Jeffrey Lewis with some amusing backstory on my story last week about Iran’s nuclear program.
Daybook
- reading: Linda Cordell’s Archaeology of the Southwest. This is one of those standards that you’re supposed to have lying around to refer to, but who actually reads these? (I am, actually. Great overview of what’s known.)
- music: Stevie Ray Vaughn and Dick Dale doing Pipeline. Do they have waves in Texas?
- bonus extra track: Don Ellis and his Orchestra’s Electric Bath. This is stuff I used to listen to when I was barely old enough to be in Boy Scouts. Sometimes more beats than four in a measure. Blew my little mind the first time I listened to it.
- computers: At a meeting recently, I sat behind a guy using MindManager to take notes on his laptop. I’ve also recently been exposed to the whole “wicked problem” thinking. So lately I’ve been playing with various bits of software along these lines, including the aforementioned MindManager (very sweet, very expensive), FreeMind (fully free, both “free beer” and “free speech”), MindMap (not so expensive, not quite as sweet as MindManager) and the very interesting Compendium. Dunno if this stuff is useful, or just distracting toys.
- phenology: The first bits of yellow are showing up on the cottonwood across the street.
- days: Happy Venezualan Civil Servants’ Day
Greenhouse Guilt
I’ve been riding my bike to work lately when I can. I can’t always do it, because some days I need a car to go out on interviews. Herein lies my greenhouse guilt dilemma.
According to this analysis, cycling to work will cause a net increase in greenhouse gas emissions over my lifetime. While in the short run using my bike instead of a car leads to a net reduction, it also has the unexpected negative side effect of improving my health. Because I’m therefore likely to live longer, my net lifetime greenhouse gas emissions go up.
I think I have a solution. To make my cycling carbon neutral, I plan to take up smoking.
Drought Perception and Reality
Expectations are as much a part of drought as is climatological reality. Take this LA Times story:
CANTON, Texas — The effects of a long, stubborn drought are everywhere here: in the parched, wasted fields and the bony cows nosing the dirt for nonexistent grass; in the cracks splitting stone-hard earth and the worried faces of farmers running out of savings, and options.
“It’s sad when you see what’s going on all around you,” said Windy Watkins, a feed-store manager. “This has been the lives of so many for so long, and now it’s gone. It’s heartbreaking.”
The reality is that in the East Texas and North Central Texas climate divisions[1], the 1990s were extraordinarily wet. The dry years they’ve been having lately have been bad, but not out of the ordinary range of variability when you look at the long term record. By the numbers, the 1950s, ’60s, ’70s and (arguably) the ’80s were worse.
When it gets wet for a while, people come to think of it as normal. The worst drought problems, in a sense, happen not as a result of it getting dry, but of it returning to normal after it’s unusually wet for a while. This doesn’t make the problems any less real, but helps explain where they come from.
[1] data here
Politics of Water
I don’t begin to understand the politics of water. The science of water I can barely see how to get my arms around, but that’s a tame problem. The politics of water is a wicked problem. So I pass this along without any clear idea of whether it’s right, just the thought that it’s interesting:
Water is an issue. Drought relief is an issue. The RNC hasn’t done very well on drought relief, and economically irrational draw-downs of Upper Mississipi tributary impoundments, from the Missouri south to the Canada, to float Upper Mississippi barge traffic, have killed hydro-electric and irrigation in the Northern Plains.
Since we know that running on inside-the-beltway issues — choice, peace, and so on, our view, “the correct view”, isn’t competitive, why bother? Why not run on water?
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Proof I am not a one trick pony. Apparently Iran is trying to build nuclear weapons. Who knew?
Nasal Warming is Inevitable
Zippy, back on the global warming beat today, asks what I think is the central question:
Will major climate change affect the temperature of my neighborhood?
Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, Zippy is posing the question to what appears to be an oversized Dachsund wearing some sort of a chef’s cap. As opposed to, say, the IPCC.
Survivor: Hurricane Island
Years ago Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were on Letterman, and Dave was complaining about the problem posed for movie audiences when one of them gave a movie a thumbs up and the other a thumbs down. Dave came up with a brilliant solution: he had them shoot basketball free throws for it.
As many readers of this site know, there’s been a great deal of argument, both in the blogosphere and the scientific literature, about the possibility of a global warming-hurricane link. My view of the literature is that the question is unresolved, and I counsel patience. But others have been pushing the argument forward, suggesting that an early answer to the debate might be of some policy relevance.
Talking with some friends today at lunch, a solution occurred to me. The proliferation of reality television programs suggests a format for almost every problem: choosing an interior designer, a chef, a nuclear weapon design, a country and western star, etc., by the medium of televised competition. (I’m told initial work is underway on a reality show based on pet grooming.)
My suggestion – Survivor: Hurricane Island.
Take all the major scientific disputants: Judith Curry, Kerry Emanuel, Greg Holland, Phil Klotzbach, Chris Landsea, Peter Webster, Kevin Trenberth, Bill Gray, etc. to a deserted island, preferably one close to sea level, and have them fight it out over a series of challenges.
For example, they could be forced to paw through old paper records trying to determine the intensity of ancient storms. They could test wits using empirical versus model-based forecast tools, and match their best regression models against global sea surface temperature and the Atlantic Multi-Decadal Oscillation.
For the program’s hosts, I recommend Chris Mooney and Roger Pielke Jr. It’d be great.
Hurricane Me Deemed “Spooky”
Hurricane John has developed something called a “pinhole eye,” which Chris Mooney declares “spooky“. I don’t know from pinhole cameras, but apparently this is a big deal, according to Chris:
The same thing happened when Hurricane Wilma put on a record burst of intensification last year, building up from a tropical storm into a Category 5 hurricane in just 24 hours.
The forecasters were more than a little surprised by Wilma’s intensification, and they seem surprised by John as well. At 8 am PDT this morning, they called the storm a Category 1 hurricane with 70 knot (or 80 mph) winds. In 12 hours, they predicted, it would be an 85 knot (or nearly 100 mph) Category 2 storm.
Well, instead, it’s now a 100 knot or 115 mph Category 3 storm, and they’re predicting 115 knots or 133 mph winds (weak Category 4) within 12 hours.
The latest model runs show John running up the coast of Mexico, with no agreement on weather it slams Baja or turns out to sea. The National Hurricane Center forecasters are going with the “turn out to sea” angle.
Chris alludes to the Great San Diego Hurricane of 1858. Michael Chenoweth and Chris Landsea wrote a fascinating paper a couple of years back in BAMS piecing together the storm’s story from old newspaper clippings and the like.
In Which I Finally Get My Own Hurricane
A helpful colleague points out hurricane John, which is strengthening as it runs up Mexico’s west coast. Happily for the folks living in Baja, most of the models show John living out its life over water. Of course it would be wrong of me to hope that John follows the GFDL model track up into Mexico and Arizona. Of course it would be wrong of me to hope for this newspaper headline: “John Devastates Tucson,” or “John Brings Flooding to New Mexico.”