Category: Environment & Weather

Top Towns for Clean Air, Dirty Air

From the American Lung Association via WebMD:

10 with Cleanest Air Year-Round

1. Cheyenne, Wyo.
2. Santa Fe-Espanola, N.M.
3. Honolulu
4. Great Falls, Mont.
5. Tucson, Ariz.
6. Anchorage, Alaska
7. Farmington, N.M.
7. Bismark, N.D.
9. Albuquerque, N.M.
10. Rapid City, S.D.

And the 5 Sootiest

1. Los Angeles-Long Beach-Riverside, Calif.
2. Bakersfield, Calif.
3. Pittsburgh-New Castle, Pa.
4. Visalia-Porterville, Calif.
5. Fresno-Madera, Calif.

Follow the link above to see cities ranked through number 25 for both categories and to learn more.

Best environmental line of the day, so far

“The folks at Rocky Mountain National Park call it ‘lethal reduction,’ a plan to shoot hundreds of elk in an effort to save a habitat they say have been devastated by elk herds growing out of control.

“The park is planning on dispatching rangers with guns equipped with silencers to kill the elk at night. Park officials say the shooting them at night would minimize run-ins with visitors (who usually come to see the elk alive).”

David Frey at New West Network

Random thoughts

The price of gasoline is going up so fast around here they’re going to have to post some guy fulltime on the price signs. You know, give him a headset so he can keep up with the rise. Well over $3 most places for mid-grade or premium (and our regular is just 86 octane).

The cottonwood trees have unleashed their annual crop of cotton. It’s like snow falling at times, especially near the Rio Grande (the banks are lined with cottonwoods). At a winery/restaurant near Old Town last evening with the doors open to the patio, the barroom floor was covered. Ah Choo!

The Rio Grande Cottonwood reproduces by seeding, unlike many other flood-plain trees which regenerate by sprouting. It flowers in the spring, before it leafs out. It releases its seeds, each carried by downy white tuft, or “parachute,” in anticipation of traditional spring floods and winds, the principal mechanisms for dispersion. A mature Rio Grande Cottonwood can produce as many as 25 million seeds in a season, covering wide areas with a blanket of “cotton.” (Rio Grande Cottonwood – DesertUSA)

NewMexiKen hasn’t watched TV in nearly two weeks — at least 11-12 days. None. Nada. Don’t miss it.

T-shirt in winery: “Men are like grapes. You crush them, keep them in the dark and wait until they mature. Then they might be worth having with dinner.”

At a semi-pro soccer match last evening (Albuquerque Asylum vs. San Diego Fusion), a 9 or 10-year-old girl insisted on reading (a major novel, no less), rather than watching the game. As the night progressed the mother and father increased the pressure on the daughter to watch the game. It started out with “Honey, do you see what’s happening? It’s a corner kick.” Progressed to “You should watch the game.” Ended up with “Put the book down and watch the game.” NewMexiKen is happy to report she kept on reading. I mean, come on parents, yes it would be nice if she took in the game and shared the moment with her family, but what’s the point of demanding it? Leave her alone.

Albuquerque won 2-1. It was a warm, beautiful snow-filled night (see cottonwood item above).

Giving Sacramento Good Reason to Have New Orleans on Its Mind

Excerpt from an interview with Dr. Jeffrey Mount:

Q. If you were making a bet, where would you say the next New Orleans will be?

A. I’d say the Sacramento area. The common denominator is concentrated urban development in the shadow of flooding and levees.

You have around 400,000 people at risk from flooding, and the number will grow in the next few years because of intense development.

The city’s main problem is that it is situated between the American and the Sacramento Rivers and at the base of the 12,000 foot Sierra Nevada range. Both rivers are prone to flooding. Additionally, powerful storms come in from the Pacific, slam against the mountains and dump heavy precipitation that ends up very quickly in the rivers.

Yet, around Sacramento — the capital of the seventh largest economy in the world — there’s intense building on the flood plains.

Twenty miles downstream is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a maze of leveed islands and channels that flow into San Francisco Bay. Because of past agricultural practices, the delta is sinking. Parts are 20 feet below sea level, lower than anything in New Orleans. Still, there are proposals to put up 130,000 new homes in the delta.

The New York Times

300,000 acres, must go

From a report in th Los Angeles Times:

The Bush administration Friday laid out plans to sell off more than $1 billion in public lands over the next decade….

Most of the proceeds would help pay for rural schools and roads, making up for a federal subsidy that has been eliminated from President Bush’s 2007 budget.

Congress must approve the plans, which several experts said would amount to the largest land sale of its kind since President Theodore Roosevelt established the U.S. Forest Service in 1905 and created the modern national forest system.

Here’s the list of Lands Potentially Eligible for Sale by State and National Forest from USDA.

Totals for a few states:

Arizona……….1,030
California…..85,465
Colorado……21,572
New Mexico..7,447
Oregon………10,581

Moving In for the Kill With Montana’s Buffalo Hunters

A good, fairly even-handed report on buffalo hunting in Montana from the Los Angeles Times. It begins:

GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST, Mont. — Boots crunching on iced-over snow, Jeff Vader creeps toward two animals from the world’s last wild herd of pure buffalo.

The normally chatty 50-year-old crouches behind a cluster of juniper trees and puts a finger to his lips. The four men behind him fall mute. Vader lies on his belly, points his rifle at the biggest bull and becomes part of a contentious experiment in controlling an icon of the American West.

And includes this:

Vader and his hunting buddies have thought long and hard about these issues: Is it sporting to stalk a creature that is so oblivious to danger that, 125 years ago, millions were slaughtered by gunmen who could ride right into herds?

Buffalo, also known as bison, are found throughout the West but mostly live on ranches and are largely descended from cross-breeding with cattle. The Yellowstone herd is among the few herds that have no cross-breeding in their lineages and the only one that roams wild.

Build an ark (for real)

Debby, official youngest sister of NewMexiKen, writes to report that Astoria, Oregon, had a record 24.10 inches of rain in January and 58.88 inches since October 1.

Astoria had 2.91 inches of rain on January 5.

Albuquerque hasn’t had 2.91 inches cumulative rainfall in nearly five months (since September 9, 2005).

Erin Brockovich

Pacific Gas and Electric on Friday agreed to pay $295 million to settle claims by more than 1,000 residents in several Mojave Desert towns who said they were harmed by groundwater contamination, a case made famous by the film “Erin Brockovich.”

As part of the settlement, the utility apologized to affected residents in the towns where leaks from gas compressor plants in the 1950s through the 1970s polluted the groundwater basin with chromium.

Los Angeles Times

Look, up in the sky, it’s a bird, it’s …

The answer to a scientific “who-done-it?” has revealed a chilling fact: We used to be bird food.

Scientists announced on Thursday they had definitive proof that the “Taung child”, a 2-million year old apeman skull famed as one of the most dramatic human evolutionary finds, was killed and eaten by an eagle.

“Birds used to eat us and in doing so they shaped our behaviour,” said Dr Lee Berger, a palaeoanthropologist at Johannesburg’s University of the Witwatersrand.

Reuters via Yahoo! News

Bad news

Hey New Mexicans, think twice before you waste any water. According to a report in the Rocky Mountain News, while the snowpack is well above average in central Colorado, news is not so good for us:

Southwestern Colorado, however, has little to cheer about. Basins such as the San Miguel/Dolores and the Upper Rio Grande are alarmingly dry, with early snowpacks registering just 41 percent and 31 percent of average, respectively.

Link via Coyote Gulch.

Solstice

The solstice — “sun still” — is Wednesday at 11:35 AM MST.

In the northern hemisphere, today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year and the longest night. It’s officially the first day of winter and one of the oldest known holidays in human history. Anthropologists believe that solstice celebrations go back at least 30,000 years, before humans even began farming on a large scale. The stone circles of Stonehenge were arranged to receive the first rays of midwinter sun.

Ancient peoples believed that because daylight was waning, it might go away forever, so they lit huge bonfires to tempt the sun to come back. The tradition of decorating our houses and our trees with lights at this time of year is passed down from those ancient bonfires.

In Ancient Rome, the winter solstice was celebrated with the festival of Saturnalia, during which all business transactions and even war were suspended, and slaves were waited upon by their masters.

The Writer’s Almanac

Astronomically, the solstice is the moment when the sun reaches its most northerly (June) or southerly (December) point in the sky.

The Astronomy Picture of the Day has a nice illustration of Sunrise by Season.

Bees recognize human faces

Yeah, but can they remember names to go with the faces?

Scientists have demonstrated that honeybees can recognize human faces, sometimes for days. Adrian Dyer of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues trained the bees to associate photographs of particular human faces with a sugary treat. Later, five bees were able to pick out the right face from a group of others. The results of the study, reported in the Journal of Experimental Biology, may eventually aid the development of computer vision systems.

Boing Boing

Buy ocean-front property now before prices escalate

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia – Ethiopian, American and European researchers have observed a fissure in a desert in the remote northeast that could be the “birth of a new ocean basin,” scientists said Friday.

Researchers from Britain, France, Italy and the U.S. have been observing the 37-mile long fissure since it split open in September in the Afar desert and estimate it will take a million years to fully form into an ocean, said Dereje Ayalew, who leads the team of 18 scientists studying the phenomenon.

The fissure, now 13 feet wide, formed in just three weeks after a Sept. 14 earthquake in a barren region called Boina, some 621 miles north east of the capital, Addis Ababa, said Dereje.

AP via Yahoo! News

Dolphin games: no mere child’s play?

An interesting report on Dolphin games includes this:

The captive dolphins “produced 317 distinct forms of play behavior during the five years that they were observed,” they wrote.

One calf became adept at “blowing bubbles while swimming upside-down near the bottom of the pool and then chasing and biting each bubble before it reached the surface,” the researchers continued. “She then began to release bubbles while swimming closer and closer to the surface, eventually being so close that she could not catch a single bubble.”

“During all of this, the number of bubbles released was varied, the end result being that the dolphin learned to produce different numbers of bubbles from different depths, the apparent goal being to catch the last bubble right before it reached the surface of the water.”

One assumes the dolphins have also figured out a better tie-breaker than the NFL.

And there’s this wise dolphin-related thought NewMexiKen read some years ago:

Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Dolphin article link via BoingBoing.

Core Evidence That Humans Affect Climate Change

From a report in the Los Angeles Times:

An ice core about two miles long — the oldest frozen sample ever drilled from the underbelly of Antarctica — shows that at no time in the last 650,000 years have levels of the greenhouse gases carbon dioxide and methane been as high as they are today.

The research, published in today’s issue of the journal Science, describes the content of the greenhouse gases within the core and shows that carbon dioxide levels today are 27% higher than they have been in the last 650,000 years and levels of methane, an even more powerful greenhouse gas, are 130% higher….