Albuquerque’s Ed
We’ve got our own version of Ed Begley Jr. here in Albuquerque. My colleague Troy Simpson has been doing a video series of energy saving tips from from Al Zelicoff. This month’s: vampires.
Archive of entries posted on February 2008
Take that, Vegas!
There’s a war of words going on out West that is by turns hilarious and illustrative of the deep divisions regarding the use of water in our arid region. The trigger was a comment by Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman in response to Tim Barnett’s study suggestion Lake Mead had a 50-50 chance of going …
A Flying Village
I stopped on the bike ride today, down by the river, to watch and listen to an enormous flight of sandhill cranes, headed north. I played a bit with the words to describe it (I often “write” while I’m on the bike), but I didn’t come up with anything quite as crisp as Laura Paskus’s …
Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem
Let us assume, for purpose of argument, that you are deeply concerned about the potential for humans’ impact on climate, but that you have some uncertainties about the reliability of the science that lies at the foundation of that concern. Today, you note, scientists tell us the planet is warming. But did they not argue …
I Am Web 2.0
This is only a test.
Truffles
First Burmese pythons, now this: At the Aups market, the black truffle’s price has more than doubled over the past five years, to about €850 per kilo ($560 a pound). Farmers say production is down by 50-75 percent this winter season and they blame global warming, warning that if thermometers keep rising — as many …
“Study Debunks ‘Global Cooling'”
Via Stoat, I see a nice story in USA Today about an interesting new analysis by some clever folk* on the history of the old “global cooling” canard: The supposed “global cooling” consensus among scientists in the 1970s — frequently offered by global-warming skeptics as proof that climatologists can’t make up their minds — is …
On the Combinatorics of Language
I find the combinatorics of language simply staggering. In today’s Zippy the Pinhead, Bill Griffith has a character say: “When Mark Twain is picture smoking a pipe, he certainly looks contented.” A Google search shows that not only has that sentence never been committed to the Googleverse, but that a simple five word subset has …
Irrational Exuberance
My modest attempts to understand energy economics have left me unprepared for today’s hundred-dollar-a-barrel milestone. With the U.S. economy teetering on the brink of recession, future demand is expected to be low, which the smarty-pants economists tell me should mean lower oil prices. Yet… Thankfully for my ego, the folks at the Daily Diary of …
The Future of Science Journalism
Matthew Nisbet has an interesting post up today about the future of science journalism. He sees it in things like Andy Revkin’s Dot Earth, or the excellent Yale Forum on Science and the Media. Nisbet wonders whether these sorts of non-traditional approaches are the future of my business: With fewer and fewer outlets for science …