And More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Blast to Simulate Nuke Explosion (sub. req.):

Pentagon researchers plan to set off a simulated nuclear blast in the Nevada desert in June as part of their search for a better way to destroy buried enemy bunkers, according to federal documents.

A Defense Nuclear Threat Reduction Agency spokeswoman would neither confirm nor deny the nuclear connection Friday, saying only that conventional mining explosives would be used in for the massive blast.

But a Pentagon budget request is explicit about its purpose: to “improve the warfighter’s confidence in selecting the smallest nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage.”

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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N.M. Scientists Mimic Global Warming to Study Long-Term Effects (sub. req.):

As if Earth isn’t warming fast enough, Jim Elliott wants to speed things up.

To do it, Elliott has fashioned what look like 20 oversized bed frames on a remote patch of desert south of Belen to create an extra bit of global warming on a very small scale.

Elliott is the self-described “blue-collar scientist”— the guy who knows how to use tools— on a team trying to answer a deceptively simple question: What will happen here as our planet warms?

Scientists no longer question whether Earth is warming, and few doubt that the stuff coming out of our tailpipes is the primary cause. Much research today is focused on what will happen as a result.

Later….

Led by University of New Mexico scientist Joe Fargione, they are building contraptions to impose global warming conditions on a patch of desert to see how plants growing here respond.

Spread across 400 square miles, the Sevilleta is an ideal laboratory for the research, spanning the sort of ecological boundaries where change is most apparent.

In the case of Fargione’s research, the important boundary is the northern edge of the creosote’s range. That boundary has been creeping northward, and warmer temperatures are one possible explanation because of creosote’s sensitivity to winter freezes.

The scientists want to see if creosote will have an edge in a warming world. They also want to know whether the mix of grasses on the site will change to favor those more comfortable in warmer weather.

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.)

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