Speed on the Bike Path

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Riding down past Tingley Beach this morning, I was coming up on a runner in the distance when something didn’t seem right. It was taking me too long to close on him.

He had this most beautiful stride, light, his toes barely touching the pavement. I slowed down to clock him on my bike’s speedometer, settling 15 feet or so behind him and matching his pace. 13 miles an hour. This guy was doing sub-five minute miles with a steady grace. I passed him and looked at his face. It wasn’t an effortless face, it was the face of firm determination, but it was the face of a man running well within himself. I’ve never seen anyone that beautifully fast out there.

I stopped at the south end of Tingley Beach, he passed me, and we ended up together at Cesar Chavez Blvd., where he stopped, his run finished. I’m usually pretty shy, but I rode up to him. “I was clocking you back there,” I said. “You were doing, what, 4:30 miles?”

He looked at his watch. “4:51,” he said, a modest smile cracking his face. I asked him his name.

I have always taken special pleasure in watching someone who is very good at what they do. My favorite example is the old super at the apartment building I lived in in the early 1980s. He was a mechanic his whole life, and I was talking to him one time while he was fixing the boilers. Without even thinking – he was talking to me as he worked – he looked at a bolt, then reached over to his very neat tool box and grabbed the right wrench.

That’s what it was like watching this guy run. He told me he was Brandon Leslie, a name I immediately recognized. He ran the 10,000 meters in the Olympic trials last year, and he told me he’s getting ready for the national half-marathon championship next week in Houston. I’ll have to try to remember to check the results.

Drought

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A couple of drought- and climate-related things in this morning’s Journal worthy of note. First, the near-term outlook from Tania Soussan:

Two meteorological forecasts out Friday confirmed what anyone who’s been outside lately already knows— New Mexico is dry as a bone.
The facts and figures in the federal reports are dire.

  • New Mexico received only 11 percent of its normal rain and snowfall over the last two months, putting that time period among the five driest November-December stretches in more than a century.
  • Long-term precipitation deficits have pushed Santa Fe, Jemez Springs, Las Vegas, Los Alamos and Zuni into emergency drought conditions.
  • Snowpack in the Pecos, Gila and Zuni-Bluewater basins has hit record lows, and snowpack in the Canadian River Basin matched the low for the past 25 years.
  • Snowmelt runoff in rivers and streams this summer is forecast to be well below normal, ranging from 24 percent of average on the San Francisco River at Clifton to 70 percent at the inflow to Costilla Reservoir.

(update: The reports Tania wrote about are on line: Charlie Liles’ drought status report and the NRCS runoff forecast.)

Second, from me, a story about a very interesting report out of a task force of state agency officials on the state’s long term climate change vulnerabilities:

New Mexico faces dwindling snowpacks and dying ski areas as the planet warms over the next century, according to a new state report on climate change.

Water supplies and ecosystems likely will suffer a one-two punch as changing climate exacerbates problems caused by a growing human population, according to the report, to be released Monday.

For farmers and ranchers, the picture is less clear, the report found, though water supply problems could make grazing and irrigation less viable.

Water systems with little or no storage, such as acequia irrigation and small municipal reservoirs, could be hit hard, according to the report.

Drought, already a significant natural problem, could get worse as population grows while global warming makes water shortages more severe.

Sea Level Rise

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I don’t know much about sea level and climate change (what with New Mexico being landlocked, and all….), so I’m not clear on the significance of this from John Church and Neil White at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia. They seem to be saying they’ve found heretofore undetected acceleration in sea level rise:

This acceleration is an important confirmation of climate change simulations which show an acceleration not previously observed. If this acceleration remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the IPCC TAR.

Lilacs, Honeysuckle and Phenology

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One of my favorite experiences as a science writer is asking a scientist to explain what I have assumed is a fundamental underlying bit of background, only to get the answer, “We don’t know.”

I’m reminded of that by an article in the latest Eos by Julio Betancourt about the efforts to create a national phenology network.

Phenology – the study of seasonal biological events, like animal migrations, plant flowerings, when trees drop their leaves – is one of those things I just assumed they (whoever “they” are) already knew everything about. It turns out, though, that there’s really very little systematic data collected on this.

Continue reading ‘Lilacs, Honeysuckle and Phenology’ »

The red phalarope

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Wouldn’t you love to live in a place where this is news?

The red phalarope, a small bird rarely seen on land in these parts, has been spotted in groups of up to 1,000 from Pescadero to Moss Beach. There were also reports of the birds making it as far from the coast as Millbrae and Mountain View.

Surf the Global Warming Wave

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David Fields of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has a paper in tomorrow’s Science (press release here) suggesting an interesting anthropogenic warming fingerprint: plankton in varves on the ocean floor. Both warm- and cold-water forams can be found, and the relative abundances of the various types works as a climate proxy.

Fields sees the “regime shift” of the mid-1970s (most famously called the Pacific Decadal Oscillation), and suggests that the patterns in the sediments from the late 20th century are unprecedented in the 1,400-year record. In other words, 20th century warming is fundamentally different than variations seen during that period, with “a deep, penetrative warming not observed in previous centuries.”

(Hat tip me.)

Daybook

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book: J. Madeleine Nash’s El Niño: Unlocking the Secrets of the Master Weather-Maker. It’s been sitting unread on my shelf since it came out three years ago. It’s good so far, by which I mean she’s a) found a good line to follow through the story, and b) told me things I didn’t already know.

stuff I wrote elsewhere: There’s this great episode of the Simpsons where the Continental Soccer Association comes to Springfield: “It’s all here – fast-kicking, low scoring, and ties? You bet!” A soccer riot ensues as the residents of Springfield scramble to get out of the stadium because the game is so boring. Now come a group of physicsts from Los Alamos who have proven that soccer is the most interesting sport. (Is there any question physicists can’t answer?

quote of the day: “Prefer the specific to the general.” Strunk and White. With that in mind, and with the help of, shall we say, a “source familiar with the Simpsons,” for my soccer story I tracked down this bit of business:

That is what happened last November when middling Doncaster prevailed over Manchester City, then Aston Villa on the way to Britain’s coveted Carling Cup.