Storm of the Winter?

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One of my weather geeks called the weather settling in over northern New Mexico and southern Colorado today the “storm of the winter”, which is not saying much given the winter we’ve had, but is still better than saying nothing. There’s currently an avalanche warning for the San Juans in southern Colorado, with two feet of snow expected. Winter storm watches and warnings all over the state, with the added strange weirdness of a red flag warning (high fire danger) across the eastern part of the state.

In Albuquerque, one to three inches are possible in the foothills by tomorrow. Yippee.

Plagues and Stuff

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A nice review of Al Zelicoff and Michael Bellomo’s Microbe:

Microbe is also a book designed to disrupt our sense of complacency about the public health system in the U.S. It challenges our assumption that the public health system works well, even in the face of widespread disease and even epidemics. The reader encounters example after example of past system failures under even modest stress. A long litany of probable future outbreaks and bioterror events is presented, in a factual and straightforward manner. Having made the case for the need for systematic improvements, the authors propose some practical ways to make those improvements.

Local Albuquerque authors and, full disclosure, Al’s one of those generous sciency people who helps me understand the complicated stuff.

Expanding Earth

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An exciting press release arrived at the office today about a subject I’d not been familiar with: the Expanding Earth (EE) hypothesis. Its chief proponent, or at least its most visible, seems to be comic book artist Neal Adams:

THEY, the scientists of Earth have not faced the simple fact that the Earth is growing!…that will all change, now…!

In order to hide the terrible truth (terrible???) that the Earth is growing, “the scientific community” insisted on the concept of “subduction” and has for over 30 years. A concept that is totally untrue and unscientific and well, stupid!

I know what you’re saying. This is crazy, flying in the face of a broad scientific consensus. Just remember the words of Michael Crichton:

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.

Why Kevin Vranes is my New Favorite Blogger

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Kevin’s mock interview with Hank Aaron:

AARON: We could also do a multiple linear regression with all the other season-by-season records of all the pre-roids sluggers. Anyway, which ever technique is most appropriate, we extrapolate from ’98 to the ’06 season to get his expected totals. Then let’s see if his post-1998 totals match. Clearly 2001 (73 HRs) was an outlier, but ’02 – ’04 are probably high, too. So we adjust those high totals down to the expected line. The residual is wiped off his HOF record, he gets to keep any HRs that come in below or at the extrapolation curve.

Daybook

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music: Today’s podGoober Project Gem: “rock ‘n’ roll” tuba, from back in the days before Bruce bulked up. No doubt many “rock” songs over the years have featured a tuba, but Gary Tallent’s turn on the big brass in Wild Billy’s Circus Story is the only one that comes to mind.

film: Netflixed An American in Paris. A tackysweet love story that’s frankly a bit much, but watching Gene Kelly and Leslie Caron move together is a treat that more than makes up for it. Or just watching Gene Kelly move alone. And there is much Gershwin.

blogdish: Scot Key suitably mocks our Trader Joe’s obsession.

climate science: Virmani and Weisberg on The 2005 hurricane season: An echo of the past or a harbinger of the future?:

Recent Atlantic hurricane activity raises several questions. For example, why was the 2005 season so early and active and are there similarities with the past? We show that parallels exist between 2005 and previously active years. Tropical Atlantic sea surface temperature (SST) anomalies beginning in winter aided the formation of early storms. On longer timescales SST, sea level pressure and zonal winds exhibit multidecadal variability; weaker easterlies during the positive phase of the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) result (via ocean-atmosphere interactions) in warmer water and increased hurricane activity. However, individual active years appear independent of the AMO phase.

blathering: If you’re in Albuquerque, you can come hear my take this evening on climate science, climate policy, climate politics and the role of the journalist: New Mexicans for Science and Reason monthly meeting, 7 p.m. room 2402 at the UNM Law School.

Welcome Daniella: Baby Daniella officially joined us Sunday, daughter to my friends Jaime and Heather. Among the activities of the day (I’m off work) none is more important than going over to meet Daniella.

Nessie Came from the Circus?

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From CBS news comes yet another explanation for the Loch Ness monster: frolicking circus elephants:

“The reason why we see elephants in Loch Ness,” asserts Dr. Neil Clark, a paleontologist, “is that circuses used to go along the road to Inverness and have a little rest at the side of the loch, and allow the animals to go and have a little swim around.”

The above-water parts of a swimming elephant, Palmer says, might look from a distance like Nessie’s most famous profile.

Hat tip Amanda (who really should blog).

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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On hurricanes and drought (sub. req.):

The same global forces that unleashed Katrina on New Orleans may be quietly sapping the West of its water.

Drought and hurricanes seem to go hand-in-hand, said Julio Betancourt, a drought researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey in Tucson.

Betancourt is among a growing number of researchers pointing to a warming Atlantic as the guilty party. Already implicated in a burst of increased hurricane activity since the mid-1990s, the Atlantic is now being fingered as a suspect in western droughts.

But while the dramatic arrival of a hurricane is hard to ignore, drought has a way of quietly creeping in, said University of New Mexico scientist Lou Scuderi.

“Droughts— they’re just sort of there,” Scuderi said. “They’re persistent.”

The most recent piece of evidence comes from a team of scientists studying repeated multiyear droughts in the upper Colorado River basin— water supply to much of the western United States.

When the Atlantic warms— as it began to do in the mid-1990s— the Colorado River tends to dwindle, said Denver-based U.S. Geological Survey climate researcher Gregory McCabe.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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An update on the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (sub. req.):

Josh Frieman’s cosmic vacuum cleaner seems to be working.

Perched on a ridge in the mountains of southern New Mexico, the big Sloan Digital Sky Survey telescope spends its nights sucking down big swaths of sky.

In three months last fall, it found 142 Type Ia supernovas— distant exploding stars that are key to understanding the universe’s expansion.

Hunting supernovas is hard work. Previous surveys bagged fewer than a hundred in a good year. But by capitalizing on the Sloan’s unprecedented ability to sweep across and record vast areas of sky quickly and automatically, Frieman and his colleagues hope to fill in big gaps in our understanding of how the universe works.

“We actually are probing more volume of space than any other supernova survey,” said Frieman, an astronomer at the University of Chicago and Fermilab.

With the Sloan, “You can cover a big chunk of sky,” said Jon Holtzman, a New Mexico State University astronomer working on the supernova project.

“Big chunk of sky” might be an understatement to describe what the Sloan has accomplished.

In its first five years of work, the telescope catalogued an astonishing 215 million galaxies and stars. Scientists then determined the distance to a million of those, building the first true three-dimensional map of a big piece of the universe.

With additional funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and others, the project last summer was extended for another three years, giving scientists a crack at using the powerful telescope to answer new questions about the universe.

Frieman and his colleagues are among the beneficiaries, using three-month runs in the fall of 2005, 2006 and 2007 to try to help sort out puzzling questions about how fast the universe is expanding.

“we’ve built a bomb”

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Good story this morning (sub. req.) by Leslie Linthicum and Tania Soussan on fire danger in New Mexico:

Fire experts predicted an early and furious fire season in New Mexico and, boy, were they on target.

Already this season, a dozen big grass fires have burned more than 100,000 acres, including a scorcher in Colfax County last week that blackened 26,500 acres.

With a record dry winter following record wet weather last year, it’s no wonder the state is on fire.

“We built up these tall grasses and now we’ve got these hot, hot windy days,” said Joe Whitehead, a rangeland specialist with the Natural Resources Conservation Service in Portales.

“Basically, we’ve built a bomb,” he said.

Big time grass fires now, with the threat of a hot forest fire season in a month or two.