There was a great house ad that they ran on the front page of the South Pasadena Review once years ago when I lived there that had the phone number for you to call if you didn't get your paper. It occurred to me that if I didn't get the paper, I wouldn't have had the number to call.
With that in mind, I'm posting now to explain that, if all goes well this evening, this blog will be converted to WordPress (so William and Ken can post comments). The practical importance of this is that those of you reading via RSS feeds will need to point to a new location. I'll attempt to keep the old links working via a symlinks, but given my modest technical abilities, if you see posting on this blog drop to zero, you might wanna check your feed, as it is very unlikely that I simply had nothing to say.
If, on the other hand, you've been looking for an excuse to drop my feed, now's your chance.
So the planet's warming? So what's so bad about that?
The question is trickier than it sounds, because in addition to being a noisy bit of the Climate Wars argy-bargy, it's a big source of uncertainty for policy makers trying to understand what sort of adaption will be required and what sort of mitigation should be undertaken.
The problem is that there's actually precious little data about how bad it really might be - where might crops whither and where might they prosper, and what's the net difference? Where might water supplies dwindle, and where might they increase?
This afternoon in Science Express, a team led by Dagmar Schröter at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research published a serious and useful look at the question for Europe, matching up climate models with economic scenarious to try to get a clearer picture of impacts over the next century. Especially significant was what they called "water stress," with lots of people living in places that in the future may not have enough water to support them the way they live today. Cropland declines significantly, and forest fires go up:
Among all European regions, the Mediterranean appeared most vulnerable to global change. Multiple potential impacts were projected, related primarily to increased temperatures and reduced precipitation. The impacts included water shortages, increased risk of forest fires, northward shifts in the distribution of typical tree species, and losses of agricultural potential. Mountain regions also seemed vulnerable because of a rise in the elevation of snow cover and altered river runoff regimes.
Not for sure the last word on the question(s), but a useful one nevertheless.
I just got around to reading a fascinating news story and research paper in the Oct. 14 Science about biological response to climate change.
One can imagine a biological need for plants and animals to respond to changing climate. So as it gets warmer, for example, evolutionary pressure might favor birds that lay their eggs sooner in the spring. But Daniel Nussey and a team at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology and the University of Edinburgh's Institute of Evolutionary Biology found a much more interesting and subtle thing happening with a Dutch population of Parus major - the great tit.
For Parus major, climate change is a problem. As Elizabeth Pennisi explained in the Science news piece, the birds time their egg-laying so the chicks hatch when there are gobs of caterpillars to eat. With climate warming, that happens sooner in the year.
One can easily imagine a rather simple drift resulting, favoring earlier egg-layers. But the researchers found something more complex going on. The birds were evolving toward a greater "plasticity" in their egg-laying behavior. Rather than a fixed genetic switch that allowed them to lay eggs earlier, evolution was favoring birds that seemed to have more flexibility in their egg-laying in response to changes in climate. As Pennisi put it:
Most of the birds did not adapt and maintained their original schedule, and the numbers of surviving offspring have begun to decline. But there were some exceptions. Even in the 1980s, some individuals altered their behavior in accordance with the climate, laying eggs earlier in the warm years and later in the cool years. These climate-attuned females have twice as many surviving offspring.
When I'm cruising for nuke news for my NukeBeat blog, I am frequently annoyed at news web site registration. Here's what I do: I register if I really want to read the story, or else (more frequently) I just blow it off.
Why don't I simply use BugMeNot? Because it's a violation for me of a pretty simple and quite effective principle of effective and sustainable human interaction. They've got something I want, and they ask for something in return. If I don't want to give, I've no reasonable expectation that I should get. Why has this simple ethical principle, which is so usefully expected and honored in our face-to-face interactions, been so freely abandoned by such a large segment of the 'Net community?
Look, a little sheepish BugMeNotting is no huge deal. This isn't like genocide or something. But I'm frankly amazed at the brazen argument the BugMeNotters make (laid out in arrogant detail in a comment thread over at Poynter and in their own FAQ) - registration is bad - "waste of time," "annoying as hell," "breach of privacy." But rather than just walk away from the deal, they argue this justifies cheating.
That's a bad basis for sustainable human interaction.
I had the same conversation with a couple of different friends recently, baseball fans whose teams were long gone from the fall competition:
Me: "Have you decided who to root for in The Series?"
Them: "Sox. For Jim."
They said it with a tone that suggested the choice was obvious, and needed no further explanation.
Our friend Jim is one of the best baseball fans I know, with a reverance for a good changeup and a great pick at second base. He's also from the south side of Chicago, a White Sox fan deep in his childhood, in his genes, from the days (do these days still exist?) when The Ballgame on the radio was the soundtrack of summer. This matters to him in ways that most of us could never understand.
When the Sox made the series, he began calling around, hunting for tickets. There were none to be had in Chicago for anything less than a second mortgage on the house. But he called me yesterday afternoon to tell me he'd scored a pair for tonight's game 4 in Houston.
I harbor no illusions about the baseball gods. They are not as one Almighty, choosing sides, that we might pray they choose Jim's. They're more like the Greek gods, squabbling and divisive. To watch a World Series is to watch their struggle play out.
Tonight, I will pray to those among the baseball gods who have seen Jim's worthiness lo these many years, who understand what it means to see him sitting field level, 13 rows back down the right field line.
When he told me where the seats are, he said, "Foul ball territory. I'll have to keep my head in the game." I've never known him to do anything else. Baseball gods, I beseech thee, in the name of thy loyal servant Jim.
I saw my first sandill cranes of the season yesterday afternoon, poking around in a recently cut field of alfalfa in Albuquerque's south valley. Johnny_Mango saw his first last week. And one of my correspondents saw his first cranes over the valley Oct. 12, and thinks this is about 3-4 weeks earlier than usual based on his two decades living here.
So here's your word of the day: phenology. It's the study of biological phenomena that happen in response to seasonality and climate, like when flowers flower and when birds migrate.
I was first exposed to the word last summer in the excellent climate blog of Roger Pielke Sr.. He was talking about a workshop in Tucson organized by the ubiquitous Julio Betancourt, who's trying to set up a National Phenological Network. This sort of data is incredibly relevant to understanding the effects of climate change writ large, but Julio and others say we haven't been very systematic about collecting it.
If I have time today, I'll call down to the Bosque del Apache and see if I can find out whether the cranes really are early this year. I bet they've got the data to back up our anecdotes.
I've largely stayed out of the "hockey stick wars" lately (by this I'm referring to climate science, not the resumption of NHL play). But some new stuff published in GRL (by von Storch and Huybers ) rather seems to undercut the criticisms that have been raised by McIntyre and McKitrick of the old Mann et al. hockey stick paleoclimate reconstructions.
The statistical questions raised by MM are somewhat arcane for the general blog-reading audience. In the first case, MM argued that the methodology used by Mann et al. essentially produces "hockey sticks" artificially out of random noise. Von Storch (who one of the M's loves to quote approvingly, and who is one of the deans of climate statistics) disputes this assertion. Huybers argues that MM's criticism of the Mann et al. choice of statistical significance tests is wrong. Suffice it to say, for purposes of the policy discussion in which MM have been invoked, that the responses by von Storch and Huybers suggest that the MM statistical criticisms of the hockey stick reconstruction are not as bone-headedly obvious as Michael Crichton wants to believe.
Our neighbor Doris came by this morning with the bad news. Someone stole her Halloween decorations. She will put out her holiday displays no more.
This is a tragedy of neighborhood proportions. Every Halloween and Christmas, Doris, who is somewhere well beyond 80, puts out lovely displays. She has a perfect touch - modest but charming, never overwhelming, a gift to us all.
As evils go, this is a modest affair. And it's worth remembering that the overwhelming majority of people in our community have never stolen Doris's decorations. Most people are not bad. But that makes me no less sad at the prospect that we may never thrill to Doris's holiday magic again.
Climate scientist Roger Pielke Sr. took the Washington Post's Juliet Eilperin to task a few days ago for an Oct. 13 story suggesting "that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record."
Pielke's contention is that, while surface temperature data may support the claim, the surface thermometer record "is not ... the most appropriate metric to evaluate global warming." And from a climatological view, of course, he is absolutely correct. Various layers of the atmosphere behave quite differently, and a complete picture requires looking at all of them, which, as Pielke notes, paint a much more complex picture of warming than a simple "warmest ever" headline.
Pielke also gives an important nod to regional anomalies, which he rightly argues "are what we should be focusing on in terms of long-term climate trends, rather than surface globally-averaged temperature trends."
But this is a newspaper story for a national audience, where you really get to say one clear thing that has to communicate with people everywhere. If it were for a regional audience (like, say, mine) it could focus on a regional anomaly. But whoever is going to be reading this is living on the planet's surface, so that's the temperature number that's going to matter to them.
Last month, I blogged about a talk I heard a few years back by Roger Pielke Jr. on hurricane damage. Roger's case study was in significant part hurricane Mitch, which killed so many people in Central America because a) it was a very strong storm, and, more importantly, b) because the folks it dumped on were poor.
Keep that in mind as Posted by John Fleck at 08:36 AM
That's how many people I counted at 10 a.m. this morning at the new fishing pond at Tingley Beach. I pronounce that a success. I wast also looking for the train. No sightings.
I'm fascinated by climate and weather extremes, so this from this morning's NHC discussion of hurricane Wilma caught my eye. (The old record was Gilbert in 1988 at 888 mb. Wilma's unofficially at 881 - 884. This like golf - lower pressure equals more powerful hurricane.):
AN AIR FORCE RECONNAISSANCE PLANE MEASURED 168 KNOTS AT 700 MB AND ESTIMATED A MINIMUM PRESSURE OF 884 MB EXTRAPOLATED FROM 700MB. UNOFFICIALLY...THE METEOROLOGIST ON BOARD THE PLANE RELAYED AN EXTRAPOLATED 881 MB PRESSURE AND MEASURED 884 MB WITH A DROPSONDE. THIS IS ALL IN ASSOCIATION WITH A VERY SMALL EYE THAT HAS BEEN OSCILLATING BETWEEN 2 AND 4 N MI DURING EYE PENETRATIONS. THIS IS PROBABLY THE LOWEST MINIMUM PRESSURE EVER OBSERVED IN THE ATLANTIC BASIN AND IS FOLLOWED BY THE 888 MB MINIMUM PRESSURE ASSOCIATED WITH HURRICANE GILBERT IN 1988. HOWEVER...ONE MUST BE VERY CAREFUL BEFORE IT IS DECLARED A RECORD MINIMUM PRESSURE UNTIL A FULL AND DETAILED CALIBRATION OF THE INSTRUMENTS AND CALCULATIONS IS
PERFORMED. SO PLEASE DO NOT JUMP INTO CONCLUSIONS YET...BE PATIENT.Posted by John Fleck at 08:55 AM
This morning I mentioned my Einstein piece with a bit of the backstory on the role Carl Caves played in suggesting the topic. It occurred to me that the entire missive Carl sent me by way of suggestion was worth sharing, so with his permission I've posted it to my work blog.
Before I slipped away for vacation last week, I was able to write this (sub. req.):
New Mexico's massive piñon die-off of 2002 and 2003 might be a harbinger of life here in a warming world, new research suggests.High elevation forests that had survived previous droughts saw as much as 90 percent piñon mortality, a team of researchers led by University of Arizona ecologist Dave Breshears reported Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Across a whole landscape, this system got whacked," Breshears said in a telephone interview.
Drought weakened the trees enough that bark beetles could kill them, but warmer temperatures appear to have played a key role, the scientists found.
The temperature difference— 1 to 2 degrees Fahrenheit above the long-term average— might not sound like much. But the scientists say it made the difference, leading to tree death in areas relatively unaffected by the drier drought of the 1950s.
"This is a different kind of response than we saw following the 1950s drought," said Breshears, who has been studying piñon woodlands since the 1980s. "This drought was hotter."
Breshears, in an interview, was careful not to blame the 2002 die-off on human-caused global warming, saying no one event can be unequivocally linked to the planet's long-term rising temperature trend.
But he said the dramatic drought-induced changes in the Southwest's landscape since the turn of the 21st century are consistent with global climate change projections.
"We're more likely to get more frequent, more intense droughts," Breshears said.
For those of you not in the U.S. southwest, the piñon/juniper woodland is a dominant middle-elevation forest type that was decimated a few years back - whole hillsides turned from their usual green to a frightening greyish brown. Like dwindling snowpacks, it's a warming effect that you can see on the ground, now, but until Breshears et al. did this work, no one had established the link. It's still a controversial link, as the comments from Julio Betancourt in my story suggest. (Betancourt, a terrific scientist who I respect on these issues and who probably knows the drought of the 1950s better than anyone, believes we don't enough about 50's dieoff to be sure the current dieoff is worse.) But caveats notwithstanding, it's nevertheless important work of the sort that matters - climate science helping us understand impacts on the ground.
Like every card-carrying science writer, I was somehow obligated to do an Einstein story (sub. req.) this year, the 100th anniversary of his annus mirabilis. When I asked my favorite physicist, Carl Caves, for help finding a topic of relevance today, he suggested the EPR paradox, and pointed me toward a delightful grad student of his, Bryan Eastin, who's working on the issues raised in the EPR paper:
To Bryan Eastin, Albert Einstein's most interesting idea may be one that was wrong.It was 1935, and Einstein and two colleagues were trying to make sense of the world of quantum physics. They failed— but in such an interesting way that physicists today still wrestle with the questions they raised.
The year 2005 has been declared the "World Year of Physics" in honor of work Einstein did a century ago. They call 1905 Einstein's annus mirabilis— the miracle year. Four papers written in rapid succession that year laid the foundations for modern physics.
In the years that followed, Einstein's brilliance made him an icon, his name synonymous with genius.
To really understand the depth of Einstein's insight, it is instructive to wander into Eastin's cubicle in a ramshackle wing of the University of New Mexico's old Physics and Astronomy building.
There, in a tattered three-ring binder, Eastin is working out the implications of what might be considered Einstein's great mistake. Such was the power of Einstein's intellect that a new branch of physics— "quantum information theory"— has developed around it.
Eastin, a 27-year-old UNM graduate student, is working on his doctorate in quantum information theory.
Following Einstein down the rabbit hole, Eastin and his colleagues are pointing the way toward a remarkable new type of "quantum computer," far more powerful than the ones we use today.
"Even when he was wrong," said Carl Caves, Eastin's UNM faculty adviser, "he was better than the rest of us."
There's no point in even bothering to try to take a picture of the Grand Canyon, so here's Lee's Ferry:
L and I just got back from a lovely week circling the Four Corners. We saw:
- Aspens turning where the head of the La Plata River meets the feet of the San Juan Mountains
- Ruins in the Dolores Valley, where the Anasazi toiled in the shadows of Mesa Verde and get no respect because of their cliff-dwelling kin
- The old orchard at Lee's Ferry, a wonderment on the flood plain of the Paria - a blooming desert
- The Grand Canyon
A package of stories by yours truly in this morning's Albuquerque Journal on the U.S. nuclear weapons budget, and allegations that a bunch of major projects are over budget and behind schedule. More, including excerpts and links, over on the NukeBeat.
Our Balloon Fiesta is almost over. This morning I rode north with a couple of friends. There were many balloons in the sky. (insert cliche here)
They're lovely and all, but it's worth duly noting Burque Babble's observations:
THIS IS TOM JOLES, Tonight at 10, FIRST ON FOUR, Six U.S. Soldiers Are Killed In Iraq, find out local reaction tonight from Balloon Fiesta Park, and speaking of the fiesta, ONLY ON FOUR, LIVE BREAKING COVERAGE OF Richard Abruzzo's views on the ongoing debate in Kansas between the teaching of Evolution and Intelligent Design. Abruzzo recently crashed his balloon in Kansas and he tells Eyewitness News' Colleen MAH o nay (who is evidently not Irish in heritage but some form of Athabascan Native American) his views on the educational debate in that State. Plus, weatherman Larry Rice inexplicably stands out LIVE at a darkened Balloon Fiesta Park to tell us how Typhoon Brittany off the coast of Japan might impact winds at tomorrow morning's launch. THAT'S TONIGHT... ONLY ON FOUR.
(Hat tip Coco.)
Michael Mann was in town speaking at the University of New Mexico yesterday. I wrote about his talk (sub. req., lots of quotes from the story below the fold) and got to spend some useful time talking to him about big picture climate issues. (Thanks, Mike!)
I didn't have much space, so the story was short, and I chose to focus more on regional climate issues than hockey sticks. I'm kinda sick of hockey sticks, and it was interesting to see that Mann's recent work, the stuff he chose to talk about in his UNM talk and the stuff I've been reading recently, is moving beyond the stick in ways that I think are incredibly useful.
(click through for more)
When I first started blogging about climate here, I spent a lot of time defending the Mann, Bradley and Hughes hockey stick paleoclimate reconstruction against what I saw as unwarranted attacks. It was kinda fun, and I learned a lot, but it's increasingly seemed to me a distraction, for two reasons.
First, the rather arcane statistical debate over the validity of the hockey stick research as evidence of "unprecedented warming" misses the point that there have been lots of other reconstructions that show the same thing. We can throw out the MBH hockey stick (I don't think we have to, but we could) and our knowledge of paleclimate over the past couple of millenia would be at roughly the same place. There's still uncertainty over the strength of internal variability over the last couple thousand years, but the 20th century is obviously anomolous.
Second, from my perspective as a user of the information the climate weenies create, knowing past temperature history on a northern hemisphere or global scale is interesting, but I need to know what's happened here in the past and could happen here in the future - paleoclimate and future projections on a regional scale are critical.
From my story (the snip is a quick couple of graphs of hockey stick history):
Michael Mann faces a tough problem.A global climate change researcher, Mann sees clear evidence that the planet is warming, in a way that's unprecedented over the past 2,000 years.
But can we expect New Mexico's climate to get wetter or drier as a result? Scientists don't know enough yet to say, Mann said during a talk Friday afternoon at the University of New Mexico.
[snip]
During his talk, Mann highlighted studies he and a team of researchers have done looking at Pacific sea surface temperatures over the last 1,000 years.
For New Mexicans, Pacific temperatures are critical because they are linked to wet spells and droughts.
Warm water temperatures— known as El Niño— bring wet winters. Cool water temperatures— La Niña— bring drought.
The question for global warming researchers trying to understand effects in the Southwest is "How might El Niño change?" Mann said.
Mann's work suggests an odd relationship between global temperatures and the Pacific Ocean in the past. When the planet warms, the complexities of wind and ocean currents cause the equatorial Pacific to cool, and vice versa.
The result is that when the global temperature warmed in the past, La Niñas and drought have happened here, the scientists found.
Whether that means we can say global warming will cause more drought here is an open question, Mann said. "It's a more difficult problem."
The paper is Mann, Cane. Zebiak and Clement from the Feb. 1, 2005, Journal of Climate:
Previously published empirical results demonstrating a statistically significant tendency toward El Niño conditions in response to past volcanic radiative forcing are reproduced in the model experiments. A combination of responses to past changes in volcanic and solar radiative forcing closely reproduces changes in the mean state and interannual variability in El Niño in past centuries recorded from fossil corals. The dynamics of El Niño thus appear to have played an important role in the response of the global climate to past changes in radiative forcing.
That means volcanic forcing - global cooling - is correlated with El Niño, which means wet for us here in New Mexico. By implication, then, warmer global temperatures have in the past meant more La Niña's, and therefore a drier New Mexico. This fits with Ed Cook's drought reconstructions last year in Science that seemed to point toward widespread western drought during globally warm times. (In fact, it was through the Cook paper that I first ran across the Mann et al. work on this.)
Mann's pretty cautious about this. The oceans, which drive all this, are darn complicated, and we're pushing them into uncharted territory with greenhouse forcing. So he was quick to point out that we don't know the answer yet about what happens next. But this is the sort of work that is critical now, as far as I'm concerned. The hockey stick wars are just an annoying sideshow.
Gnumeric is one of the computer tools I most frequently use. But the version I'm using is 1.2.1, which is some two years old. Why have I not upgraded, to take advantage of the sweet new features the Gnumeric team has been developing? I hope my answer to that question will be of some interest to my GNOME project friends.
When I was active in the GNOME project, it was routine to spend an hour or two a day of my free time working on whatever - writing user docs, helping manage bug reports, chatting on IRC with my pals, compiling the latest whatever in the background. I loved the people (still do!) and I loved the work. And I loved the software, too. I believe in the political and ethical notions of freedom and sharing that free software embodies. And I also prefer the freedom and flexibility to control your own data and computational destiny that you get with the Linux platform and the software stack that rides on top of it.
When I decided a couple of years ago to step down from my formal GNOME obligations so I could use my free time to start working on a book project, I expected that I would still be able to kick in a bit of free time to update user docs, triage bug reports, and help with some of the grunt work. But I quickly reallized that if you can't spare the minimum amount of time and effort required to keep the latest versions of the software stack built, there's no way to make useful contributions to the development effort. That bar is quite high - too high for me given my new self-imposed obligations.
As a user, I remained (and remain) enthusiastic. But as the time I was actively hacking recedes, the distance between the software stack on my computer and the latest interesting development work grows. The solution, of course, is simple - upgrade! Between Fedora and Ubuntu, this ought to be a relatively straightforward proposition. But at this point you have to remember that I am not a really a hacker. To make the contributions I did, I had to learn some modicum of command line skills. But every time during my active days I had to do a serious system upgrade, I faced a chore and a crap shoot. When it went smoothly, great. When it didn't, I had to spend hours Googling and IRC'ing how to manually change the ".frabinator_conf" file, and get the "gurglebarger" module to load before the "bergenhafter" module, and why won't it talk to my printer? Or worse, why won't it boot? So when I stopped hacking, I stopped doing full system upgrades, because I'm supposed to be writing now, not hacking config files by hand.
For the way that I write, Emacs is still a beloved tool, and Gnumeric even frozen in time in 2003 still meets pretty much all my number-crunching needs. Libxml - god love Daniel Veillard, one of my heroes - always builds no matter what the calcified state of my stack. Increasingly, thought, all the cool new software is out of my reach as the kernel and the stack advance away from me. Occasionally I'll see some cool new gadget I want to try. I'll download it and try to compile it and it'll tell me that I need to upgrade the frabinator. Sorry, no go. Gotta get back to writing.
The purpose of this screed is not to plead for y'all to stop working on the stack. That would miss the whole point of the power and joy of free software. The people who own the pieces of the stack love it, and want to make it better, and are doing amazing things with it that benefit the users who get the latest version. But people like me are always going to be left behind.
Is this really true, or just some amazing joke: "a made-for-TV movie about Miguel aired on prime-time Mexican television." Miguel's embarassed? Fool. This is pop culture superstardom, lain at his feet! I don't know if chicks dig free software hackers, but a made-for-TV movie?
I like cool domain names. One-word ones are cool because (sort of like the special allure of a 3-digit REI member ID number) they mean someone was thinking early on in the age of the Internet. That's why, aside from being the coolest food blogger I know of, Albuquerque's Miss Tenacity deserves special respect.
Here's another I recently ran across (via Secretly Ironic, another good one) that I particularly admire: Team Moose and Squirrel.
(Updated 2: 22 p.m. to cure some horrid prose)
I spent a mesmerizing couple of hours yesterday afternoon with the diaries of John D. Lee.
The only place I could find it was in the Albuquerque special collections library, a lovely old building that used to be the city's main library and now houses the rare stuff they won't let you check out.
(click through for more on Lee)
Lee's a complicated fellow, a Mormon pioneer who was central to the settlement of southern Utah and northern Arizona in the 19th century, and who was convicted and executed for his role in the notorious 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre. He established Lee's Ferry on the Colorado River in the early 1870s, which is where I've run into his history.
I'm interested because I've been trying to better understand how the early residents of this region, both Indians and European settlers, coped with the harsh and demanding climate. As an inveterate diarist, Lee may have something to tell me in this regard.
Lee's Ferry, where the Paria River meets the Colorado at the head of Marble Canyon, is about as harsh as it gets, climatologically speaking. Average annual rainfall there in the historical record is 6.18 inches (157 mm), but the real problem in terms of habitation is the variability. In nearly a century of modern records going back to 1916, rainfall has ranged from a low of 2.7 inches (68.6 mm) to a high of 10.83 inches (275 mm). That's a difference of a factor of four between the wettest and driest years. Makes it tough to plan.
Tree ring reconstructions suggest the year Lee arrived - the winter of 1871-1872 - was one in a long series of drought years in the region. But such is the nature of desert living that it was flooding, not drought, that nearly did him in. There's a remarkable diary entry in particular, from June 12, 1872.
The back story: Lee and his family had arrived in the winter of 1871, in large part to establish a river crossing that the Mormon leadership believed was vital to the community's future. Facing a threat of the same sort of persecution that had dogged them before they arrived in Utah, they feared they might have to move south en masse, but the Colorado River blocked their way.
By spring, Lee and his family had established basic shelter on a patch of land adjacent to the Paria River (really more of a creek) near where it enters the Colorado. By February, they were building a dam across the Paria to irrigate their crops. But twice, storms washed out the dam. The second time was near disaster. From his June 12 entry:
Now begins the Tug of war. A Dam 8 foot deep and 7 rods long (115 feet, 35 meters) to make, besides heavy repairs on the ditch, before the water can be brought to revive the now dyeing crops, vines and trees. This Point Must not be abandoned. The probable Salvation of Iserel depends on it, temporal if not Spiritual.
Lee, his four sons and his wife Emma, who had only just given birth to a baby girl in January, spent 21 days rebuilding the dam, water their young fruit trees and vines by hand. "& by the grace of god we finally conquered and brought out the water and began to revive our dying crops and while doeing so the Heavens smiled from above & sent down gentle showers to aid us."
I got a nice note this morning from Luboš Motl about yesterday's post, quoted in its entirety here (with Dr. Motl's kind permission):
Dear Mr. Fleck,I think that you're being outrageously unfair to me. Everyone who follows this debate knows that I understand those climate issues that have been discussed at least as well as William Connolley does. At least, unlike him, I know what the latent heat of ice is - while he believes it is 1000 times smaller than it actually is.
Therefore it is highly annoying that you call this semi-educated guy a "British climate researcher" while your sentences about me are constructed in such a way to indicate that my opinion does not matter so much. It's just unfair in the case that you realize that what you write is nonsense. If you don't realize it, then it may be that you are honest - but in that case your intelligence is probably not too high.
You also accuse me that I don't realize that there are stupid people on all sides. I have no idea why you think that I don't realize it. It's just another lie - another completely unjustifiable accusation. For example, the creationists may be on my side politically, but they don't have a scientific approach to biology. If you mean Crichton, you would have to give more details. Crichton's speech was spot on and it was extremely intelligent. You have not found anything wrong with the speech either.
You're just apparently used to the fact that you can write a few kilobytes of lies and false accusations, without any justification whatsoever, and there are always sufficiently many stupid and politically biased readers who will appreciate your acts nevertheless.
I believe that you should apologize to me for this outrageous text.
Thanks for your understanding
Lubos
I'm happy to welcome the reader who found inkstain after searching on cyclist gnome. I'm not working on or writing about GNOME much these days, in part because I'm spending so much time on the bike, but you're welcome to sit and have a cup of coffee. Enjoy. Readers who visited Inkstain also might enjoy underwater cyclist swerves to avoid garden gnome.
Other fun search strings in the logs include "dakota 3.9 firing order" - something to do with auto mechanics, as near as I can tell - and "clean dishwasher tang".
I grew up in inland Southern California, a childhood in the 1960s blessed with significant air pollution. Warm summer afternoons playing outside (or, later, running with my cross country and track buddies), our lungs would ache. But we'd do it anyway. Heck, we were kids. The fact that a measuring station a couple of blocks from my house recorded the region's worst air quality one year was, for us, a point of pride.
That's one of the reasons we moved to Albuquerque - we didn't want our daughter growing up in that. Now comes a new study that "found the risk of death rose by 11 to 17 percent from the cleanest parts of Los Angeles to the most polluted areas of Riverside and San Bernardino counties to the east." (Hat tip Coco.)
I've recently made the blogoworld acquaintence of a character called Luboš Motl, a string theorist at Harvard who has decided he has sufficient expertise to weigh in on the issue of climate change.
There is nothing wrong with doing this. All of us are entitled to have opinions on important public policy questions, and he should be thus praised for taking a stand. But he does it in a way that illustrates much that is wrong with political discourse. Here's my favorite recent example, on the blog of British climate researcher William Connolley:
Sorry to be candid, but as far as this debate goes, all of you are dishonest and intellectually limited political activists.
This is it, in a nutshell. Lumo thinks that if you believe that we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions because of climate change, then you are venal, or stupid, or both.
He's not alone in doing this. In fact, this is a style of rhetoric common to talk radio and the blogosphere, and represents a common way of thinking and talking about all sorts of political and policy debates. It's frankly intellectually lazy. It allows one to dismiss the arguments of one's opponents without ever having to take them seriously. But in any sufficiently interesting political or policy debate, as I discussed elsewhere recently, there are sincere and reasonable people on both sides.
That doesn't mean that some of your opponents aren't venal and stupid, and that you shouldn't call them on it. But if you don't recognize two other things, you're missing the boat. If you don't recognize the venal and stupid people on your own side of the debate, you're not paying sufficient attention, because they almost certainly are there. (Note to Lumo: you need to give Michael Crichton a closer read. Note to all those enthusiastic greenhouse gas reduction advocates who emailed me Ross Gelbspan's hurricane piece: You shouldn't be quite so attached to Gelbspan.) And if you aren't seeking out and trying to understand the reasonable people on the other side of the debate, you're not thinking the question through very well.