A Change in the Wind
And the wind cried…Nemo?
One model's vision of the blizzard-to-come…. very hurricane-like. twitter.com/EricHolthaus/s…
— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) February 8, 2013
That's from The Weather Channel…but isn't it NOAA's job to name storms?
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From UPI:
DURHAM, N.H., Jan. 24 (UPI) – Climate change beliefs held by independent voters can be dramatically swayed by short-term weather conditions, University of New Hampshire researchers reported.
This is in contrast to how voters aligned with a political party hold on to their beliefs, they said.
"We find that over 10 surveys, Republicans and Democrats remain far apart and firm in their beliefs about climate change. Independents fall in between these extremes, but their beliefs appear weakly held — literally blowing in the wind," researchers Lawrence Hamilton and Mary Stampone wrote in the journal Weather, Climate and Society.
Peter Gleick tweets a great graph from the study (unavailable without sub):
Fascinating to see that on this issue, independent voters really are independent.
The UPI story continues:
"Interviewed on unseasonably warm days, independents tend to agree with the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. On unseasonably cool days, they tend not to," Hamilton and Stampone said.
Hamilton is a professor of sociology and Stampone is a professor of geography and is also the New Hampshire state climatologist.
They used statewide data from about 5,000 random-sample telephone interviews conducted on 99 days during 2 1/2 years, and correlated that with temperature and precipitation records.
Weather had a substantial effect on climate change views mainly among independent voters, they found.
"The shift was dramatic," Hamilton said. "On the coolest days, belief in human-caused climate change dropped below 40 percent among independents. On the hottest days, it increased above 70 percent."
You have to love a reporter who makes a joke — and beer — out of his unemployment.
Best of all is his label, which reads in part:
"Porter style beers were first popularized in the nineteenth century by merchant sailors and manual dock laborers. Unemployed Reporter is crafted in the same tradition, honoring a profession likewise doomed to decline and irrelevance."
For this new class of "expendables," the label goes on:
"We've included chocolate and roasted barley malts that are as dark and bitter as the future of American journalism, and a high alcohol content designed to numb the pain of a slow, inexorable march toward obsolescence. While Unemployed Reporter is especially delicious as a breakfast beer, it's still smooth enough to be enjoyed all day, every day. And let's be honest: what else do you have going on?"
A wildly popular social media item, originally from the Hartford Courant.
ADD: Credited the media source, but not the source: the reporter/wit Jon Campbell. My apologies, Mr. Campbell. No blog found as of yet, unfortunately.
Great op-ed yesterday in the New York Times about how GPS data is helping bring us closer to other species.
In recent years, there has been much pontificating about how modern communications technologies are changing the way that we relate to other people. Less discussed is the way these advances are reshaping our relationships with other species. By using satellite and cellular tags to track free-ranging animals, biologists are providing us with intimate access to the daily lives of other species, drawing us closer to the world’s wild things and making us more invested in their welfare.
Over the past several decades, the use of wildlife tags has proliferated as the devices have become smaller and more powerful. Today’s tags are capable of collecting months’ or years’ worth of data on an animal’s location at a given moment, and can be used to track everything from tiny tropical orchid bees to blubbery, deep-diving elephant seals. The devices provide crucial information about populations — helping scientists uncover the migratory pathways of Arctic terns or the ocean currents that loggerhead sea turtles like to surf — as well as individuals. Is this particular predator a pack leader or a lone wolf?
Lots of fascinating ironies here, but it's worth mentioning again how usefully the Times has refashioned the op-ed column. So often it becomes strident argumentation along predictable lines, but it can be a prime opportunity for the thoughtful exploration of topics not topical enough to be considered news.
Though actually, the story of OR-7, the first wolf known to have visited California in many years, did make news in both California and Oregon. Here's one of OR-7's cohorts, OR-10, via California's (renamed) Department of Fish and Wildlife.
Exactly as author Emily Anthes says, following an individual has helped us bond to the species.
We may be able to ignore a nameless, faceless mass of threatened creatures, but fill in their personalities and back stories, and it becomes harder to look the other way as their habitats disappear or they are hunted to extinction. A famous animal can become an ambassador for its species, inspiring efforts to conserve the entire population. Indeed, after [Yellowstone] wolf 832F [was shot to] death, the National Wolfwatcher Coalition started a fund-raising campaign in her honor, donating the proceeds to wolf research and education programs.
Make it specific, as they say in writing, and in drama. The general? Eh.
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Hype is the point, writes Hampton Stevens:
The Super Bowl is our National Day of Capitalism—a feast and party
that's mercifully without the least bit of spiritual underpinning. It's a
celebration of commercialism and consumerism, and consumption for
consumptions' sake. Today we slurp and cho down as much food and drink
as humanly possible. We pay more attention to the TV commercials than
the game. We gamble, which is almost capitalism in the purest form—an
attempt to make money off nothing but one's capital, brains, and someone
else's work.
Oh, okay.
Add: Joel Achenbach puts it in perspective:
The Super Bowl is our day of national vulgarity. Everything about the
event is over-the-top, most of all the halftime show. I kept thinking
that Beyonce didn’t need to try so hard. She had me at hello. At several
points it turned into a workout video.
Mark Bittman, the amazing cook and bold columnist for the New York Times, tries to restrain his temper as he reports on how some suburban governments are citing homeowners for transforming their lawns into gardens.
He grumbles:
…several times a year we hear of a situation like the one in Orlando[1], where the mayor claims to be striving to make his city green while his city harasses homeowners like Jason and Jennifer Helvenston for planting vegetables in their front yard, threatening to fine them $500 a day — for gardening. The battle has been raging for months, and the city’s latest proposal is to allow no more than 25 percent of a homeowner’s front yard to be planted in fruits and vegetables.
As if gardens were somehow an official eyesore, or inappropriate.
Of course not all governments are so homogeneity-obsessed. Here in the Southwest, in places like Las Vegas and Tucson and Ventura, cities are encouraging residents to transform their lawns to xeriscape or ocean-friendly gardens. But as Bittman points out, and a scientific team from the University of Montana (featured by NASA's Earth Observatory) has documented, the lawn is this nation's largest crop.
Using widely available data, Roger Doiron of Kitchen Gardeners International[3] estimates that converting 10 percent of our nation’s lawns to vegetable gardens “could meet about a third of our fresh vegetable needs at current consumption rates.”
Ten percent is optimistic; even 1 percent would be a terrific start, because there is a lot of lawn in this country. In fact it’s our biggest crop, three times as big as corn, according to research done using a variety of data, much of it from satellites. That’s around a trillion square feet — 50,000 square miles — and, since an average gardener can produce something like a half-pound of food per square foot (you garden 100 square feet, you produce 50 pounds of food), without getting too geeky you can imagine that Doiron’s estimates are rational.
Lawns are not exactly the enemy, but they’re certainly not helping matters any.
An especially striking picture from the University of Montana team, led by Christina Milesi, found a clever way to map lawn extent. See here:
Isn't it striking how wide-spread the extent of lawns really is, regardless of politics? The Bay Area in Northern California is really not so diffferent from SoCal, or even Texas, by that measure.
The ecologists never fail to describe coastal Southern California as a semi-arid region, which all too many residents transmute into "desert." It's not! Big difference between a land of some rain and a land of no rain. Trees, for one. As Chris Clarke, who has an interesting gig writing for KCET points out, rain often skips the desert entirely. But when the rain does come, it's transforming:
If the wave of scent that precedes the storm is strong enough to be euphoric, the scent when the rain actually hits can be mind-altering. The first drop hits soil. It dissolves the accumulated resin and dust of a year, or two or three, and releases it: a small wet grenade exploding in perfume. Then another hits. Then another. Before the marks of the droplets even begin to merge on the ground, they fill the air with volatiles: the air becomes like turpentine, but less choking.
And then a new scent overwhelms the others, literally washes them out. It can take a few years in the desert to notice it, but it's not subtle. It's just that outside the desert you're never away from that smell. It is the scent of water itself, rendered overpoweringly noticable by its absence — until now.
The presence of that writng!
In a recent interview with Franklin Foer of The New Republic, Barack Obama said he liked to shoot:
FF: Have you ever fired a gun?
BO: Yes, in fact, up at Camp David, we do skeet shooting all the time.
FF: The whole family?
BO: Not the girls, but oftentimes guests of mine go up there.
In this Obama is much like past presidents, including John F. Kennedy Jr., who in this picture, taken at Camp David before his inauguration, went skeet shooting with Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams. 
Or, in the words of Kurt Cobain: Load up on guns and bring your friends…
[pic via BeschlossDC]
For decades the Los Angeles Times has had a Column One feature on the front page, at the top left of the front page, usually, in the A1 position. It's a story-telling opportunity for good reporters. Yesterday Chris Lee hit the ball out of the park with his profile of the unusual reader/Hollywood producer Stuart Klawans.
It's good to see, because with the newspaper's struggles as of late in two separate bankruptcy court, the big hits have been few and far between. But no matter!
Here is the subject of the profile, Stuart Klawans, the reader/producer:
Nearly every day, for upward of 10-hour stretches, the independent film producer speed-reads police blogs, articles from RSS feeds and niche-interest journals in dogged pursuit of an elusive prize: a story on which to base his next movie.
His biggest hit to date is "Argo." Before the film landed seven Oscar nominations (including one for best picture) and twoGolden Globes (including best drama picture), before it generated more than $180 million in worldwide grosses, "Argo" existed as a declassified story in the quarterly CIAjournal Studies in Intelligence, which Klawans happens to have been perusing one day in 1998.
"It's like going on the beach with a metal detector," the self-described news junkie says of his process. "Like Kanye West looks through records to sample on his songs, I'm looking for stories to turn into films."
Klawans, 44, has established himself as Hollywood's least likely movie macher by heeding the advice of his mentor, the old-school producer David Brown ("Jaws," "A Few Good Men"): "Read everything you can get your hands on."
A truly inspiring story about,an incredibly hard worker at work in the world of fact and story.
Even more impressively, Klawans worked with a local reporter, Joshuah Bearman, who shared his taste for unusual stories. Bearman got good assignments, based on Klawans' tips, and went on to research, interview, and very successfully narrativize the stories Klawans found. He made the movie Klawans imagined vivid in prose, enticing the involvement of big Hollywood players such as George Clooney and Ben Affleck.
Astonishing, and brilliantly timed, as Argo with its latest SAG wins contends for Best Picture.
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A great Washington Wire column in the Wall Street Journal quantifies the true political split on the queston of global warming. It's not Republican vs. Democrat. It's old versus young. In the words of pollster Dante Chinni:
While politicians and the media tend to focus on the
Democratic/Republican divide on the issue, the real split is evidenced
in other ways – the urban/rural divide, the education divide and,
crucially, the age divide. And when you add all those differences
together and look at it through geography, you see glaring differences
in how various places understand the issue.
It's necessary to read the whole column (and look at the charts) to understand Chinni's point in any depth. But here's a start:
The two biggest supporters of man-made climate change are the
Immigration Nation (light blue on the map below) and Campus and Career
(green) counties. Those places don’t share a lot of commonalities. There
are big differences in income and education levels. But they have one
common trait – they are younger than other places.
In both of those county types roughly 50% of the population is under
34 years of age – it’s actually slightly more than 50% in Immigration
Nation. In most of the county types that figure is 45% or less. And both
Campus and Careers and Immigration Nation counties have fewer people
over 65, about 11%. Nationally that figure is 13%.What does that mean? It indicates that while there are a variety of
factors that go into people’s attitudes on global warming, age is
profoundly important. In reporting in Campus communities in particular,
Politics Counts has found environmentalism is held out as one issue
where most all students agree. Liberal and conservative. Democrat and
Republican.If those young people hold on to those beliefs as they age, it has
big implications for the global-warming debate in the coming years. As
pollsters like to say, the numbers above represent a “snapshot in time.”
While the divide in the chart above is stark, it may not always be.
In other words, Chinni hints, if the GOP doesn't change its position to reflect the viewpoint of young people, they stand to lose a generation on this issue.
Fascinating to yours truly that no demographic group is more concerned about global warming than immigrants. Could this reflect experience learned south of the border?
Michael Oppenheimer of Princeton researched this a couple of years ago, and believed the answer was yes.
Kit Stolz