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.

Buffelgrass

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Apropos last week’s discussions of tamarisk comes this Tucson Weekly story about buffelgrass, an African invader that is playing havoc with the Sonoran desert:

In spite of the frantic warnings of ecologists and land managers, and despite some valiant and surprisingly effective local efforts, the problem is now so acute that biologists view buffelgrass as an imminent threat to the entire Sonoran Desert ecosystem.

My understanding is that buffelgrass is not (yet?) an issue in New Mexico, but perhaps someone down south (hint hint) can shed some light?

Hat tip Julio Betancourt for sending me the article. The guy’s on a crusade about this.

Zeitgeist

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In order, the top search strings y’all are using to get to my blog:

  1. big ass
  2. john fleck
  3. pirates global warming
  4. google games
  5. bread mold
  6. rumpology
  7. environmental determinism
  8. global warming pirates
  9. chandler wobble
  10. global warming vs pirates
  11. brandon leslie
  12. John Fleck
  13. largest pineapple
  14. jeff Baxter
  15. cool domain names
  16. fleck
  17. tang dishwasher
  18. pirates and global warming
  19. Celestial Drops
  20. first hummer
  21. klaus oldenberg
  22. tingley beach
  23. celestial drops
  24. 3.14159
  25. stephen dowling botts
  26. python pi
  27. chandler wobble stopped
  28. pirates vs global warming
  29. pirate global warming
  30. moving to montana soon
  31. co2 science
  32. beaver dams
  33. mold on bread
  34. maunder minimum
  35. teflon pants
  36. man dinosaurs coexist

Daybook

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reading: Tipped by the newly ubiquitous Kevin Vranes, I picked up The Wisdom of Crowds at the library yesterday, thinking it sounded all Gladwell. And who’s there on the back flacking it with a jacket blurb but Malcolm Gladwell.

music: Bill Evans on a quiet Sunday morning while I drank my coffee and read about death and destruction ’round the world.

bikes ‘n’ trains: On my ride this morning, I noted that they’re putting in a connection between the bike trail and the Journal Center Railrunner station.

word of the day: frangible

Wet Spring?

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Via the Journal’s Bruce Daniels comes word of a forecast for a wet spring:

Who needs computer models and satellite imagery to tell which way the wind’s blowing?

Certainly not Joseph Weldon Crim of Portales. Using what he calls a Plains Indian ritual passed down to him through his father, the 70-year-old Portales resident got a glimpse of a slightly wetter-than-normal spring, with some severe hailstorms in the picture, according to the Portales News-Tribune.

Much preferable to those nincompoops with the computers.