From AP via The Durango Herald:
Months ago, national fire managers predicted the 2004 wildfire season would be a bad one. Now, they’re changing their forecast: It’s going to be worse.
With unseasonably warm temperatures in March and April, the potential loss of heavy airtankers for safety reasons and a years-long drought continuing, Western states and the federal government are grimly facing the possibility of another devastating fire season.
At briantology they don’t much like Oklahoma tornadoes. (Some of the commenters say they do.)
Thanks to dooce for the link.
Have you noticed Venus in the western evening sky these past several weeks? The Astronomy Picture of the Day shows her phases.
Wired News: New Dinosaur Stumps Scientists.
A curious piece of bone spotted by a University of Pennsylvania professor during a horseback ride in southern Montana led to the discovery of a new dinosaur with a long neck, a whip-like tail and a mysterious extra hole in its skull.
The new find — a Suuwassea emilieae — is a sauropod, a classification of plant-eating dinosaurs with long necks and tails, small heads and four elephant-like legs. At 50 feet long, it’s a smaller cousin of better-known sauropods Diplodocus and Apatosaurus.
The 150-million-year-old creature is described (PDF) by scientists in the current issue of the paleontology journal, Acta Paleontologica Polonica.
“It has a number of distinguishing features, but the most striking is this second hole in its skull, a feature we have never seen before in a North American dinosaur,” said Peter Dodson, senior author of the research study….
Scientists are probably over-thinking this. NewMexiKen’s theory is that one day this dinosaur said “I need that like I need a hole in the head” and another dinosaur obliged him.
Interesting article from the Los Angeles Times on Orcinus orca off California.
Significant quote: “Adult [killer whale] females with calves and male pairs did most of the killing of gray whales. The females often prolonged the attacks up to six hours, leading the scientists to believe the mothers were instructing their young.”
University of Wyoming Professor Jeffrey A. Lockwood celebrates the cicadas. His essay in The New York Times concludes:
We would do well, I believe, to begin to think of periodical cicadas as moving, living national parks. Maybe the Department of [the] Interior should declare a new category: national events. These would be wondrous natural happenings that define the character of our nation, occasions that warrant our attention, or processes that merit celebration. These events would honor the ways in which we are connected to the earth, recognizing that we are embedded in a marvelous natural world.
As candidates, I’d propose the migration of monarch butterflies from Mexico to Canada that unites our continent, the flickering of fireflies that turns suburban hedges into enchanted forests, the bugling of elk in the Rockies that is as primordial a sound as one could ever hear, and the turning of leaves in the New England autumn that reminds us of the cycle of life and death in which, for all of our medical technology, we are still a part.
And I nominate the exuberant arrival of the periodical cicadas as the inaugural national event. Rather than a few million of us visiting Yosemite or Yellowstone this summer, a few trillion cicadas will come to visit us. They will remind us that the world is yet to be tamed and that wonder is our birthright. Even staid scientists are entranced by these creatures — why else would the genus have been named Magicicada?
NewMexiKen notes that Professor Lockwood does not reside where he has to deal with these trillions of pests.
Click to enlarge.
End of April snowpack reports from AP via The [Boulder] Daily Camera:
The snowpack in the South Platte River Basin, where Denver gets its water, improved to 65 percent of a 30-year average from 51 percent the previous month.
In the Arkansas River basin, where other Front Range cities draw their water, the snowpack jumped to nearly 98 percent of average, up from 60 percent a month ago.
But the Colorado River Basin, which feeds states throughout the West, got no relief in April. Snowpack there dropped to 55 percent of average, down from 64 percent.
From The Billings Gazette:
Although the issue remains mired in legal dispute, snowmobiling is likely to be part of Yellowstone National Park next winter, Secretary of [the Interior] Gale Norton said Wednesday.
“I am certainly confident that it will be,” Norton said during a question-and-answer session with reporters in a telephone conference.
Before next winter season, National Park Service officials may have to conduct further environmental studies, examine the numbers of snowmobiles allowed into the parks and look at management practices, Norton said. She did not provide details.
“We are currently looking at our options to see what the implications of the court decisions are,” Norton said.
“One typical gas-powered lawn mower pollutes as much in one year as 43 new cars, each driven more than 12,000 miles annually, according to the [Los Angeles area] air quality agency.”
Reported in The New York Times
More from the Los Angeles Times on the State of the Rockies Conference:
The overall best quality-of-life ratings were awarded to four Colorado counties. Gilpin, Douglas, El Paso and Larimer received A-pluses. The judgment was made based on per capita income, unemployment rate, education levels and natural amenities.
Counties receiving an F-minus were Cascade, Mont.; Valencia, N.M.; Owyhee, Idaho; and Gem, Idaho.
Many of the lowest-rated counties included Indian reservations such as the Navajo of Arizona and New Mexico. McKinley County, with a per capita income of $13,896 and 37% of residents living in poverty, was ranked as the most distressed.
Boulder County, Colo., home to the University of Colorado, was chosen as the most-educated place in the Rockies, with 21% of its population holding a graduate degree or higher compared with the regional average of 9%. Summit County was listed as the healthiest place to live. Santa Fe, N.M., was tops in arts and culture. Teton County, near Yellowstone National Park, was No. 1 for the best quality public lands. It was recently named the richest county in America.
From the Los Angeles Times, a report on the first State of the Rockies Conference, held this week at Colorado College:
The myths and paradoxes of the new American West were explored Tuesday as experts here released a comprehensive report highlighting sweeping changes in population, growth and the environment across the Rocky Mountain region.
Most Westerners don’t live off the land, aren’t especially rugged and like big-box stores and lattes as much as anyone else, the statistics show.
They are, however, better educated than most Americans, younger and living in a beautiful region that’s become the fastest growing in the country.
From The New York Times:
PAGE, Ariz. — At five years and counting, the drought that has parched much of the West is getting much harder to shrug off as a blip.
Those who worry most about the future of the West — politicians, scientists, business leaders, city planners and environmentalists — are increasingly realizing that a world of eternally blue skies and meager mountain snowpacks may not be a passing phenomenon but rather the return of a harsh climatic norm.
Continuing research into drought cycles over the last 800 years bears this out, strongly suggesting that the relatively wet weather across much of the West during the 20th century was a fluke. In other words, scientists who study tree rings and ocean temperatures say, the development of the modern urbanized West — one of the biggest growth spurts in the nation’s history — may have been based on a colossal miscalculation.
Continue reading from The New York Times.
Factoid from the article: “The period since 1999 is now officially the driest in the 98 years of recorded history of the Colorado River, according to the United States Geological Survey.”
The Albuquerque Tribune supports the preservation of Otero Mesa:
Earlier this month, a watershed event in Western wilderness protection occurred in Idaho, where a coalition of competing interests announced a surprise proposal to protect the stunning Owyhee Canyonlands, long recognized as the largest unprotected potential wild area in the country outside of Alaska.
The proposal still is generating significant debate two weeks later and may or may not succeed politically. But it represents a collaborative model that could provide a solution in New Mexico to the increasingly contentious fight over the equally precious Otero Mesa.
There are many similarities between the Owyhee Canyonlands and Otero Mesa, with hundreds of thousands of natural and unique acres at stake in each. In fact, many conservation organizations consider the two tracts among the most important large federal land areas left worthy of massive wilderness and biodiversity protection.
From the Los Angeles Times
Los Angeles will post warnings in Griffith Park, one of the country’s largest urban wilderness areas, after a mountain lion was seen by people there for the first time in 100 years, officials said today.
A park ranger, a city public works superintendent and several equestrians recently reported seeing a mountain lion in a northwest section of the park, used primarily by equestrians, said parks spokeswoman Jane Kolb.
NewMexiKen somehow missed commenting on Earth Day Thursday. Oh, well, let’s make up for it with this great holiday logo from Google.
Kevin Drum and Brad DeLong wonder about Easterbrook on air quality. DeLong begins, “Kevin Drum asks why Gregg Easterbrook has run off the rails and crashed into a ditch.” Drum begins, “Can someone please tell me why Gregg Easterbrook continues to claim that the Bush administration is dedicated to improving air quality? His writing on the subject has gotten pathological.”
As announced by EPA yesterday.
From the environmental action group American Rivers, America’s Most Endangered Rivers of 2004:
Click to see a somewhat fascinating graphic of U.S. population distribution.
From the Billings Gazette:
In a ruling that could have far-reaching implications for sportsmen’s access, a Douglas [Wyoming] man has been acquitted of trespassing after he jumped from one corner of public land to another, crossing the space above adjoining private property.
“Corner jumping” is the term used to describe stepping from piece of property where four sections of land meet to reach an opposite corner without touching the other two parcels, like a diagonal move on a checkers board. …
The case began Sept. 23 when Kearney, while hunting, stepped from one parcel of public land to another that meet at a corner where two pieces of private land also meet.
Using a global positioning system device, Kearney found a surveyor’s pin that marks the intersection of the four parcels, and he did not step in or physically touch the private lands when he crossed the corner.
“I did this, and I was accosted by a landowner and a Game and Fish representative on public land,” Kearney said. “They asked how I got there, and I told them, and they told me that was against the law in Wyoming. … I couldn’t believe that was true because I never stepped on private land.”
Nearly a month later, Kearney was cited for trespassing.
“From my overall experience, it appeared to me that the Game and Fish was under a tremendous amount of pressure by this very wealthy hobby rancher to prosecute me for accessing thousands of acres of public land,” he said.
He decided to challenge the citation because he didn’t think he had broken the law. On March 24, after a nonjury trial, Castor found Kearney innocent.
“It’s unfortunate that I had to waste a couple of days of elk hunting and my own money to see this through, but it was a matter of principle,” he said.
Kearney’s attorney and the prosecutor, Deputy Albany County Attorney Torey Racines, could find no definitive answer in Wyoming case law to interpret whether corner jumping is prohibited.
“There’s case law from other states, and there’s arguments made on both sides as to what the law should be,” Racines said.
In court documents, Racines noted that Wyoming law specifically grants landowners sovereignty of the space above their lands – except for aircraft use – and even the U.S. Supreme Court grants landowners ownership of “at least as much of the space above the ground as they can occupy or use in connection with the land.”
On the other hand, a recent Massachusetts Supreme Court ruling stated there is “no place in the modern world” for the ancient civil trespass doctrine that “he who owns the soil owns upward unto heaven.”
The Santa Fe New Mexican published an article Sunday that surveys the drought situation across the west.
From the brittle hillsides of Southern California to the drying fields of Idaho, from Montana to New Mexico, a relentless drought is worsening across most of the West where a once-promising snowpack is shrinking early, water supplies are dwindling and the threat of wildfires is already on the rise.
“Most of the West is headed into six years of drought and some areas are looking at seven years of drought,” said Rick Ochoa, weather program manager at the National Interagency Fire Center in Boise, Idaho.
Arizona faces its worst drought on record.
New Mexico farmers are bracing for dramatic reductions in water supplies, and in parts of southeast Idaho, the only farmers who will get water this summer might be those with water rights dating to the late 1800s.
On the edge of the Sierra, lingering drought is pitting residents against the Reno country club that hosts a national golf tournament in a battle over water from a mountain creek.
Continue reading from the Santa Fe New Mexican.
From the Albuquerque Tribune —
An intense storm that doused [Albuquerque] Friday evening is expected to linger through Tuesday. It has already set a few records:
Most rain in 24 hours: 2.29 inches, Friday night to Saturday night. Previous record: 2.26 inches in 1893.
Most rain in a calendar day: 1.92 inches Saturday. Tied Sept. 24, 1955.
This already ranks as the third-wettest April in city history with 2.47 inches of rain. The record is 4 inches in 1905.
The average annual rainfall through today is 1.62 inches; Albuquerque had already picked up 4.47 inches through this morning.
While the sorely needed rain thoroughly doused the area, weather officials said it barely made a dent in the city’s drought.
From the Denver Post —
Lake Powell, the desert oasis that has served Colorado as a crucial fail-safe for water deliveries throughout the Southwest during five years of hard drought, is now more than half empty.
If the drought persists a year or two more, the 186-mile-long reservoir in Utah and Arizona could be drained dry as early as 2007, federal officials say.
That would propel Colorado – and 30 million other Westerners who depend on the Colorado River for their drinking water – into an uncertain future punctuated by recurring water shortages and decades of litigation, experts warn.
On Friday, the Bureau of Reclamation said it expects only 55 percent of the normal runoff to flow into Lake Powell between April and July. That guarantees the big reservoir, already down to 42 percent of capacity, will recede even further by 2005.
“Time is running out,” said Pat Mulroy, director of the Southern Nevada Water Authority. “The drought no one thought would even happen is here.”
Driving from Albuquerque to Denver, as NewMexiKen did yesterday, one is simply amazed (dismayed) at the absence of snow. While evident on the highest peaks, there is nothing but a few melting patches at 10,000 feet, and none below. At least that was the case in the New Mexico Sangre de Cristos, above the San Luis Valley and around South Park.
The Santa Fe New Mexican reports on New Mexico.
Snowpack in the Sangre de Cristos dropped from 89 percent of normal at the beginning of March to 50 percent of normal at present. The Rio Chama Basin and the upper Rio Grande exhibit similar statistics. The Jemez Basin snowpack dropped from 79 percent to 16 percent of normal.
Those figures are dramatic, Liles said, given that snow is usually accumulating in the mountains in March. But they are not isolated: Snowpack is turning into an early runoff throughout the West.
The Rocky Mountain News sums it up for Colorado.
High country snowpack dropped alarmingly in March, pushing the state into its fifth year of drought and making strict summer watering rules almost a certainty for many communities.
The statewide snowpack – a critical indicator of fresh water supplies – measured just 65 percent of average Thursday, well below the 94 percent of average recorded one year ago, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.
