On Greenland warming (hat tip Benny Peiser)
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
The problem with the U.S. Department of Energy. Perhaps subtitled: “Parking in 14 easy pages.”
The Ants
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.
Chess and Love
From the virtual lips of Johnny_Mango, a phrase that has never before appeared on the InterWeb: Armenian chess houligans.
Hot Day in New Mexico
From the National Weather Service
PUBLIC INFORMATION STATEMENT NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE ALBUQUERQUE NM 734 PM MDT MON JUN 5 2006 ...RECORD HIGH TEMPERATURES FOR MONDAY JUNE 5 2006... LOCATION HIGH TEMPERATURE PREVIOUS RECORD ------------------------------------------------------------ TUCUMCARI 103 100 IN 1980 PORTALES 102 TIED 102 IN 1990 DEMING 101 TIED 101 IN 1996 DEMING AIRPORT 100 99 IN 1980 ALBUQUERQUE VALLEY 100 98 IN 1996 ALBUQUERQUE SUNPORT 98 97 IN 1996 FARMINGTON 98 94 IN 1946 ALBUQUERQUE FOOTHILLS 96 TIED 96 IN 1996 SANTA FE 96 93 IN 1946 RATON 95 93 IN 1946 GALLUP 94 TIED 94 IN 1996 LAS VEGAS 93 91 IN 1946 CHAMA 87 85 IN 1996
To try to get a feel for the urban heat island where I actually live, in the middle of town, I’ve set up an old cotton region shelter in my backyard with surplus NWS thermometers. I’ve had thermometers for a while, and they usually read hotter than the official Weather Service reading from the airport, but I never knew if my setup was comparable. Now it is.
Yesterday’s high in my backyard was 106F.
update: 106F = 41C
The Old Schwartzman Property
Richard Metcalf’s story in Thursday’s Journal spurred me to ride down past the old Schwartzman property this morning, down in Albuquerque’s South Valley.
It’s 500 acres of land, much of it still farmed, dating back somewhere into Albuquerque’s distant past when farming was what we did. According to Richard’s story, the Schwartzman family moved here in the 1880s, and ran a “vertically integrated” meat-packing operation on the land, from feed, to cattle, to slaughterhouse.
Continue reading ‘The Old Schwartzman Property’ »
The Immigrant Threat to our Way of Life
Dr. Swamp Cooler today speaks bravely about the threat posed by immigrants to our way of life:
The decision to issue Swamp Cooler Photo ID cards was made unavoidable due to the influx of migrants (California, Ohio, Illinois, Texas, etc.) who come to New Mexico with alien notions of air conditioning that have become a threat to us all.
Dr. Swamp Cooler could not ignore numerous reports of migrant homeowners with refrigerated air conditioning trying to pass themselves off as traditional New Mexican swamp cooler owners.
If you show up at the home improvement store ostensibly looking for cooler pads, water pumps, tubing, compression nuts or any number of things you forgot to buy on the first trip, it is imperative that you actually need these things.
We can’t allow swamp cooler fraud to shred the social fabric.
On the Radio
If you’re in Albuquerque, you can catch me on the radio this afternoon at 2, talking with Kim Johnson and Dave Thomas of New Mexicans for Science and Reason. We’ll be talking about science journalism. Or something. I’m not sure exactly what, but I trust Kim and Dave to ask some sort of useful questions.
Journalism, Hurricanes and Climate Change
Alex Witze has an excellent news piece in Nature this week summing up the back-and-forth on the hurricane-global warming link. It shows the debate leaning in the direction of those arguing for a link, but also suggests how currently unsettled the issue is, and why.
I think she gets it just about right.
Over in the comments at Prometheus, I’ve been arguing with Steve Bloom about how journalists should report the discussion. Steve posits:
“an awful lot of people have begun to conclude that the Webster/Emanuel camp is right…. Why shouldn’t journalists begin to draw the same conclusion?”
My answer is that the debate is lively, the question is unsettled, and the best available expert consensus review by the World Meteorological Association reflects the fact that the quesiton is unsettled. To report otherwise would be to pick sides. That’s not what mainstream journalists do (or should do).
Steve points to Nature’s editorial accompanying Alex’s piece, which concludes: “In the past year, an emerging consensus has suggested that rising sea surface temperatures may well be causing hurricanes to become more intense over time,” suggesting that the editorial is an example of good journalism on the issue. But that’s an editorial – Nature’s expression of its institutional opinion on the question, not a news reporter’s explanation of the state of the science. Editorials are supposed to take sides.
More important, though, is a later bit of discussion in the Nature editorial, which Steve and those like him, arguing for the hurricane-global warming connection, should heed:
More worryingly, the science of hurricanes and global warming seems to be falling into the same trap that has ensnared climate-change research for two decades. Researchers are lining up into distressingly familiar camps, with some arguing for the link between tropical storms and climate change, and some against it. They duel at press conferences and snipe at each other on the Internet and in the literature, each side trying to dissect the other’s data.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, I refer readers to Daniel Sarewitz on this point, who has ably documented the way public policy and political debates become intractable when disputants choose up sides with competing scientific authorities to support their views.
Steve’s on risky ground here. On the broad questions of anthropogenic climate change, he and the other members of his camp have the IPCC and other expert reviews on their side. Such expressions of consensus provide strong support for their arguments and, I believe, strong support for political and public policy decisions. As soon as they abandon that cover on the hurricane question, picking a side while the science remains unsettled, they lose the authority of their argument.
Ancient Art
The cave paintings of Chauvet-Pont-D’Arc captivate me. Our ancestors were making art in depths of the last ice age, long before they domesticated food. It takes all kinds of hubris and reductionist deconstruction to imagine why they were doing it, so I’d rather just let it be and enjoy the fact that they did it.
The news of the day (hat tip to some smart wire editor at my morning paper) is a find in Vilhonneur forest – a 27,000-year-old cave painting of a human face with a skeleton. It’s said to be, possibly, the earliest artistic representation of a human face.