Category: Environment & Weather

From Reuters via ABC News —

The bad news is tens of millions of people along the eastern seaboard of the United States and Canada may drown if the slow slippage of a volcano off north Africa becomes a cataclysmic collapse.

But the good news is the world is not likely to be destroyed by an asteroid any time soon.

Link via kottke.

Death Valley. On this date in 1913, the hottest temperature ever reported in North America was recorded at the Greenland Ranch in Death Valley, California. 134ºF/56.7ºC … in the shade.

A thoughtful essay on western dams from Daniel McCool at High Country News:

We can always find another source of energy, a more sensible place to grow high-water crops, and a more efficient way to water our cities. But we cannot replicate Glen Canyon; we cannot genetically engineer a massive salmon run; we cannot invent a mountain canyon that funnels sand to the edge of a continent. We have great power to foul our own nest, but we have a commensurate power to mend that nest, and create a future of free-flowing rivers and deeply carved canyons.

NewMexiKen’s father reports on the seasonal change in Tucson:

Those of you familiar with the desert know that after two or three months of no rain we expect thunderheads to build up every afternoon south east of us. These are the rain clouds from the Gulf of Mexico, pushing up into the Sierra Madres in Mexico. Day by day they creep closer to us.

Yesterday while reading I was surprised by a loud clap of thunder. Glancing out the window it was true….. Rain………

I raced to the kitchen to gather my rain gauges and ruler; ran out the door and proceeded to record the event.

Taking numerous measurements, I concluded the drops averaged two inches apart and the rain had lasted four minutes…..a 2/4 rain.

From AP via The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Three juveniles have admitted starting a forest fire that has burned 8,400 acres in western New Mexico’s Zuni Mountains, a fire-information officer said Thursday. …

The youngsters, who built a campfire in a restricted area, told investigators they put it out using water, sand and a stick, he said.

The fire started when they rested the stick against a tree, and its hot tip apparently fell off into a clump of pine needles…

From AP via The Salt Lake Tribune:

The drought gripping the West could be the biggest in 500 years, with effects in the Colorado River basin considerably worse than during the Dust Bowl years, scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey said Thursday.

The wildfire burning in the Zuni Mountains 75 miles west of here is providing us with the pleasant scent of wood smoke and — last night at least — a glorious sunset.

From Dan Neil in the Los Angeles Times:

In some atmospheric conditions — a brown day in San Bernardino, for instance — PZEV vehicles actually clean the air, which is to say, their emissions are cleaner than the air sucked into the engine.

In terms of noxious emissions, your spouse pollutes more than a PZEV.

Despite automakers’ long and litigious assertions to the contrary, they have been able to develop the compliant technologies. There are currently more than 30 PZEV vehicles on the market (visit http://www.driveclean.ca.gov ), including BMW’s 3-Series cars and wagon, Honda’s Accord, Subaru’s suite of Legacy cars and wagons, and Volvo’s big V70 wagon — not exactly hair shirts of eco-martyrdom.

So let’s hear it for big government. Had California not used its enormous leverage in the marketplace — the state is the biggest vehicle market in the country — the automakers would not have been motivated to develop the engineering that will, now that it is available, become integrated into the larger vehicle market. California’s zero-emissions mandate has been adopted, with some variation, in the “green states” of Maine, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. Why, clean air is spreading like a prairie fire.

From the Los Angeles Times:

California officials and Hearst Corp. have reached a tentative agreement on a $95-million deal to preserve most of the rolling hills and grassy tablelands of the Hearst Ranch around San Simeon, which have long served as a picturesque gateway to Big Sur.

Under the proposed accord, which California Resources Secretary Mike Chrisman announced after months of negotiations, the state would buy about 1,400 acres west of Highway 1. The purchase would make public about 13 miles of the state’s best-known undeveloped stretch of coast — a land of cliffs, rocky outcrops and short beaches colonized by lounging elephant seals.

Hearst Corp. would retain ownership of four parcels along the coast, totaling five miles of shoreline. At the base of one of those parcels — San Simeon Point — the company, owned by a family foundation, would retain the right to build a 100-room hotel based on architectural plans of Julia Morgan, who designed Hearst Castle.

The corporation would allow some public access across each of the parcels by way of the California Coastal Trail, a work in progress that is designed to run the length of the state.

On the rest of the roughly 120-square-mile cattle ranch that surrounds Hearst Castle, a “conservation easement” would prevent most development. The ranch reaches from the coastline far into the forests and rangeland of the Santa Lucia Mountains in northern San Luis Obispo County.

Hearst Corp. would keep the right to build 27 homes deep in the canyons so long as they were out of view of the highway and Hearst Castle, which is owned and operated by state park officials. The homes are presumably for family members, but could be sold to outsiders, according to negotiators. The family has owned the ranch since 1865.

Excellent scientific data about global warming.

From The Poor Man. Link via Brad DeLong.

The Canadian National Post has some of the science about climate change NewMexiKen mentioned — “Scientists raise alarms about an impending water crisis in the West but governments have yet to heed the call.” Concerning the western U.S. the article tells us:

Phillip Mote, a climatologist at the University of Washington recently found snowpack levels in the western United States have dropped considerably in recent decades. That has led to predictions that, over the next 50 years, snowpacks in such regions as the Cascade Mountains in Washington could be reduced 60%, cutting summertime stream flows as much as 50%. Those forecasts match the findings of Daniel Cayan, climate researcher at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla, Calif., who recently reported in the journal Climate Change that snowmelt in California’s Sierra Nevada now comes three weeks earlier than it did in 1948. “Snow is our water storage in the west,” Dr. Mote recently commented in the U.S. journal Science, “when you remove that much storage, there is simply no way to make up for it.”

Meagre snowfalls in the western U.S. last winter have resulted in projections suggesting snowmelt runoff into the Colorado River — the main water artery for Denver and Los Angeles as well as huge expanses of agriculture — could be 45% below average this year. The United States Geological Survey says the period since 1999 has been the driest in the 98 years of recorded history of the Colorado River.

The relatively humid 20th century is being shown to be an anomaly.

On Friday NewMexiKen put this headline on an entry about what people think about global warming/climate change: I believe. I believe. Even though it’s silly I believe.

The line is taken from the little girl Susan (Natalie Wood in the original) in Miracle on 34th Street. My misuse of it was an attempt to say, “Hey, it really doesn’t matter what the public thinks.” As Byron, one of two official sons-in-law of NewMexiKen, said to me, “A politically popular opinion doesn’t make it correct.” Precisely.

The climate is changing. The climate is always changing. NewMexiKen’s opinion is that we’d better find out what, if anything, we might do about it, and what, if anything, we should do to prepare for it. If there is a consensus among serious scientists, that’s good enough for me. Can’t the news media report that and quit with the man-on-the-street nonsense?

From Scripps Howard via the Albuquerque Tribune:

Two-thirds of Americans are convinced global warming is a serious problem even before today’s opening of “The Day After Tomorrow,” the disaster film with a plot based on an abrupt change in Earth’s climate, according to a Yale University poll released Thursday.

In a national survey of 1,000 adults conducted by the polling firm Global Strategy Group, 70 percent of Americans said they consider global warming to be a “very serious” or “somewhat serious” problem.

Only 20 percent said they do not consider global warming to be a serious problem.

A majority of Americans, 55 percent, also believe that “the scientific evidence is in” with regard to global warming, the poll found.

There is, however, a clear political gap on the issue. A majority of Democrats, 66 percent, and independents, 55 percent, said they want action to address the problem. But only 44 percent of Republican women and 35 percent of Republican men share that view.

The Missouilan has some thoughts on the folly of the USDA tanker decision —

Well, it didn’t take long to demonstrate the folly of the Forest Service’s decision this month to fight wildfires without all the right tools.

In southern New Mexico, the Captain fire is burning more than 23,000 acres and has sent dozens of homeowners fleeing. “I was shocked to be told this fire could have been held to a single acre if the heavy air tankers had been available at the beginning,” New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson said Tuesday, according to the Associated Press.

But, of course, air tankers weren’t available at the beginning. And it doesn’t look as though they’re going to be available at the beginning of the next fire, or the ones after that. The Forest Service terminated all its contracts for 33 of the big planes earlier this month, citing safety concerns springing from the crash of two Wyoming-based tankers two years ago.

*****

The decision seems to have far more to do with limiting Forest Service exposure to possible lawsuits than with ensuring safety. Whatever reduction of risk gained by grounding the tankers surely will be offset by increased danger to firefighters and people living in the path of wildfires.

There is no evidence that the tanker aircraft that have been grounded are anything but safe. What we already have is a fire raging out of control in New Mexico that might have been stopped in its tracks with the use of large tankers. Something tells us this summer will produce many such examples.

From AP via The Salt Lake Tribune:

Other researchers compared the current drought and rising temperatures to a similar episode 13,000 years ago. Mountain forests died off or were wiped out by fire, to be replaced by woodlands, grasslands and desert scrub that had been prevalent at lower elevations or farther south.

“Yet another spate of disturbance-driven plant migrations may be looming in the West,” the researchers reported.

Scientists still don’t know how much climate stress forests can withstand before massive die-back kicks in. Without that knowledge, researchers can’t begin to realistically predict how much of the West’s forests will die, nor gauge the resulting effects on the environment or society.

The effects of drought are compounded by the ravages of tree-eating beetles that are killing entire forests from Alaska to Arizona. Not only may a lack of water weaken trees, but warmer temperatures may help the bugs survive and multiply into what Jesse Logan of the U.S. Forest Service’s Rocky Mountain Research Station called widespread and intense outbreaks.

Around Santa Fe the loss of piñons is already more than 60% and it’s not a pretty picture.

One of two forest fires burning in New Mexico is at Capitan Peak, the mountain where Smokey Bear “was found as a fire-orphaned cub clinging to a smoldering tree trunk” in May 1950.

The second and larger of the two New Mexico fires appears to have been started by a campfire in an area where campfires are currently banned.

Source: AP via the Santa Fe New Mexican