Sound of a Warming World
Daniel Crawford and Scott St. George at the University of Minnesota have collaborated on another fascinating attempt to use music to communicate data about our warming world: Todd Reubold at Ensia has more on the project.
Archive of posts filed under the science category.
Curiosity
I’ve the privilege of giving the commencement talk for the University of New Mexico Biology Department’s graduation ceremony tomorrow, and I’m nervous as hell. It’s such an honor to be asked, and feels like such a hopeless task – hard to match words to the measure of the importance of the day. (“A commencement speaker …
Tree rings, telling another story
From the Newbury Daily News: In May, 2002, the Coffin House on High Road in Newbury was run through a battery of tests to determine its age. Dendrochronology, the science of dating timbers based on patterns of tree growth, was used to determine that the oldest portion of the house was built by trees cut …
On climate, a call for more social science
David Victor on the need for better inclusion of social science in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: The IPCC must overhaul how it engages with the social sciences in particular…. Fields such as sociology, political science and anthropology are central to understanding how people and societies comprehend and respond to environmental changes, …
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We don’t get to decide nature’s boundaries
My Albuquerque Journal colleague Win Quigley, intrigued by the coyotes in his Albuquerque Country Club neighborhood, near downtown, visited with the Bosque Environmental Monitoring Program’s Dan Shaw and wrote this: [C]onsider the country club neighborhood, Shaw said. Kit Carson Park and the country club golf course abut the irrigation ditch, which abuts Tingley Beach, which …
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Stuff I wrote elsewhere about deceptive bird sex
The best part of doing this story was standing by the Rio Grande at dusk with Chris Witt, watching the sandhill cranes fly in to roost. The birds were great, but the really extraordinary part was watching Chris watch them – eyes flitting, counting, listening and hearing. As they flew by, they announced their presence …
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Kelly Redmond to be honored for climate work
Kelly Redmond, deputy director of the Western Regional Climate Center in Reno, is being honored at next month’s AGU meeting in San Francisco for being generally awesome. Kelly’s one of the best climate scientists I’ve ever encountered at overcoming the “loading dock problem“, by which scientists do knowledge and leave it out there in a box for non-scientists …
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Oak leaves in fall
Lissa and I caught the tail end of fall colors on a drive in the mountains east of Albuquerque today. I wonder why these oak leaves are waiting until the last minute? Phenology.
Science knowledge and policy support
[W]idespread knowledge and well-informed citizen support are not necessarily required for implementation of effective climate policies. From “Does effective climate policy require well-informed citizen support?”, Rhodes et. al, Global Environmental Change, Volume 29, November 2014, Pages 92–104
For this one tree, autumn
What makes the first tree decide, “OK, now’s the time to turn.”