During all the rain we had in January, many people consoled themselves with the thought that California needs this rain and snow to fill our reservoirs. And given how low the water level in those reservoirs had been, the rain was indeed a blessing.
As with so many things, though, it all comes down to timing. Ideally, rain in the winter keeps the reservoirs in good shape through the spring, then snowmelt in the spring replenishes the reservoirs to get us through the summer and fall until the rains begin again. This requires rain at the right time, then snowmelt at the right time, or else you can end up with too much water in winter and spring or too little water in summer and fall.
A new study, described in Friday’s Los Angeles Times, has found that we have a timing problem — the balancing act we depend on to keep our water supply at manageable levels is no longer working out as well as it did when those reservoirs were built. The problem is that temperatures are rising, so snow is melting earlier than it used to. Instead of replenishing the reservoirs during late spring as mountain snow slowly melts, that water is flowing out of the mountains earlier, arriving in reservoirs when they are still flush with winter rain. As the Times story puts it:
But in California, reservoirs already operate on a delicate balance.
They are kept well below capacity during the winter as protection against flooding. After the rainy season, they are filled with the spring snowmelt, storing up water to be released during the dry summer months.
Heavier winter rains and earlier snowmelt are likely to overwhelm reservoirs, forcing an early release of water. That would leave too little water for the summer.
“The handwriting is on the wall,” said lead author Tim Barnett, a marine geophysicist at Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. “Mother nature is going to stop being our water banker.”
Sometimes I wonder why I even read the news. Every day I discover a brand new way to worry about the future…
A former San Franciscan named Shreve Stockton, who now lives in a log cabin in Wyoming, took in a ten-day-old orphan coyote, and she has been posting photos and updates of life with the coyote at Daily Coyote. On the basis of her reports, it sounds like the coyote pup has taken to her just like a dog takes to its human — following her around, getting excited when she returns home from being away, and even insisting on sleeping next to her.
Despite extensive research (i.e., a google search for “domesticated coyote”), I don’t know how common it is for coyotes to willingly live with people (the young coyote even cuddles with her cat), and we’ll see how the coyote feels about domestication when he is an adult, but it did make me wonder whether we’ll start seeing more coyotes as pets in coming years. Coyotes are increasingly found in American suburbs and cities (a coyote even finds its way to central park every few years, no mean feat since they have to cross bridges and navigate busy city streets to get there). One can easily imagine coyotes following the path taken several millennia ago by their dog relatives.
Dogs, of course, were once entirely wild, but as they came into contact with human beings, the dogs that hitched their wagons to human culture by becoming pets thrived, while dogs that remained aloof from humans struggled. As natural selection worked its magic down the centuries, domesticated dogs became better and better at ingratiating themselves to their human friends, while wild dog populations tended to disappear.
Coyotes have apparently played the evolutionary game well too, and unlike many species, coyotes have managed to dramatically expand their native habitat and thrive alongside human society in far corners of North and Central America. Will domesticated coyotes like the one in Wyoming become a more common occurrence as evolution selects for coyotes who can not only thrive alongside human society, but inside it as well?
We’ll see. Meanwhile, those sure are some cute pictures.
(Photo above by Flickr user Qole Pejorian)
You gotta love this:
In the push to harvest alternative energy, scientists have tapped a number of novel sources: the sun, corn, old cooking oil. But how about the simple act of walking?
For two architecture students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass., the sound of footsteps is an echo of energy gone to waste. They figure that the stomp of every footfall gives off enough power to light two 60-watt bulbs for one second.
“Now imagine how many people walk through a train station each morning, or walk down the street in Hong Kong,” says James Graham, who, with fellow MIT graduate student Thaddeus Jusczyk, is helping to develop the growing field of “crowd farming.”
This sort of stuff won’t be a practical solution to our energy problems, at least not in the foreseeable future, but it’s nice to know that people are thinking in innovative ways. The fact is that energy is all over the place — anything hot or in motion is potentially an energy source — and we just need to figure out ways to harness it more efficiently. The tricky part is learning how to to capture and store all that energy in a way that doesn’t expend more energy than you end up with. If powering a cell phone with an elastic backpack strap is a step in that direction, then I’m all for it.
The Washington Post has an article on a recent development in scientific taxonomy — selling naming rights to newly discovered species:
Searching for new ways to raise money for environmental causes, scientists and conservationists are increasingly opting to sell naming rights to the highest bidder. But the trend — which is reshaping the way researchers name everything from monkeys to beetles — has sparked a fierce debate over the future of taxonomy, as well as conservation itself.
The practice isn’t entirely new:
The rules say nothing about selling naming rights. So after Mark Erdmann, a senior adviser for Conservation International’s Indonesia marine program, and consultant Gerald Allen discovered two new species of sharks last year, Erdmann thought, why not auction off the right to name the creatures they had found?
In the 18th and 19th centuries, explorers frequently named the flora and fauna they found after their financial backers. Erdmann reasoned he was simply updating the tradition by bestowing that honor on anyone willing to donate funds to help a species survive.
Will all newborn babies soon have corporate sponsorship too? I can just imagine the birth announcements: “John and Sally Palmer and Microsoft are proud to announce the birth of their daughter, Windows Vista Palmer. She was born September 14th, 2007 in Oakland, CA and weighed 7 pounds 4 ounces.”
Frances E. Kuo at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has done some remarkable studies on the social benefits of trees in urban settings. In a Chicago housing project, she and her colleagues compiled interviews and statistics on buildings surrounded by trees compared with nearly identical buildings in the same housing project that did not have any trees nearby. Among the findings are the following:
Trees reduce crime:
In fact, compared with buildings that had little or no vegetation, buildings with high levels of greenery had 48 percent fewer property crimes and 56 percent fewer violent crimes. Even modest amounts of greenery were associated with lower crime rates. The greener the surroundings, the fewer the number of crimes that occurred.
Trees build community:
residents of buildings with more trees and grass reported that they knew their neighbors better, socialized with them more often, had stronger feelings of community, and felt safer and better adjusted than did residents of more barren, but otherwise identical, buildings.
Most people intuitively sense that trees are an asset to a neighborhood, but I never would have expected the benefits to be so quantifiable and dramatic. The findings aren’t lost on everyone, however — the Alliance for Community Trees is a nationwide umbrella organization for groups like Urban Releaf, which was set up in 1998 to plant trees in barren neighborhoods of Oakland and Richmond. The urban agriculture movement, which is quite large and still growing in Oakland and surrounding areas, focuses mostly on food, but it dovetails nicely with the tree-planting projects. In a 2003 paper, Kuo emphasizes the parallels between natural ecosystems and what she calls the “social ecosystem”:
In urban communities, arboriculture clearly contributes to the health of the biological ecosystem; does it contribute to the health of the social ecosystem as well? Evidence from studies in inner-city Chicago suggests so. In a series of studies involving over 1,300 person–space observations, 400 interviews, housing authority records, and 2 years of police crime reports, tree and grass cover were systematically linked to a wide range of social ecosystem indicators. These indicators included stronger ties among neighbors, greater sense of safety and adjustment, more supervision of children in outdoor spaces, healthier patterns of children’s play, more use of neighborhood common spaces, fewer incivilities, fewer property crimes, and fewer violent crimes. The link between arboriculture and a healthier social ecosystem turns out to be surprisingly simple to explain. In residential areas, barren, treeless spaces often become “no man’s lands,” which discourage resident interaction and invite crime. The presence of trees and well-maintained grass can transform these no man’s lands into pleasant, welcoming, well-used spaces. Vital, well-used neighborhood common spaces serve to both strengthen ties among residents and deter crime, thereby creating healthier, safer neighborhoods.
(Photo above was taken in 1884 by Moses Chase, and shows an oak tree at 5th and Clay Sts. in Oakland, CA. More information on the photograph can be found here)
That’s probably true for all of us, but extreme cases can really clarify matters. First there was Phineas Gage, now there is Tommy McHugh:
