The Tweet of the Killdeer

The hilarity over the Washington Post’s take on Albuquerque continues on today’s front page via my friend Jim Belshaw. As I mentioned earlier, I’ve not heard the stumbling of mountain lions, but I did hear a killdeer this morning on the way in to work.

Global Warming or Climate Change

There’s a longstanding debate about whether we should use “climate change” or “global warming” in describe the global climate change-warming thingie. In that regard, this data from Google’s new search terms trends monitoring tool: This is the relative use by people searching on Google of the terms “global warming” (blue line) and “climate change” (red …

Continue reading ‘Global Warming or Climate Change’ »

Climate Change and the Colorado River

Brad Udall at the Western Water Assessment has written an extremely helpful summary of the history of research into the effects of climate change on the Colorado River. It is interesting to note a  consistent message in nearly 30 years of work on this question: the sign is nearly always negative. There’s not a whole …

Continue reading ‘Climate Change and the Colorado River’ »

Going Metric

For the more sophisticated in the Inkstain audience (either scientifically or geographically), I usually try to translate units from those we use here in America to their metric equivalents. But I realized I had no idea what the standard metric equivalent was for our quaint river flow metric – cubic feet per second. Malcolm to …

Continue reading ‘Going Metric’ »

“the grumbling of mountain lions”

From today’s Washington Post: At 9 a.m. on the very edge of the dusty, desolate collection of adobe homes and Vietnamese restaurants that seem to form this city, David Iglesias begins his run through the foothills of the Sandia Mountains. This is not easy terrain. The footing is terribly uneven. The altitude can be unbearable. …

Continue reading ‘“the grumbling of mountain lions”’ »

That Handsome Devil

That Handsome Devil Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. One of the cultural advantages of all the concrete we use to channelize our storm runoff is the essentially unlimited canvas it offers.