Drought Report

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OK, it’s April 1, and this is no joke. The official runoff forecast, done by genuine professionals, will be out next week, but we can get a pretty complete picture from the Snotel data. These numbers are river basin snow water equivalent content, in percent of April 1 average:

  • Upper Colorado River: 111
  • Upper Rio Grande (the part in Colorado): 65
  • Upper Rio Grande (the part in New Mexico): 63
  • Rio Chama (a Rio Grande tributary in NM): 60
  • Pecos: 11
  • Gila (the NM part): 30

Elephant Butte Reservoir, New Mexico’s largest, was at 38 percent of average March 1. This is a reminder of the significance of both decadal-scale climate variability (a huge wet year last year didn’t alleviate the problem) and growing human withdrawls from the system (there are more people here now than there used to be).

You can see from the map a pretty clear La Nina pattern, dry in the south and wet in the north, though that may just be dumb luck rather than a genuine teleconnection.

Tribalism

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Kevin Vranes had a great post yesterday about tribalism in the climate wars. He subtitled it “get over your tribalism instincts already”, which the commenters apparently skipped past in their zeal to read what Kevin had to say.

Kevin didn’t rise to Chris Mooney’s bait, so I don’t know if he was obliquely criticizing Mooney when he said journalists “should not need to rely on labels to get your message across”, but I’d argue that journalists should cover the tribes rather than self-identifying as part of them.

That’s why I found Chris’s post earlier this week about the Time global warming piece so disturbing. Chris’s criticism wasn’t that the Time team had misinformed its readers by committing journalistic malpractice on the hurricane question. His criticism was that time had given the other tribe, the one he’s not in, ammunition to debunk the article: “Jeez, Time, make it easy for them, why don’t you.” (Emphasis added, and no obliquity here, Chris. I’m criticizing you.)

I realize the kind of journalism Chris does is different than the kind I do, but whatever kind of journalism you’re doing must be about informing readers rather than about the journalism’s place in tribal wars. You can’t do that if you, as a journalist, openly self-identify as a member of one of the tribes.

To be fair, (“on the other hand….”) down in the comments Chris makes a much more reasoned point:

Nonsense, science writers have a duty to depict science accurately. There are many ways of telling a good story and informing the public without misrepresentation of what’s known or causal misattribution.

That’s the tribe I think you belong in, Chris – the tribe of science writers – not the “us vs. them” climate wars tribal colors you implicitly donned in the initial post.

Drought Babble

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Scot Key with a hilarious look at New Mexico’s drought tourism future (can drought be funny?):

Look at the Rio Grande, now a continuous strip of dry bed running the length of the state. Tourism, working with other State and Federal agencies, is clearing the burned bosque as fast as it can and establishing a number of “River Memorial Parks”, where vacationers can bring as many all-terrain vehicles as they can fit on a trailer to zip up and down the dry river bed for miles and miles.

Always look on the bright side of life.

What Really Happened on the Lower Colorado in 1905?

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I’ve been digging into the relationship between climate and the early history of water development of the Colorado River, and I’ve run into a bit of a conflict between the conventional history and the climate record (or as much of the climate record as I’ve been able to easily sort out).

(Click through if you’ve any interest in obscure western history or you think you’d be amused by my confusion. The rest of you move along, nothing much to see here.)

Continue reading ‘What Really Happened on the Lower Colorado in 1905?’ »

More Buffelgrass

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As a followup to yesterday’s post on bufflegrass, which is ravaging the Sonoran desert, I checked in with my buffelgrass expert on the question I posed about whether bufflegrass has made its way into New Mexico.

The answer is that it is not cold-tolerant, so we haven’t seen it here much. But a group of researchers at Texas A&M and elsewhere have developed “frio”, a cultivar of buffelgrass that is more cold tolerant:

(I)t has more winter hardiness than any commercially available cultivars and will expand the area where buffelgrass can be grown in the southwestern U.S. and northern Mexico and will reduce the risk of damage from cold weather in areas where buffelgrass is presently grown.

The question of whether this is a good idea is left as an exercise for the reader.

McIntyre and McKitrick Help Confirm Greenhouse Hypothesis

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One cannot help but be amused by the irony in this paper, in which Diego Rybski and others (one of the others being Hans von Storch) use Steve McIntyre’s paleoclimate reconstruction as one of a suite of six in a detection study, using the Hockey Stick Slayer’s work as evidence for human-caused warming:

Accordingly, the hypothesis that at least part of the recent warming cannot be solely related to natural factors, may be accpeted with a very low risk, independent of the database used.

The irony of the fact that the reconstructions of both Mann and McIntyre show strong detection signals (“early detection” meaning that it’s easier to detect the anthropogenic effect earlier in the 20th century) does not escape the authors:

An interesting detail is that the two fiercely arguing groups around Mann and McIntyre lead both to very early detections.

Ask an Adult

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I can’t even begin to put words to the complexity of my feelings about Nora turning 18, and even if I could I’m not sure I’d share them here. So I’ll leave you with this.

Last night at birthday sushi dinner, we purchased a round of Ramune, a Japanese soda with a strange marble contraption stopper. To open it, you flip up the little plastic thing and then…. Well, the point is that opening a Ramune bottle is complicated enough that the first bullet point on the caution label says: “Ask an adult to open the bottle for you.” And it occurred to me that that universe now includes Nora.