More on Blogging and the Academy

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My friend Luis, who was thinking hard and well about this stuff before he went to law school, co-links to my recent post on the blog-media-scholarship nexus and this Mike Madison post. There apparently is a discussion afoot in academic law circles about the blog, to whit: Is it scholarship? Madison suggests the question is ill-posed:

Can we talk? Have a real conversation about the future of legal scholarship? I don’t know. But there have to be some ground rules that don’t put the law review genie in the bottle.

First, we’d have to agree to stop debating whether something is “scholarship” or not, and instead start talking about where and when and how different types of writing and speaking and presenting engage each other.

Lissa for Congress

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So I’ve been cogitating over a blog post of a couple of weeks, a schtick about our local congressional race. But it seems events have superseded my attempt at humor before I ever had a chance to write it down.

The schtick involved ads in which each major party candidate accuses the other of various sorts of corrupt malfeasance. (Locals in the audience – you know what I’m talking about. I won’t bore the rest of you with the details.)

So my schtick was going to involve an effort to get the candidates to focus on the issues that matter – the bumper crop of weeds in my garden after the bountiful summer rains. “What are you going to do about the weeds in my garden?” I was going to rhetorically ask the candidates.

The thing is, Lissa’s been working like mad on the weeds and has them pretty much whipped. So I think I’m just going to skip the schtick and write in Lissa on the November ballot.

Water in the Desert

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San Juan Chama Intake

Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck.

This is the intake structure for the city of Albuquerque’s San Juan-Chama project water. It’s just south of Alameda on the east side of the Rio Grande. (here on Google maps, but it hadn’t been built yet when this satellite image was taken.)

The water comes across the continental divide out of the San Juan River watershed, and is dumped into the Chama River – hence the name. We’re going to start using this water for our city drinking water beginning in 2008 under the current schedule. Currently, we pump fossil groundwater, but that is unsustainable.

Consensus Science

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I have tried several times, with varying degrees of success, to tackle the “consensus ain’t science” shibboleth. (See especially here and the comments here).

Andrew Dessler recently took an excellent stab at this in a couple of posts: see here and here.

Might a “consensus” position be wrong? Of course. All knowledge is provisional and subject to future revision as new data comes in. However, as policymakers, the scientific consensus is the position most likely to be correct. In particular, strongly held consensus positions (e.g., smoking causes cancer, the Earth is warming) are verly unlikely to turn out to be wrong. Policymakers can do no better than to follow the scientific consensus in formulating their policy.

El Niño Lurks

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The Climate Prediction Center’s latest ENSO outlook, issued yesterday, ups the odds for a weak El Niño by the end of the year. Last month, they put the odds at 50-50. Yesterday, they said a weak El Niño is “likely” by the end of the year. Here in New Mexico, that tips the odds wet.

In Australia, there’s a strong correlation between El Niño and drought. From The Age: “Farmers fear the worst”

Breathe Easier

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A new paper from Jungclaus et al. at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology says model runs show the melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet is not likely to shut down the thermohaline circulation any time soon:

Our results suggest that abrupt climate change initiated by GIS melting is not a realistic scenario for the 21st century.

That’s Dry

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From today’s Drought Monitor:

Yuma, Arizona, has recorded only 0.23 inches of rain this year, which is 12 percent of normal.

(That’s 0.6 cm for my metric friends.)

I’m not sure who would notice this amid the electronic buzzing and whirring and air conditioning and fountains, but Las Vegas, Nevada, has only had half an inch (1.25 cm) this year.