Courtesy Avelino Maestas:

Here’s the thing to notice: a bright sunny day, a creek that apparently is normally dry (else the plants alongside would be different), yet look at the muddy chocolate milk thing going on.

Years ago, I was hanging out on a hillside in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon with a group of geologists (I know – rough job, but somebody’s got to do it) when a late summer thunderstorm blew through. It was a gully just like this – completely dry, turned into a mini-torrent. Our problem was that the gully bottom was essentially the only trail back to camp. I still have a pair of formerly white socks stained reddish brown from wading through the water that day.

Jim Giles has a story in last week’s Nature (sub. req.) pointing to some preliminary work linking warm Atlantic temperatures to last year’s devastating Amazon drought:

The drought first caught scientists’ interest because its cause was unusual. Dry spells in the Amazon usually occur in El Niño years, when warm water off the Pacific coast of South America sets up a pattern of circulating air that inhibits rainfall in the Amazon. But last year was not an El Niño year.

Instead, the drought was caused by a circulation pattern powered by warm seas in the Atlantic — the same phenomenon responsible for last year’s unusually intense Atlantic hurricane season. The result was a dry spell that hit particularly hard in the western Amazon, a region that normally has more rainfall than other parts of the forest.

Giles points to some interesting modeling work by Peter Cox that had predicted more frequent droughts in the future because of warmer Atlantic waters. At the time Cox published the work, people didn’t take it seriously, according to Giles, because the warm Atlantic-drought thing hadn’t been seen before. Cox is apparently being taken a bit more seriously.

The latest drought monitor, out this morning, pretty much wipes out drought conditions completely across much of New Mexico:

In New Mexico, D1 and D0 conditions were reduced over much of the state. A large area free of drought designation exists in central New Mexico and a new drought-free area was introduced in northeast New Mexico. After a dry start to the year, many locations in New Mexico are at or above normal for the year, and flooding concerns across the state have superseded drought concerns. In Arizona, the wet pattern has allowed for many hydrological issues to improve and is shown in the current drought status.

We’ve still got reservoir shortfalls, so I wouldnt’ really say the drought’s over. But we’re in much, much better shape than we were two months ago when all of this started.

Summer rains usually don’t do much good at Elephant Butte, New Mexico’s major storage reservoir. (I touched on this a bit last week in my on line Journal chat.) But this summer’s been extraordinary. So how’s the Butte doing?

One of my water geek contacts sent me this link, to daily numbers from the Bureau of Reclamation. The Butte was at 183,000 acre feet on July 28, the low point of the year. It’s up to 295,000 acre feet as of this writing. So how big a deal is that?

On average, Elephant Butte drops 30,000 acre feet in August. So we’re clearly moving in the right direction. But Average end-of-August storage is 1.2 million acre feet. So we’ve still clearly got a long way to go. Summer rains, even the wettest since we’ve had rain gauges in New Mexico, are not enough to erase drought caused by lack of winter precip.

So I’m now fully prepared to look stupid.

This morning’s front page of the newspaper included a short story by me about the rains finally shutting down.

Umm. Hold that thought. Hurricane Ileana is changing the picture in a hurry, with the possibility of a big slug of moisture come the weekend:

AT LEAST SOME PORTION OF MOISTURE FROM TROPICAL STORM WELL S OF BAJA CA MAY GET ENTRAINED INTO THE FLOW. THAT WOULD BE AN EVEN BIGGER NIGHTMARE FOR THE ALREADY WATERLOGGED PORTIONS OF THE STATE

One of my arguments against Chris Mooney’s thesis (“The Republican War on Science“) is that all disputants in scientized political debates cherrypick. Chris has argued from the specific – Well-documented examples in which conservatives have done this. – to the general – The problem is that conservatives do this.

My view is that we have a different problem to cope with: the fact that both sides in most interesting science-politics-policy debates do this, and we’ve got to call bullshit on it wherever it happens. With that in mind, I’ll call bullshit on this:

Oceans worldwide are projected to rise as much as three feet this century, and much higher if the Greenland ice sheet melts away. (emphasis added)

It’s from an op-ed in the Washington Post by Mike Tidwell of the U.S. Climate Emergency Council, “a nonprofit organization dedicated to rigorous grassroots action in the fight to stop global warming and promote a clean energy future.”

People who want to do what Tidwell is advocating – use climate change science as a basis for energy policy action – can, if they are careful, speak from the high ground, basing their call to action on a strong scientific consensus on climate science. But as soon as they cherry-pick science that goes beyond the consensus, they are implicitly justifying all such cherry-picking, and we devolve into a he-said she-said argument with the Roy Spencers of the world.

So what’s the best available consensus statement on the subject of sea level rise? From the IPCC:

Global mean sea level is projected to rise by 0.09 to 0.88 metres between 1990 and 2100.

As you can see, Tidwell has picked the most extreme sea level rise scenario identified by the IPCC (“.88 meters” ~ 3 feet). This is epistemologically identical to picking the other end of the IPCC range and arguing that sea level rise will be negligible and can therefore be ignored. Sea level rise is a significant issue, and it’s important to incorporate the best available science in underpinning the discussion, including a recognition of the genuine uncertainties. As soon as Tidwell picks an outlier on one extreme, he sanctions his political opponents’ choice of the opposite, and gridlock is ensured.

(Hat tip Roger Pielke Jr. for the link, with a lot more interesting discussion there.)

jones_arroyo

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

Another sight from Saturday’s bike ride: This is the Jones arroyo (and by “arroyo,” I mean “concrete channel”) that Coco wrote about last week. If you click through to the big version of the picture, you can see where they whacked out the bridge’s concrete sidewalls to let the water through during a big rain storm Aug. 6. Coco suggests some, uhh, engineering issues upstream are to blame for the sand that clogged things up.

Miguel and I rode up into the neighborhoods being built upstream, in the northwest Corrales sand hills. Tons of erosion problems.