Daybook

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reading: My goofball daughter gave me The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster for Father’s Day. Way better than a barbecue, frankly.

climate news: Sergey Zimov of the Russian Academy and colleagues have a paper in Friday’s Science arguing that the potential for carbon loss from permafrost has been underestimated. That’s another “plus” feedback: “Factors inducing high-latitude climate warming should be mitigated to minimize the risk of a potentially large carbon release that would further increase climate warming,” they argue.

film: Lissa and I saw “the Al Gore movie” last night. As Eric Steig has already explained, he pretty much got the science right. My quibble is with the hurricane stuff, but on the whole the science is solid. What’s more interesting is the passion. It’s a passionate personal essay, and that is what touched me about it.

music: Via my office neighbor, the Kleptones and Radio Clash. I’ll never be as hip as the cool kids, but a boy’s gotta dream, eh?

But Wait, There’s More!

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For the low, low price of a morning newspaper you also get my take on whether or not you can expect a good southwestern monsoon this year. The succinct answer? Dunno….

There are forecasters in the National Weather Service’s Albuquerque office who have never seen a really juicy monsoon.

You know the kind— towering late-afternoon knots of summertime purple over the mountains that roll down and cleanse the Rio Grande Valley, day after day.

The last time summer gave us that kind of blessing was 1999.

Sitting around a table Friday morning with some of those young forecasters and a group of Albuquerque television meteorologists, local Weather Service chief Charlie Liles tried his best to answer the question on everyone’s mind: Will our luck finally turn this year?

Liles’ best bottom line: There’s no way to tell.

Seasonal forecasts are hard any time, but especially summer in the Southwest, and especially in a year like this.

(A journalistic aside. Those not familiar with the business may not realize that the person who writes the story doesn’t write the headline. That’s done by copy editors who have the specialized skill of coming up with a handful of words that does a couple of jobs: accurately representing the complexities of the story that follows, luring readers into the story, and most importantly fitting into whatever size and shape the page design allows. It’s extremely difficult, and I’d be terrible at it. In this case, whoever headlined my story came up with an absolute gem: “It’s Going to Rain … When It Rains“)

Stuff We Wrote Elsewhere

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$3 a gallon gas and $70 a barrel oil represent a teachable moment. The results of my schooling can be found here:

So is biodiesel made from restaurant fry oil the answer to our nation’s transportatioan fuel woes?

The short answer, energy experts say, is “no.” But once the caveats are added in, the longer answer is a complex “maybe”— biofuels made of waste from our food production system, along with a host of other options, suddenly look not only viable but necessary.

“There’s not one single silver bullet,” Assistant Energy Secretary Karen Harbert said during a recent visit to Albuquerque.

The goal was an overview of all the major petro-alternatives that are on the table right now, trying to give some sense of how viable they are, and what their strengths and weaknesses might be. It was a tricky story, because pretty much all the “experts” are advocates for one of particular technological solution. It took some hunting to find people who are looking at the full picture, trying to find apples-to-apples ways of comparing the options.

Also in today’s Journal, Rosalie Rayburn does much the same thing for electricity supplies here in New Mexico.

Good Fire Coverage

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I have a great frustration with traditional television news coverage of wildfires, because it generally leaves the impression of a chaotic, uncontrolled and unpredictable situation. Sometimes it is that way. But more often, the fire crews have a pretty clear idea of terrain, fuel load and weather. They know where the fire is now, and where it’s likely to go in the next 24 hours. They have a strategy for fighting the fire, which generally involves cutting a line behind it, flanking it with lines, and picking a safe distance in front of it to cut a line. It’s hard work, but most of the time it’s a fairly orderly process. The importance is to distinguish that orderly process from the times that the fire gets unruly rather than just treating the whole event as unruly chaos.

Avelina Maestas gives a nice flavor for that with his coverage this morning of the Skates Fire down south. Especially check out the map.

What I Want for Father’s Day

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I want one of those really big-ass barbecues. The kind that’s all shiny metal, with a giant tank of propane or something, so I can cook lots of meat – sizzling raw flesh of dead animals.

And a place to hold a keg of beer for me and my man friends.

But it’s got to have an enormous flat screen TV, so I can watch football games while I’m cooking the meat. (Or Bette Midler movies when it’s not football season. Me and my man friends love Bette Midler.)

But wait. Is this a safety issue? Can you have a keg of beer next to a big-ass tank of propane?

The Ants

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I timed an ant this evening, walking (if you can call it that – “drunkenly stumbling”?) across our front yard with an elm seed as big as she was.

The ants have been with us forever, a big colony living under our driveway about midway between the house and the street. I’m pretty sure they were there when we moved in, and for a long time, before Sadie joined us, I thought of them as our pets. They seem to be seed eaters, because you can sit on the front porch and spot them from a long way away, carrying these gigantic elm seeds over to their hole.

The elm’s seed sits at the center, surrounded by a thin membrane that must act a sail, carrying the elm seed in the wind or something. So the ants have to pick this thing up by the edge and carry it in front of them, and the seed is as big as they are. They sort of flop around, and the ants tip over from the unbalanced weight, or maybe from the elm seed blowing in the wind. It’s hard to imagine how arduous a task this must be. But if you sit back on our front porch and squint, you can see the little flashes of white, several at any one time, as the ants trudge holeward with what I assume must be a great feast.

This evening, I wandered over to watch one, follow it back to the hole. Scaled up, I imagine it being sort of like one of us stumbling a great distance carrying a large blowup kids’ pool that flops some in the wind. Except that we’re carrying it in our mouth, so we can’t really see where we’re going.

My understanding of ants is that the leave pheromone trails for one another, so their little brains don’t have to know much more than “have food->go up gradient”. My ant followed a curving path, but then at the last minute, as she was approaching the hole, veered off in the opposite direction. The final approach looked like a random drunken walk, but eventually she ended up at the hole. At which point she set the seed down, and a bunch of ants converged to work on it.

I was so fascinated that I forgot to look at my watch. I have no idea how long it took her to walk across the yard.