Postseason Baseball

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It is that time of year when I awake from my sporting slumber and begin paying close attention to the telly. I admit to being a fair weather baseball fan, with a love for the game but a lack of patience for the 162-game season. I’ve come to see the season as statistics, and the things that happen in individual games as noise – or at least, a difficult environment to pick signal out of noise, especially with the inane baseball minds trying to explain it to me over the television as we go.

My case in point is the strange story of Alex Rodriguez and Derek Jeter, the two superstars on the left side of the New York Yankee infield. Both are terrific ballplayers, but there has been a consistent story line in the sporting press this year, repeated in the Fox pregame show, about Rodriguez’s struggles at the plate as contrasted with Jeter’s brilliant batting season.

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Bad Drought Reporting: A Visual Aid

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More on the bad drought story I wrote about yesterday, an AP piece with heart-rending stories about drought in Kansas. Standardized precipitation index data showing that, since December, conditions in the area in question have been “near normal”:
SPI map

It’s not like there hasn’t been drought in the United States, just not in Kansas in any significant measure, where the story originated.

(From the NOAA SPI page)

Cigarettes and Global Warming

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There’s a fascinating meme echoing around the Internet in recent days suggesting Al Gore said something idiotic. The source is a NewsMax story about a talk Al Gore apparently gave last week at the United Nations. The NewsMax article suggests Gore claimed that ” Cigarette smoking is a ‘significant’ contributor to global warming”.

It’s obviously an idiotic claim, and it seems extremely unlikely to me that Gore, practiced in the delivery of his global warming schtick and careful in his scientific citations, would have made it. But it’s nevertheless fascinating to watch its trajectory. The echo chamber effect in conservative circles has been deafening. In fact, the echo metaphor breaks down as it gets louder and louder. This suggests an audience eager to believe that Al Gore really is an idiot, and happy to spread any meme that supports that belief.

It’s a great example of the way it’s far easier to dismiss one’s political opponents as venal or stupid than it is to actually engage the substance of their argument.

Daybook

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reading: Famine. A symposium dealing with Nutrition and relief operations in times of disaster, the proceedings of a 1970 meeting on the issue. I’m trying to understand what actually happens to humans, both physiologically and culturally, in famine-causing drought.
reading 2: I was fascinated by the whole Hugo Chavez-Chomsky thing, and I’d not read Hegemony and Survival, so I am.
music: Thanks to Wikipedia, I discovered the connection between Peace Piece, on Bill Evans’ 1958 album “Everybody Digs Bill Evans” and the classic “Flamenco Sketches” on Kind of Blue. (Flamenco Sketches was recorded 13 days before my birth. It used to be my fantasy that Kind of Blue was recorded the day I was born. Sadly, Wikipedia has shattered that. Curse you, Wikipedia!) I don’t know Evans’ work well, but he’s my current fave.
paper of the day: Abrupt decline in the Arctic winter sea ice cover
paper of the day 2: Eruption early warning at Vesuvius: The A.D. 1631 lesson (this is a really fun one – translation of eyewitness accounts to sort out details of changing gas emissions as seismicity in the week leading up to the eruption)
days: Oct. 4 is the feast day of Petronius, patron saint of Bologna. I guess that means baloney sandwiches for lunch Wednesday?

More Bad Drought Reporting

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Drought is a real problem. But this just pisses me off:

Each night before going to bed, cattle rancher Barrett Broadie prays for rain. More such prayers follow on Sunday mornings, when he and his neighbors meet for church services in Ashland, a town of about 1,000 in southwestern Kansas.

It’s been eight years since Broadie, 36, returned to Ashland to buy the ranch his family homesteaded in 1884. In those eight years, the few showers they have gotten were too small to leave any water runoff.

There’s a co-op weather station in Ashland. There’s a century of data up on the Western Regional Climate Center web site. (Farmers make great co-op observers. They’ve got skin in the climate game.) This year has been dry. Three of the previous seven years, the Ashland co-op observer reported above-average precipitation.

Most cries for help come from the northwest and southwest quarters of the state – which have been struggling with the harsh arid weather for several years – but this year the drought is so widespread calls are coming in from across the state, he says.

In the southwest Kansas climate division, 10 of the years since 1991 have been wetter than the long term mean, 6 have been drier. 2003, 2004 and 2005 were all wetter than average.

Northwest Kansas, on the other hand, has been genuinely dry. Beginning in 2000, they’ve only had two wet years.

Variability is a normal part of climate. When we’re thinking about how to help people in drought, we need to use care in distinguishing between people merely in a typical dry patch and people living through genuinely unusual times.