For those of you not from or familiar with New Mexico, here’s the joke: the armed Saguaro, an iconic southwestern image, does not grow in New Mexico. The Estancia Valley is in New Mexico.
RailRunner
The thing I like about trains is the same thing I have always enjoyed about walking in alleys: you get to see the backs of things. It’s the place where people pile their junk, where they show the things they don’t really want you to see, but that are a real part of their lives.
Lissa and I rode the RailRunner up to Bernalillo yesterday, stopping on the way back to take the feeder bus up to Cottonwood Mall. The Mall is all about showing you the front side of things, all prettified and glossy. The train ride was much better.
Those Batshit Crazy Livermore Guys
The boy dropped off his pass-along copy of the Nov. 16 Rolling Stone, that I might enjoy Jeff Goodell’s powerful strange and fascinating piece about Lowell Wood and geoengineering. Wood’s idea – not really “Wood’s idea,” really “lots of people’s idea” – is to pump shit into the atmosphere to cool things off, a geoengineering approach to the question of climate change, kind of like optimistically drinking a lot of coffee before you drive home from the bar.
The idea frankly sounds batshit crazy, but I’ve got no real way to judge it on its technical merits. What I’m fascinated by is the the Goodell/RS rhetorical approach. Lowell Wood is a giant in batshit crazy military technology circles, a supreme optimist in his belief that our technological solutions will really turn out the way we intend them. This is the brains behind Star Wars (the missile defense technology, not the epic film series). Star Wars was batshit crazy – would never have worked. But it didn’t really have to in order to succeed. All that really had to happen was for the Soviets to think it might work, and that we’d be crazy enough to try it. The Soviet military apparatus, you see, was infested with people every bit as batshit crazy as Wood.
Goodell/RS (I’m lumping them together because one cannot distinguish between writer and editor/publisher) entertains Wood’s geoengineering ideas, treats them with profound seriousness, while at the same time baldly calling them “nefarious” and absolutely loving the “Dr. Evil” appelation. Goodell could have done a story about perfectly serious, not batshit crazy people who are serious about geoengineering to deal with climate change. But the idea sounds so perfectly batshit crazy that Wood seems the perfect vehicle through which to tell the story.
This is postmodern, ironic journalism, right? (See Colbert, Stephen)
Bosque Trail
My friend Miguel has posted some great snaps of my favorite bit of bike trail in the city, the shaded, secluded stretch of bosque trail south of the National Hispanic Cultural Center.
Remembering the Past
My Journal colleague Pat Vasquez-Cunningham did a beautiful multimedia package based on his photographs and interviews with Pearl Harbor survivor Ray Baker. Additional interviews with Homer Garcia, John Stanhope and James Rounding.
El Niño Update
The latest ENSO forecast is out this morning:
El Niño conditions are likely to continue through May 2007.
The models are clustering around a relatively modest affair.
A New Mexican Insurgency
My colleague Tania Soussan wrote Saturday about what Andrew Dessler has described as “the climate change insurgency“:
Cars with dramatically better gas mileage.
More energy-efficient houses and offices.
Doubling the renewable energy flowing through New Mexico’s grid.
Those are among the 69 recommendations announced Friday by a special climate advisory group created by Gov. Bill Richardson last year to find ways to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
If all of the ideas were put into practice, greenhouse gas emissions in the state would drop to pre-1990 levels by 2020— or half of what is projected if no changes are made— and the economy would get a $2 billion boost over the next decade.
“This is a really bold and exciting proposal that will help New Mexico do its share to reduce greenhouse gases,” said Jim Norton of the New Mexico Environment Department.
The Rising Cost of Bread in Australia
The cost of Australian bread is on the rise:
Bushman’s Bakery, which has six outlets in the Coffs Harbour area, has told customers the drought has pushed the price of a loaf of bread up by 20 cents.
Owner Dally Sullivan says there is no choice but to pass on the cost.
“We were notified a few weeks ago by our flour millers that there was going to be a very big price increase in the vicinity of $200 a tonne for flour because of the shortage of wheat due to the drought,” he said.
“That has forced us to increase the price of the bread, and a rise of $200 a tonne equates to something like 20 cents a loaf.”
Back in the day, people starved. In that context, 20 cents a day seems reasonable.
What Tree Is This?
Anyone have a clue what kind of tree this is? Photo by L. Heineman, fall 2006, on San Mateo NE in Albuquerque.
That Badass Paleo Record
More evidence of the naivety of assuming that the 20th century climate record is sufficient to capture the range of variability with which we’ve got to be able to cope. Tian et al in GRL looked at calcite layers in Minnesota lake sediments:
[D]roughts of greater severity and duration than during the 20th century occurred repeatedly, especially prior to 300 AD. Drought variability was anomalously low during the 20th century; ?90% of the variability values during the last 3100 years were greater than the 20th-century average.