old, irreplaceable house (the home planet) than to fighting a fire already raging.

“Climate change presents a very real risk,” said Carl Wunsch, a climate and oceans expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “It seems worth a very large premium to insure ourselves against the most catastrophic scenarios. Denying the risk seems utterly stupid. Claiming we can calculate the probabilities with any degree of skill seems equally stupid.”

Update: The discussion is underway in earnest over on Dr. Pielke Jr.’s blog.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

Posted by on

I wandered the airport yesterday chatting up stranded passengers for the paper. My favorites (I know, this sucks, but in a profoundly ironic way) – the couple who drove down from Colorado to Albuquerque, figuring they had a better chance of flying out here than out of Denver:

Ron and Ruth Shaw were supposed to be on a catamaran sailing from Tortola, in the British Virgin Islands, this morning.


They drove to Albuquerque from Monte Vista, Colo., guessing they had a better shot of flying out of Albuquerque than Denver.


They guessed wrong.