El Nino or El Fizzle?

This year’s boy child is looking considerably less robust than advertised just three months ago. From a typically excellent story by Rob Krier in the San Diego Union Tribune:

Anyone counting on El Niño to wipe out California’s drought this winter may be counting chickens long before they’ve hatched.

Long-range forecasters are less and less bullish about El Niño, a
global atmospheric condition that could bring extra precipitation to
San Diego County.

Most of them say the odds still slightly favor a wetter-than-normal
rainfall season in California, which could use a drenching after three
straight years of drought. But the fledgling El Niño is showing signs
of losing steam.

Gary Robbins, a science writer for the Orange County Register, had a chat about it with Bill Patzert, SoCal’s leading forecaster, who called this year’s boychild “El Fizzle.” Patzert told him, via email:

“At this time, it is a long shot for this El Nino to expand and
intensify into the fall and elevate the present weak to moderate El
Niño episode to a stronger event. For comparison, the
August 21, 1997, TOPEX/Poseidon image of the macho 1997-1998 El Nino is
included here. In size and intensity it dwarfs the present conditions.”

For the meteorologically challenged, Patzert sent along a couple of images from the TOPEX/Poseidon satellites he’s been working with for years.

Here’s the Pacific today, with a mild band of warming across the equator:

Lamelnino-copy

And here’s the Pacific back in the summer of 97-98, the last monster boychild:

Aug21elnino-copy

It’s a real shame for Ventura County. Not only are we dangerously dry, but we actually now have the capacity to shore a great deal of water, to help through drought times…if it would every really rain.

Speaking of which, here’s the conclusion to an extremely thoughtful story about California water politics by Timm Herdt in the Ventura County Star, a week or so ago:

Something else that’s changed is the ability of Southern California
water agencies to store water. Because of that, they would be able to
get maximum benefit from a system capable of delivering more water
during wet years, even if it did not divert additional fresh water from
the delta during dry or normal rainfall years.

[Donald] Kendall notes that the Calleguas [Water District for Ventura County] has spent $9 million on a groundwater
storage project capable of holding 300,000 acre-feet of water, but it’s
never been more than one-third filled. “Now they’re telling us, ‘We
don’t have any winter water for you to store.’ ”

The bills being negotiated by the conference committee would create
a Delta Stewardship Council that would be empowered to make decisions
about new conveyance systems. The hope is to take such decisions out of
the realm of politics and into the realm of science instead.

Kendall said the only hope for a solution is a plan that does not reignite all the old wars.

“If they can come up with a plan that doesn’t smack of North-South
politics, I’ll be cautiously optimistic,” he said. “We’d be very happy.”

Herdt’s story was written before the collapse of negotiations in Sacramento. Legislators were trying to agree on a “Delta fix.” Unless the Governor calls a special session, it won’t happen this year. Sigh.

An Unrepentant Realist: Rackstraw Downes

Perhaps the most interesting name amongst the list of MacArthur Fellows — aka official geniuses — announced today is the realist painter Rackstraw Downes, known for his exacting portrayal of unbeautiful landscapes.

Interesting to yours truly because if art is about opening our eyes to see afresh, what better means that to show us exactly what we see but refuse to look at?

Peter Schjeldahl has a typically brilliant and unusually effusive review available, fortunately, through the New Yorker site here. The whole piece is recommended, but here's the first paragraph:

Rackstraw Downes, the veteran painter of landscapes and urban places, is
a realist esteemed by people, including me, who normally have scant use
for realism in art. His current show, of work from 1999 to 2004, at the
new Betty Cuningham Gallery, is powerful in quiet, stubborn ways. The
subjects include a viaduct in Harlem, a flood-monitoring station on the
Rio Grande, a Texas desert, electrical substations in that desert, and
metal ductwork in a large, dark attic. The look of the pictures, most
of them panoramas, is luminous but taciturn: just the facts. Their
surfaces are fine crusts of dry, oil-starved pigment, applied in sober
little strokes and patches. The tonality is so uniform that the color,
though extremely varied, turns almost monochrome in memory. “I want to
paint exactly the way something is,” Downes said to me recently. “If
that means dulling down the green, then dull it down. Find the beauty
in that.” The pressure of scrutiny in his pictures yields a revelation
not only of how the world looks but of how the eye—unaided by
photography, which Downes pointedly never uses—toils to behold it.

And here's a painting called "In the High Island oil field, late afternoon, March."

In the High Island oil field by rackstraw downes

Animal Logic — Photos by Another Darn Genius

Having six billion plus humans on the planet creates some problems, but also has some advantages. Surely there are more geniuses amongst us now than ever before. And thanks to the Internet, we can experience their work a little more easily than back in Da Vinci's day.

Well, Richard Barnes may not have Da Vinci's range of brilliance, but he's a photographer who brings a uniquely architectural understanding to the natural world. And a heck of a shooter, to boot.

Here's his latest project, called Murmur.

Now, what are those birds in the sky up to? Does anyone really know? 

Murmur01 

a tip of the hat to Metafilter

The Global Warming Debate in Real Life

From the great Overheard in New York:

Boyfriend: Can you believe they're saying the temperature is gonna rise, like, 5 degrees over the next 100 years?
Girlfriend: Yeah, but it's all based on scientist's predictions and computer models.
Boyfriend: Predictions and computer models? C'mon!
Girlfriend: How do you think they predict anything?
Boyfriend: But to force public policy upon us based on these predictions and models is a mistake!
Girlfriend: Force public policy upon us? What are you talking about? Nobody's forcing you to do anything.
Boyfriend: Hillary Clinton taking oil company profits. There you go.
Girlfriend: (looks puzzled)
Boyfriend: Booyah!

–Pool, 79th St

If the gf's not careful, she may find herself married to one of The Marching Morons…

Battle of the Headlines: “World’s Ocean Temps Warmest Ever Recorded” vs. “Arctic Sea Ice Is Again on the Rise”

The first headline for USA Today, atop veteran science writer Seth Borenstein's story for the AP, was inspired by world-wide records from the National Climactic Data Center. As the story said:

WASHINGTON — The world's oceans this summer are the warmest on record.

The National Climatic Data Center, the
government agency that keeps weather records, says the average global
ocean temperature in July was 62.6 degrees. It is the hottest since
record-keeping began in 1880. The previous record was set in 1998.

Meteorologists blame a combination of a natural
El Nino weather pattern on top of worsening manmade global warming. The
warmer water could add to the melting of sea ice and possibly
strengthen some hurricanes.

The second headline, atop the entertaining denier site Watts Up With That, leads to a post from Anthony Watts that begins:

Yesterday I looked at JAXA data and ventured that:

“Arctic sea ice melt appears to have turned the corner for 2009″

The Sept 15th JAXA Arctic Sea Ice extent graph was published this evening
about 8PM PST (and updated overnight which is the image now shown) and
shows an increase in sea ice for the second day in a row. It seems
clear that Arctic sea ice is now on the rise.

Read with a modicum of attention, and it's quickly apparent why sea ice in the Arctic is on the rise…winter is coming, and fall is nearly here!

So — ignore the long-term trend!

Oy. Could a more obvious, flat-footed way to avoid facing the truth about global warming be imagined? Ignore that man behind the curtain — winter is coming! 

For those who want a little reporting with their facts, Dot Earth helpfully labels a graphic from NOAA:

Adds Andrew Revkin, dead of climate reporting, adds pointedly:

Variations in polar sea ice on short time scales, up or down, are
essentially meaningless, my contacts studying the cryosphere always
stress.

The Age of Stupid — A Documentary About Us. (Hey, Wait as Minute…)

Gotta admire the wit of English filmmaker Franny Armstrong. Instead of warning us of climate change disasters to come, she mocks our thick-headed inability to listen to these warnings from from the distant future.

It's a clever way to make a point.

Her film, bluntly called "The Age of Stupid," is built around the idea that we humans are — as friend Andy Lipkis of TreePeople likes to say — "denial machines," far better at avoiding the truth than facing it.

To dramatize this, she imagines a future with a rare survivor, looking sardonically back on our era.

Could she be right?

(Well, experts say our species is not facing extinction — unlike many others. But life as we know it might be changing faster than our ability to adapt. What will that feel like? And is it nitpicking to point out that we may suffer greatly, with millions upon millions dying, but still survive as a species?) 

Maybe that's the big question. Can we cope with an unprecedented challenge from the planet itself?

Here's the trailer…

Don’t Waste Your Dreams — Recycle Them

Rebecca Solnit, one of today's great thinkers, wrote recently in her book A Field Guide to Getting Lost:

It is in the nature of things to be lost and not otherwise. Think of how little has been salvaged from the compost of time of the hundreds of billions of dreams dreamt since the language to describe them emerged, how few names, how few wishes, how few languages even, how we don't know what tongues the people who erected the standing stones of Britain and Ireland spoke or what the stones meant, don't know much of the language of the Gabrielanos of Los Angeles or the Miwoks of Marin, don't know how or why they drew the giant pictures on the desert floor in Nazca, Perus, don't know much even about Shakespeare or Li Po. It is as though we make the exception the rule, believe that we should have rather than that we will generally lose. 

True, but it's a problem for which the great bard of the radio, Jean Shepherd, had a solution. As recounted on Prof. Al Filreis's poetry site, it's a Dream Collection Day: 

Dream collection day

A  way to recycle dreams, to keep them alive…beautiful.

In Wildness, Truth. In Wildness, Life…

From an essay by Jay Griffiths in Drunken Boat:

What is wild cannot be bought or sold, borrowed or copied.  It is. 
Unmistakable, unforgettable, unshameable, elemental as earth and water
and fire.  Don’t waste your wildness: it is precious and necessary.  In
wildness, truth.  In wildness, life.  And, for the human spirit as for
any other wild creature, wildness smoulders in the groin, thighs
slippery with juice.  Proud, anarchic, the raw core of our human spirit
is still untamed, eloquent, complex, kinetic and fleetly wild.

Max500x500