When I was a little kid, I thought John Wesley Powell was the coolest, the one-armed adventurer daring the unknown as he ran the rapids of the Grand Canyon – the “Great Unknown” – for the first time. Standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, I would stare down at those little glimpses you get …
Daniel Collins (via haiku!) notes the important point that water folks are increasingly raising about climate change: it’s not just whether rainfall goes up or down. Increased evaporation and transpiration as the climate warms is the critical water supply variable. From Cai and others in GRL – since 1950, nearly half the reduction in soil …
I’ve not been posting on climate change much here at Inkstain recently for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, I’m trying to marshal all of my spare time (and Inkstain is a spare time gig) to think about western water. Second, the whole climate blogothing has seemed to be increasingly less than helpful, where all …
More blathering from the morning paper, this the tale of the fascinating work of Blair Wolf (sub/ad yada yada) a University of New Mexico biologist who studies the water consumption of desert birds: The smaller a desert creature, the more water loss matters, and little birds like verdin are especially vulnerable, Wolf said. Sometimes, that …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere II: Birds, warming and the desert’ »
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
The failure of the Colorado River to reach the sea, Jonathan Foley argues, is evidence of dramatic challenges facing humanity that go beyond climate change. From an essay at Environment 360: Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of …
A look at the science and financing behind the “CO2 is Green” ads running in New Mexico (ad/sub req): It is hard to square Leighton Steward’s cheery message with the vast swaths of dead trees across the mountains of northern New Mexico. “Fall of ’02 is when they started to die,” biologist Craig Allen told …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: A Look at CO2 is Green’ »
Michael Tobis believes the prevalence of bunk on the issue of climate change is “one of the principal characteristics of our time,” and that the media’s failure to effectively counter said bunk is a fundamental failing that stands in the way of action on climate change. As I said in a previous discussion of this …
Two of my favorite climate scientist-communicators recently posted on the risks of overstating. First is Simon Donner on Ketsana, the tropical storm that devastated the Philippines: The climate policy talks in “nearby” Thailand have led to a number of sloppy media reports and climate activist statements about the role of climate change in Ketsana. For …
In early 2008, I did some inquiries on the data underlying Albuquerque’s “green” claims and we published what I found in the newspaper. With a mayoral election underway and the city pushing forward on a “Climate Action Plan”, it seemed like a good time to revisit the issue. The results: When Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: ABQ Greenhouse Update’ »