“the life force is strong, John”

Posted by on

Many years ago, when I lived in California, I was walking down the street with a friend, an old Italian-Catholic grandmotherly woman who I knew through her work fighting against the construction of a freeway through our town.

I was sharing my fascination with these tenacious little juvenile palm trees that had found a niche in the gravel beds along the railroad tracks that ran through town.

“The life force is strong, John,” she said in response, with a smile of religious wisdom.

Here’s some poppies from last spring, doing what they do:

the life force, strongly

the life force, strongly

Not too soon for Sandy lessons

Posted by on

Jeff Mount from UC Davis:

The San Francisco Bay Area business community should be taking notes. This trifecta of high tides, storm surge and intense rain is also a Bay Area scenario. Scientists and a host of government agencies have been warning about such an event for years.

It may not appear so on a map, but the Bay Area has half of California’s shoreline. Unlike the rest of the state’s coast, most of that shoreline is along reclaimed lowlands that are prone to flooding from the bay and surrounding creeks – the same as waterfront cities in New York and New Jersey.

A major storm in the Bay Area would put more than 140,000 people at risk of serious flooding, along with $30 billion worth of public assets that include the Port of Oakland, two major airports and 800 miles of roadways.

It’s not tropical storms that pose the risk, Mount says, but “atmospheric rivers”.

Antelope Island and the notion of climate variability

Posted by on
Antelope Island Causeway, Great Salt Lake, October 2012

Antelope Island Causeway, Great Salt Lake, October 2012

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 the climate history of the region during the mid-19th century, he turned to the early Mormon herders for help. The Great Salt Lake was then a great climate integrator, a closed basin that rose during wet times and fell during dry – sometimes allowing access to Antelope Island, sometimes not. There were other similar sites, most notably the access to Stansbury Island. The herders kept track, and Gilbert was able to use their stories to generate a crude but usable “paleoclimate” record over the previous 30 years.

G.K. Gilbert's Great Salt Lake level reconstruction, from the Report on the Lands of the Arid Region

G.K. Gilbert’s Great Salt Lake level reconstruction, from the Report on the Lands of the Arid Region

I’ve always loved the story (I included it in my book), because Gilbert was so clever and because, if you look that drop in the lake’s level he identified beginning around 1855, he seems to have pretty much nailed the story that 21st century scientists now understand about that time period.

As far as I know, we have no rain gauge data from that time period around the Salt Lake, but tree ring records have been used to reconstruct what Richard Seager calls “the Civil War drought,” extending from the mid-1850s to the mid-1860s.

The drought was quite broad, as Seager’s map (based on tree ring data compiled by Ed Cook at LDEO) shows.

Palmer Drought Severity Index, 1856-1865

Palmer Drought Severity Index, 1856-1865, courtesy Richard Seager, LDEO

The culprit? La Niña. Seager’s group used the relatively sparse ocean temperature data reconstructions available, which are based on ship-board records, to drive climate models. They showed a persistent La Niña phase, and driven by that, the models did a nice job of reproducing the spatial nature of the drought as shown in the tree ring records.

And in Gilbert’s clever 19th century reconstruction as well. For a paleo nerd, worth a quick pilgrimage on the way to the airport.

(Seager’s group has a great web page summarizing their work on 19th century drought.)

 

 

stuff I wrote elsewhere: tree rings, climate change and our disappearing forests

Posted by on

When I wrote The Tree Rings’ Tale, its organizational premise was that tree rings are storytellers.

And how.

Park Williams latest research, which I featured in this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, combines tree ring records for the southwestern United States with contemporary climate data, fire data, tree mortality data and future modeling results to tell a frankly stark story:

If climate trends follow even the most conservative projections from scientists who study the effects of rising greenhouse gases, the work by Williams and his colleagues suggests a warming climate will push the Southwest’s forests by the middle of the 21st century into a regime in which the worst tree-killing drought conditions of the last thousand years become the norm.

Temperature as a potent driver of regional forest drought stress and tree mortality, Williams et al., Nature Climate Change (2012) doi:10.1038/nclimate1693

bunk risk and the problem of debunking

Posted by on

On the twitter this evening, I stumbled across a fascinating paper (pdf) from a couple of years ago by Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler documenting problems that can ensue when journalists try to debunk bunk that has an ideological component:

Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a ‘‘back?re effect’’ in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

Given the amount of bunk loose in the wild, this sometimes feels to me like an intractable problem. When I tweeted the link, Nyhan helpfully pointed me to this (also pdf) which offers some science-based suggestions journalists might use to combat the problem. Among them, charts and graphs!

 

SHOUTING IN ALL CAPS ABOUT THE WEATHER

Posted by on

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 PORTIONS OF DELAWARE…NORTHEAST MARYLAND… NEW JERSEY AND PENNSYLVANIA…INCLUDING THE FOLLOWING AREAS… IN DELAWARE…DELAWARE BEACHES…INLAND SUSSEX…KENT AND NEW CASTLE….

Other times, not so much:

THE WARMING TREND CONTINUES SUNDAY AS THE RELATIVELY STRONG LATE OCTOBER SUN CONTINUES TO MODIFY THE LOWER ATMOSPHERE QUITE NICELY. A VERY WEAK BACK DOOR COLD FRONT IS STILL EXPECTED TO DROP INTO NORTHEAST NM SATURDAY NIGHT…RESULTING MAINLY IN A WIND SHIFT AND LITTLE IF ANY CHANGE IN TEMPERATURE.

Kevin Drum explains the background behind the all caps tradition. (it apparently has something to do with Agenda 21 and the whole One World Govt. problem or something). Thanks to Kerry Jones at the NWS Albuquerque office for pointing me to this daring mixed-case experiment:

.SYNOPSIS…Several rounds of rain are expected over the next several days. Temperatures will be a bit warmer Sunday through the end of next week. Snow levels will climb above 5000 thousand feet by late tonight, so travel over the mountain passes should improve on Sunday. A break in the wet weather pattern may arrive next Friday or Saturday, but may not last long. The outlook for early November looks abnormally wet.

We’re rooting for you, Spokane!

 

 

Stuff I wrote elsewhere: more on the B61

Posted by on

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 National Nuclear Security Administration, the federal agency that oversees Sandia’s work, suggests the answer is, at least in part, “yes.”

But experts say decisions made across the nuclear weapons enterprise seem also to have played a role, that there is blame to go around for a project that members of Congress say has increased from $4 billion to at least $8 billion in estimated cost.

 

Tarrant: much ado about nothing

Posted by on

So what’s up with that full court PR madness from the folks in the Tarrant Regional Water District in Texas? Is the future of the many interstate water management compacts that govern water distribution among the western states really under threat. This may seem obscure, but if you follow water, you can’t help but have stumbled over the argument that, if the Supreme Court takes up the case in question, all the compacts will be out the window.

Not so much, writes Stephanie Ogburn after doing a bit of digging on the question:

According to Harris, of Western Resource Advocates, the Texas water district is looking for allies. Oliver’s strategy is to get Western water mavens worried enough to take up his cause.

“He’s going after again the water districts, states, anybody else that he thinks might be interested in siding with them if the Court picks up the case.”

Those groups could file friend of the court briefs on Tarrant’s behalf, says Harris.

“But honestly I think he’s making a mountain out of a molehill here.”

So there you go. Are we on the verge of water anarchy? Probably not.

(This thing’s been bouncing around out there, via Tarrant’s PR, and I haven’t had time to do the leg work. Journalistically, it’s a weak payoff to do the work to conclude something’s not really a story, and we owe Stephanie gratitude.)