Archive of posts filed under the science category.

Coyotes and geese – the trajectories of our newly forming urban ecosystems

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Canada geese seems especially fond of Albuquerque’s country club and the neighborhood around it. So it also seems likely, according to research into urban coyotes, that the skinny little dog-wolves are in this urban ecosystem mix: Though urban coyotes do occasionally attack cats and dogs, far more often they avoid them. (Coyote attacks on people …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Engineering nature at the Bosque del Apache

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From the morning paper, a look at the wet bits and the dry bits at the Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge during a drought, and the challenge of mimicking nature: Some years, like this one, drought comes to the refuge in a way that matches what we would have seen in a drought year …

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Antelope Island and the notion of climate variability

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On a quick weekend dash to Ogden earlier this month, I squeezed an hour out of my return trip to the Salt Lake City airport to make the drive out the causeway across the Great Salt Lake to Antelope Island. When G.K. Gilbert, under the direction of John Wesley Powell, was trying to sort out …

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SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS ABOUT THE WEATHER

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As Sandy converges on our stark, inevitable fate, people outside the weather nerd community are being again confronted by our dark, uncomfortable question – why do the official forecasts always make it seem like they’re shouting? Why do the forecasters always write in all caps? There are times when this feels right: FLOOD WATCH FOR …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on the B61

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Forgot to blog earlier in the week, a frustratingly inconclusive newspaper piece on the reasons behind the rising cost of refurbishing the US stockpile of B61 bombs: Is Sandia National Laboratories to blame for cost overruns in the multibillion-dollar effort to refurbish the U.S. arsenal of B61 nuclear bombs? A December 2011 evaluation by the …

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Saguaro, Ponderosa and regional climate

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Intriguing paper by Pierson and colleagues, looking at a big demographic survey of the great saguaro cactus: Averaged across the region, saguaro regeneration rates were highest from 1780 to 1860, coincident with wet conditions and high Pinus ponderosa recruitment in the highlands. Milder and wetter winters and protection from livestock grazing likely promoted late 20th …

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Why science?

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From the New York Times’ obituary of the great science journalist Malcolm Browne: “After a time, a news writer may begin to sense a kind of sameness in most of the events that pass as news,” he wrote. “When that happens a lucky few of us discover that in science, almost alone among human endeavors, …

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Stuff I wrote elsewhere: Maya drought

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From the morning paper: With drought draped across all of New Mexico and much of the United States to our east and west, it’s an interesting time to think about the prehistoric Mayan city of Chichén Itzá. Its fate is a reminder that drought isn’t simply something climate does to us. Drought’s effects are defined …

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