As I’ve mentioned previously, we don’t have a lot of water here in the desert. But we desert dwellers are people of vision. We build ponds. We race boats. (Well, they race boats. I just watch.)
As yacht racing goes, the new pond at the north end of Tingley Beach is a small setting, but the sailors of the Duke City Model Yacht Club were up to to the challenge Saturday afternoon.
It’s a bit long for a crit course, but it was fun watching the boys have at it on the Champs-Elysées today. Great to see Ekimov hold the flag for us old guys, leading the peloton in, and even greater to see him bust a move there at the end to try to set up Popovich. I love watching the guys ride the gutter, looking for that little edge of smooth concrete. That’s bike racing, for sure. And, oh yeah, Floyd won the Tour.
Go Floyd.
One of the fundamental public misunderstandings about science, I think, is the difference between textbooks full of answers known and scientists poking blindly out at the fuzzy edge. That’s why the latest dietary study (“But I thought they said coffee was good for me!”) always causes such public puzzlement.
That’s the premise I was trying to get at in the climate science story in this morning’s paper, taking the outliers seriously while at the same time trying to place them in a broader context:
Contrary to the common perception of textbooks filled with fixed knowledge, real science is a tangled process fraught with uncertainties, and such debates are common in any field.
“Science,” said Texas A&M climate scientist Andrew Dessler, “is this turbulent interface between what we know and what we don’t know.”
But if all science is turbulent, then climate science, because of its political dimensions, is all the more so.
A week ago, I wrote a snarky post in which I implied that the criticism of Michael Mann and his hockey stick had gone beyond a debate about the science to become a personal attack. A thoughtful commenter suggested that perhaps I’d gone too far: “There has been little in there which is ad hominem, and I do not recall any personal criticism of Mann- which is what your sketch seems to imply.” The comment was true with respect to the Wegman report, but it is most assuredly not with respect to the broader discussion that has accompanied it.
Today, on a New Mexico science email list, one of the discussants compared Michael Mann to Jeffrey Dahmer:
Here’s what I think of Mann and his cronies, including the Oil for Food guys. Is Jeffrey Dahmer an okay guy since he hasn’t killed anyone lately? First off, I will admit the comparison is not equivalent, but not for the reason I think you would suggest. What Mann is doing, considering the possibility that CO2 is beneficial, is orders of magnitude worse.
As Dave Barry says after penning something that seems too absurd to be true: I am not making this up.
Of course after his epic performance Thursday, there were bound to be questions about whether Floyd Landis was doping. Now new evidence has emerged.
There’s this sound when a group of cyclists rolls off together, a rapid, random “clickclickclickclick” as they lock into their pedals. That was the sound this morning in the bosque, down by the Rio Grande Nature Center, as a group of cyclists mounted up for a ceremonial ride at the end of Paula Higgins’ memorial service.
I went because Paula is part of my tribe. I didn’t know her well, but she was Rio Grande Racing Team from way back (that’s smalltribe) and a cyclist (that’s largetribe).
If you look on the Record Challenge web site, you’ll see this:
Tandem 40k 52:00.55 Carolyn Donnelley, Paula Higgins 9/3/95
That’s the national women’s record for a 40k tandem ride. That’s street cred.
A big bunch of folks – some in quiet black, some in shorts and Hawaiian shirts, some in spandex – gathered at the Nature Center for a memorial service this morning. It was deeply moving, by turns funny – like her brother’s story of the pun Paula built with a twinkle after making a pizza dough spiced with dill – and unbearably sad.
At the end of the service, the cyclists lined up at the Nature Center bridge, and Carolyn rode away from the bunch, alone on the tandem, up the riverside trail until she disappeared around a bend. Then the rest of the riders clicked in and slowly followed.
It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen.
In which Nora chronicles our visit to the Ghost Mall. She was kind enough not to embarass me with the revelation that I bought a bunch of incredibly cheap T-shirts while Lady Foot Locker was in the final throes of going out of business. Which I guess makes me a cross-dresser.
In another life, I wrote about California water policy. So it was with some nostalgia that I saw this LA Times story come across a local water policy email list:
The cost of dismantling the dam that created Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and restoring the glacial gorge that John Muir considered one of the national park’s scenic treasures could range from $3 billion to nearly $10 billion, according to a state report released Wednesday.
Both critics and supporters of the fiercely debated proposal to return the flooded valley to its natural state seized on the state Department of Water Resources report as good news.
Opponents in San Francisco, which relies on the reservoir for its crystal-clear water and its hydropower, said the lofty price estimates should kill the fanciful idea once and for all.
“This assessment should lay to rest the idea that draining the Bay Area’s main source of water warrants further study, particularly in a state that needs more water and more clean power, not less,” said Susan Leal, general manager of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission.
But the group of environmentalists pushing to topple O’Shaughnessy Dam — the towering wall of concrete completed in 1923 that put Hetch Hetchy Valley under 300 feet of water — said the 62-page state report underscores that the project, though pricey, is feasible.
Back in the ’80s, when I was writing about this stuff, Reagan Administration Interior Secretary Don Hodel proposed removing O’Shaugnessy Dam and restoring the magnificent Hetch Hetchy Valley. It was wonderfully wacky, completely impractical, completely out of character for the Reaganites to side with the environmental left, and therefore a delightful story.
Nice to see it’s still completely impractical and yet won’t die.
The AP’s Douglas Pizac reports this week that Lake Powell is seeing less water than expected:
Lake Powell is barely half full and taking a quarter less runoff than expected this year — a sign the Colorado River basin remains in the grip of a multiyear drought, according to a new report from government hydrologists.
For some, Lake Powell is proving its value, keeping water for dry years. Others say the reservoir may never refill and should be drained to reveal the glory of Glen Canyon.
Pizac’s story doesn’t give a lot of detail about “the report” on which this is based, except to say that it was “filed Friday for government officials at dozens of federal and state agencies.” Anyone have any idea what it is and where it might be found?
I did another water ride this morning, up the Hahn Arroyo bike trail to see the bits that washed out in last Saturday’s downpour.
Water in a sense defines landscape (or at least contributes strongly to its definition), and the concrete of the Hahn is a great illustration of one of the fundamentals of life here in the desert southwest.
Albuquerque spreads across a series of alluvial fans flowing out of the Sandia Mountains. With no permanent running water in the arroyos, it’s clear that the alluvium all got here in big debris flows – flood events. When you lay a city down on top of that, you’ve got to do something to accommodate the water from those flood events, which is why we’ve got the concrete-lined Hahn Arroyo and a bunch like it threading down from the mountains.
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