The New York Times has a story today about Eli’s summer vacation project: The rabbit-proof fence — or bunny fence — in Western Australia was completed in 1907 and stretches about 2,000 miles. It acts as a boundary separating native vegetation from farmland. Within the fence area, scientists have observed a strange phenomenon: above the …
Jim Belshaw sends along a Felicity Barranger story on the dwindling of the Great Lakes. Per usual, climate change is blamed, though other hypotheses are also on the table: Although the drop in levels in all three lakes is variously ascribed to climate change or new rainfall patterns, evidence is growing that people caused some …
Autumn’s Advance Guard Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I haven’t been taking notes, so I can’t be sure, but Aug. 12 seems awfully early for roasting chiles. It’s the smell of fall here in Albuquerque, as they put the big gas-fired roasters out in market parking lots. You buy a bag and they roast ’em for …
Everyone’s talking about desalination lately as a source of “new” water here in the southwest. The picture at right is El Paso’s new desalination plant, which opened last week. It’s the largest inland desalination plant in the United States, capable of delivering a substantial fraction of El Paso’s water. In this morning’s Journal, I join …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Desalination Edition’ »
As deserts go, the place I live now is modest. Albuquerque is in the 10 inch (25 cm) per year range. The deserts of my youth, where I developed my fondness for arid landscapes, were the real deal – creosote and year-round sun. I can remember once as a teenager sitting with a friend on …
Dr. Water goes to the place that has none: Copiapo is one of the Atacama’s “wetter” places, as they told me they last had rainfall in 1997 – a whopping 60 mm (2.4 inches) in one day that year. The long-term annual average (meaningless, really) is 10 mm or 0.4 inches.
From the BBC: Two Somali journalists have been killed in the capital Mogadishu in separate attacks within hours of each other. The owner of HornAfrik radio and television, Ali Iman Sharmake, died when his car exploded after apparently running over a landmine. He had just been to the funeral of one of his leading radio …
Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis: This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 …
Added Laura Paskus’s High Desert Reports to my blogroll and feed reader. She’s a freelance journalist here in New Mexico who does a good job of paying a lot of attention to issues I’m trying to keep better track of. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I reached the point where I said …
The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to …