Earlier this week, Kevin Vranes helped explain something that had been puzzling me: how members of Congress could use appropriations bills as vehicles to make policy. The item at hand for me was the Yucca Mountain language included in the most recent Senate version of the Energy and Water appropriations bill, which I’d been writing about over on my work blog.
Turns out Yucca Mountain isn’t the only policy being made in the bill. Coco notes action on the subject of billboards.
My first visit to Albuquerque, at least the first that I remember, was some time in the mid-1970s. I was a teenager, and we stayed with friends in Dietz Farm, in a house in the shade of the cottonwoods that backed up on the ditch along the east side of the Rio Grande.
I remember towering afternoon thunderstorms. We didn’t get wet every day, but a day did not go by that you couldn’t see them somewhere nearby. I’ve been remembering that visit this week, as the rains make a valiant attempt at returning.
We’ve had rain in parts of New Mexico every day for the last week or so, spotty thunderstorms that have an awfully monsoonal look. The forecasters have been suggesting it’s not quite monsoonal yet, and I haven’t been doing of my own journalistic due diligence, so I’ve no ammunition with which to disagree. But whatever it is, it’s been lovely.
Yesterday morning I rode my bike up to the Alameda Bridge at the north end of town, and the river was running a beautiful muddy red. The river’s been quite low, but if you click through to the link you’ll see how it popped up every time it rained over the last week.
An old missive of mine resurfaces: “filesystem or file system“
With Ullrich and Basso out of the tour, and apparently half the people in Europe who have ever worn spandex being connected to doping in the Spanish press, David Millar suddenly looks mighty attractive, having just finished his two-year suspension for doping.
Or, as a friend suggested yesterday, Pee Wee Herman’s starting to look good with that sweet ride of his.
We got 0.41 inch (1 cm) from that one*, Mark.
That brings my rain gauge total to 0.93 inch (2.4 cm) for June. Also 0.93 for the last four days. That makes this the wettest month since October. The water year at my house:
* For those who don’t live in my neighborhood, “that one” = storm cell that rolled through town in the early evening. It was a relatively small cell, but Mark and I happen to live right beneath it.
Back in January, there was a huge debate in the comments here about “flora gains” – the suggestion by one of the regular commenters that we’d benefit from enhanced carbon dioxide because the plants on which we depend for food etc. would do better, with CO2 fertilization more than making up for any negative effects from climate change. It was one of those classic blog comment shouting matches, mostly heat and not much light, and I pretty much stayed out of it.
There are a couple of papers in tomorrow’s Science that add some light, and they suggest that the case for CO2 fertilization benefits has been overstated.
The problem, outlined by Stephen Long of the University of Illinois and colleagues is that the “enclosure studies” supporting flora gains were not terribly realistic. With better technologies that have allowed testing of enhanced CO2 in real-world settings, the benefits are far smaller.
I don’t know enough about the issue to understand where this fits in the broad sweep of research on this question. But I do know that this is a fair piece more interesting and important than hockey sticks, as this is the sort of stuff we actually need to understand in order to figure out what to do.
Food for Thought: Lower-Than-Expected Crop Yield Stimulation with Rising CO2 Concentrations, Long et. al, Science 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1918 – 1921, DOI:10.1126/science.1114722
Climate Change and Crop Yields: Beyond Cassandra, Schimel, Science 30 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5782, pp. 1889 – 1890, DOI: 10.1126/science.1129913
Today’s lesson: never mix alkali metals with water.
Now that’s science. (Hat tip Quark Soup.)
Via the magic of technology of some sort, I listened this morning to Harry Shearer’s interview with Ivor van Heerden from Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, more commonly known as “the man who saw it coming“. Fascinating conversation. Download it here.
We’ve had rain here the last few days (half an inch in the gauge at my house, much more elsewhere, much less other elsewhere). To wet climate denizens, that might seem like no big deal, but such is our drought that some residents of our community have literally never seen rain before. Coco explains:
You’ve been in a storm before? Well, my tomato and pepper plants never had been. It was their first rain ever! Come to think of it, it was the Boy Pup’s first big storm too. For here, and in these days, it was a real deluge.
Such was the novelty that for two nights in a row, everyone at my house stopped what they were doing and watched it rain. We went out on the porch, we stood in the front window, we angled the view to the north to see the lightning show, some of us (well, honestly, just one of us) stared at our little electronic weather gizmos like they were one of those overtime shootouts in the World Cup final. We even had to rescue a neighbor out for a walk and caught in said deluge.
Via James Hrynyshyn, word of possible budget cuts at the National Climatic Data Center:
The center holds the world’s largest collection of climate data and information, which often is used for monitoring long-term trends that might harm lives and property and the nation’s environmental, national, homeland and economic security.
A House budget proposal gives the data center $13.3 million, which is $3.9 million less than was requested and $1.2 million less than its budget from the previous fiscal year.
Without changes, the center would be forced to lay off some of its 100 contract scientists and workers and limit hours in which they can help 50,000 clients with questions, said Tom Karl, the center’s director.
