January 11, 2007
Category: Annoucements
[READ ME FIRST: in case you don't want to read this whole post to find the most important info, which is at the bottom, you will now find me in my new digs here and here. Read this post to the end to find out why I'm splitting into two blogs.]
Just in time for de-lurking week, my day has come at ScienceBlogs. Today is my last.
I appreciate all the comments on my announcement post a few days ago, and all of the comments I've received over email. I've seen NoSeNada go from no notice (I didn't even advertise it and was only going to for a couple of months when they caught up with me, which has always made me wonder how Seed found me in the first place), to an underoverwhelming 36,405th place on the technorati rankings! Put that in your pipe and smoke it. (hey, ok, out of 55M blogs that puts me in the top 0.001%, so I'll take it....)
Now's your chance to keep the readership up. As I said before, I'm splitting back into two blogs. I already have a new Prometheus post up. All the technical, policy, politics, and similar stuff will go on Prometheus.
I'm also going to revamp NoSeNada.org (new software and resumed posting will begin there within the next 24 hours). The split between posting at Prometheus and NoSeNada.org reflects the prominent split in my life: the policy/politics wonk side and the in-the-woods natureboy side. NoSeNada.org will be a lot of the more snarky and snappy stuff I did here on sports and culture, along with my ramblings through animal and people observation and tracking, climbing, getting lost, getting found, and generally trying to figure out if there is a way to live both lives. (Oh, and since more than one of you has mentioned it, the geology stuff that doesn't have a policy angle will go on NoSeNada.)
It's been fun, kids! Thanks for all your contributions and for keeping me on my toes! Now go update your blogrolls and your RSS feeds and come visit my (old) new homes!
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 5:09 PM • 8 Comments
Category: Bare politics
So, as of a couple of hours ago, the Democratic National Convention is coming to Denver in 2008.
A little coverage of what the western US means to the Democratic is here and here, with coverage and comments from ColoradoPols here.
(I think) it's not reading too much into this that it signals an awakening to the valuable western electoral votes by the Dems. The swings states are moving to the Mountain West from the now R-dominated South and now D-dominated Northeast. Of course, there's still the purplish central Midwest, so we'll fight with that region over candidate attention. This is the start of what will be a lot more national attention lavished over this region in the coming few presidential elections.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 2:58 PM • 1 Comments
Category: Annoucements • Wilderness
Actually, this is a demonstration of the power of letter-writing to authority. Have a local issue under the jurisdiction of city or county authorities, but that involves a resource considered important regionally? Are the local authorities not doing the right thing? Then just tell them that you're contacting your Senators, Representatives and Governors. Sure, the state-wide and national electeds have no authority or control over the local issue, but the local officials still feel some unwanted pressure from simply knowing that they're being watched by people who have been elected to higher office. Pathetic, really, but human nature illustrated.
Thus, I am happy to announce that Daryl and I won. Ms. Sitka gets the hospice treatment instead of a visit from Dr. Kevorkian.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 11:05 AM • 0 Comments
January 10, 2007
Category: Bare politics
The title refers to this post, where I covered Iowa Gov. Tom Vilsack's November visit to Boulder to tout his in-depth/out-depth knowledge of energy policy.
Gov. Vilsack gave up the reins to Iowa last night in a final State of the State speech, where he mostly stuck to the script. Until the end of his speech, where he remembered that he's running for George Bush Jr's job. At that point he looked away from the telecaster and started talking Iraq.
"This war has cost us a lot," Vilsack said. "It has hollowed out our military. It has, in my view, weakened our National Guard, and it puts our nation at risk.
"Now the president and Congress are poised to make a big mistake even bigger," Vilsack said. "As governor and as the commander in chief, I have an obligation to speak out and to urge the president and Congress not to put more Iowans and Americans in harm's way in Iraq."
oh, and by the way, he also said:
Vilsack also argued that sectarian violence in Iraq has its roots in intolerance based on "blood and belief." He then urged lawmakers to stand up to intolerance at home by passing legislation requiring schools to protect students, including gays and lesbians, from bullying.
Passage, he argued, would also honor the sacrifice of U.S. troops.
"We can honor their sacrifice by promoting tolerance, understanding and compassion for those who are different from us," Vilsack said. "The current strife in Iraq stems from a failure to accept diversity of blood and belief."
Maybe this will earn him an Enemy of the State award from Hannity.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 2:37 PM • 0 Comments
Category: Weather
Here on the Front Range our fourth snowstorm in four weeks is on its way, with nighttime lows below zero to accompany. Meanwhile, in Fairbanks, it's a hell of a lot worse:
dude, it's -45 f-ing below. my brakes hardly work because the fluid is
frozen and the air quality is a la beijing w/frozen CO in the air. but
i'm cool. i was featured in the NYT for my NY snow work on Sunday, so I
was really happy about that.
That was an email to me from this bloggista. The NYT article is this (sorry, but it's moneywalled. whine to the Times for all of us....)
As for me, I was in Fairbanks and it's northern cousin, Barrow, in August and September of 2002. When we landed in Barrow sometime in mid-August it was about 32F and blowing snow. Saw some polar bears, ate caribou, bearded seal and bowhead whale with a local, got my dad a t-shirt from the Barrow Fire Department, then flew on that frenchy helo the Coast Guard uses to get out to an ice breaker....it was epic.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 2:10 PM • 1 Comments
January 9, 2007
Category: Weather
If you're like every other Boulder resident I've talked to lately, you agree: the City of Boulder apparently has decided to contract its snow removal and plowing to the group that wears this uniform. What the H? The City of Boulder still hasn't plowed Mapleton or Spruce west of Folsom and east of Broadway AT ALL since the first storm, even having five days since the latest storm? Why do we still have two feet of standing snow in the middle of the street in places along Mapleton? Nevermind the connecting side streets - at least plow the damn neighborhood collectors!
This is the kind of BS that gets mayors fired in big cities. Maybe ours will take note of this Daily Camera poll?
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 5:41 PM • 1 Comments
Category: Bare politics
Via Colorado Confidential, a Colorado group on the Western Slope is hammering Gov. Bill Ritter for being too east-centric.
The image (click it to make it bigger) is brilliant, is it not? I love georeferenced information.
The hidden political lesson in the image is appropriate for all you non-westerners who would like to have a better understanding of western US politics. It is the lesson of the east-west intrastate geopolitical divide. Colorado joins Oregon, Washington and Montana as states with geologic-become-political divides, split by north-south running ranges. The other western states, including Idaho and Utah, have their own versions but they are less prominent. (I can't tell whether AZ and NM have similar features ... Mr. Fleck?)
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 4:38 PM • 7 Comments
Category: Annoucements
Hello readers -
January 11 is the one-year anniversary of the start of ScienceBlogs (my first SB post is here). It's been a very interesting project, one that I was quite flattered to have been invited to join as an original member (there were 14 of us then). Through the past year we've seen SB grow from fourteen bloggers and no technorati ranking, to about 50 bloggers and a combined ranking near #30.
The project for me, however, has grown a bit beyond what I'm comfortable with. The SB fiefdom originally felt like a community to me, but now it feels like a city and I'm not a city boy. It's become a bit too busy, too fast-paced, too impersonal for this redneck.
Because of the nature of the project, I have felt some pressure from the start to post continuously, every day or twice a day. But if you're a regular reader, I suppose you've realized by now that I've seriously scaled back writing over the past month and a half. Such is the nature of my feast-famine work style: I need to be able to take a mental holiday for a month or two in order to balance out the two week periods where all I do is work and push out two papers and 148 posts. I feel a bit constrained from doing that here at SB. (It's not the environment that Seed created - the Seed overlords have been great - it's just where the project evolved to.)
So noting all that, January 11 is going to be my last day on ScienceBlogs. The archives will remain, including your very good (and occasionally very bad, but usually very good) comments.
From here I'm returning to my roots. My main blogging home is going to be Prometheus, where I've already been posting occasionally for a year and a half, and which is going to be seriously revamped this spring. I'm also going to revive my original home, NoSeNada.org. NoSeNada is going to become much more personal, and I'm going to start writing more about wilderness, tracking, hunting, nature observation, mountain rescue, sports, and other topics. The difference will be that I don't expect anybody to read NoSeNada - it'll be more of a personal journal that happens to be public.
A couple more posts to come this week before the final post on Jan 11, so don't go away yet.
Thanks to all the readers who came in and stayed. Thanks to the Seed overlords for starting the project and bringing me in early. And thanks to all of you who have remembered (and occasionally reminded me and others) that blogging and commenting is not something that should be taken too seriously.
-k
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 12:42 PM • 13 Comments
January 4, 2007
Category: Wilderness
An old partner in crime from my days in Portland has surfaced in the news.
The story is about a tree. It's a tree I visited a time or two while living in Stumptown. It's a tree you can't miss if you take Hwy 26 out of the Rose City to the coast. You drive and drive and suddenly you see the sign to our left 
and you think, "Wow. I have stumbled upon the Largest ... Single ... Sitka Spruce ... In the Entire ... United States." (You pause between the words for effect even though you are speaking silently to yourself. It makes you feel more awed.)
Unlike in humans, for trees "largest" often means "oldest." (Unless you're talking about Pinus longaeva, but trolls if you even take that as an invitation to start the hockey stick wars here I'll disemvowel you so fast your fingers will feel numb.) So our friend The Largest Sitka Spruce In The United States is getting kind of old, and it's showing. Hit by lightening fifty years ago, she survived but was weakened. Recently, however, disaster struck. The same storm that killed three Denali-experienced climbers on Hood gashed up our Sitka friend pretty good. She now has an apparent cavity two feet deep and 15 feet long and a bevy of litigation-wary county administrators on her tail. They want to cut the old girl down.
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 4:57 PM • 10 Comments
January 3, 2007
Category: Culture
I'm still buried under snow and work, so blogging will remain slow for a while if you're worried. I'll try to trickle out some good stuff in the meantime, like this fabulous prediction by our favorite Oracle, Mr. Pat Robertson.
Mr. Robertson
predicted Tuesday that a terrorist attack on the United States would result in "mass killing" late in 2007.
"I'm not necessarily saying it's going to be nuclear," he said during his news-and-talk television show The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network. "The Lord didn't say nuclear. But I do believe it will be something like that."
Mr. Robertson said God told him during a recent prayer retreat that major cities and possibly millions of people will be affected by the attack, which should take place some time after September.
Now, is this really a prediction? Or is it a well-placed errand boy delivering a message from his superiors? The answer matters, because if it is a prediction then it implies that some quantifiable uncertainty exists on the prediction. And where does the uncertainty lie? In that Mr. Robertson might not really have a direct line to the Heavenly Father? What are the chances? Or that the line might have had some static, obscuring God's voice and so Mr. Robertson might not have heard every detail totally clearly? What are the chances? If we hit Jan. 1, 2008 without the predicted attack, is there a way that we can go back and figure out what went so horribly wrong for Mr. Robertson? Of course, the possibility exists that he's just making it all up:
The broadcaster predicted in January 2004 that U.S. President George W. Bush would easily win re-election. Mr. Bush won 51 per cent of the vote that fall, beating Democratic Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts. He also predicted Bush's victory for a second term in 2005.
"I have a relatively good track record," he said. "Sometimes I miss."
In May, Mr. Robertson said God told him that storms and possibly a tsunami were to crash into America's coastline in 2006. Even though the U.S. was not hit with a tsunami, Mr. Robertson on Tuesday cited last spring's heavy rains and flooding in New England as partly fulfilling the prediction.
Predictions matter for policy makers, whether they be on the quantitative and qualitative aspects of future climate change or on the possibilities for mass death directed by an angry God. (Of course, now that God has told Mr. Robertson of the attack, it implies God's compliance in the attack, so if it does happen, instead of asking ourselves "Why do they hate us?" we should be asking ourselves, "Why does God hate us?")
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 11:50 AM • 3 Comments
December 20, 2006
Category: Climate change • Congress
In a few other posts about the changing Congressional landscape for climate in wake of the November midterms, I identified Rep. John Dingell (MI), the incoming chair of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, as a major potential roadblock to meaningful GHG legislation. Things look strong on the Senate side, but on the House side they appear to start and end with Rep. Dingell. And by that I mean "mostly end."
Now you can see for yourself exactly where Dingell is coming from and is headed, and it ain't pretty. It's frightening to think that he sounds eerily apace with Mr. Inhofe. At least I've never seen Inhofe be condescending and sexist in public.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 7:03 PM • 8 Comments
Category: Climate change • Science at work
Another thing that passed by in my December frenetic haze. It's been covered by a few of the blogs in this circle (by that I mean the ones I link to and that link to me), so many of you are going to know about this, but many won't.
That is, that James Annan and Julia Hargreaves got thoroughly screwed by Geophysical Research Letters. You can read James' recounting of his editorial treatment there, and WC's take here.
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 5:51 PM • 4 Comments
Category: Climate change • Science at work • Science+culture
With thirteen thousand people at a confab of geophysicists and geophysicists-in-training, a few thousand of whom work on something related to the climate system, you expect to hear about climate change. In perhaps a short decade, climate change has rapidly surpassed seismology as the primary membrane between the public and the geophysics research world. Climate is now what most makes the American Geophysical Union relevant to non-members; climate is now what essentially drives the meeting despite the presence of dozens of other specialties represented.
As a physical oceanographer (which by definition also means "climatologist")- become-enviro policy guy, though, I wasn't so much interested in the details of climate science at this year's AGU. What I was (and am) interested in is seeing the conference as a whole. My interest in AGU has strayed from the hardrock science, moving into something more to do with feelings and hunches. That's right, feelings. Hunches. Intuition. The squishy, soft underbelly of the human mind; the part we want to ignore in pursuing geophysical data analysis. What I want to know is attitude. More than the state of the science, I now want to know about the state of the scientists.
I will grant that talking to the people I did at AGU represents a small fraction of all the attendees. I will grant that there is no way to know whether my averaging of attitudes in the climsci world, as sensed by talking with a few people over a few days, scales up to represent the true feelings of the collective. But I will tell you what I found, and what I felt, and whether you think it might represent the current attitude of climsci world is up to you.
To sum the state of climsci world in one word, as I see it right now, it is this: tension.
Read on »
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 1:32 PM • 39 Comments
December 19, 2006
Category: Climate change
[NB: Yes, I am still going to post my "controversial" climate science article coming out of AGU, along with some other thoughts. Please bear with....I'm still recovering from the week that was and I didn't get home until last night.]
As for the subject of this post, who said it and when? None other than the CEO of Duke Energy, James Rogers, in the Dec 12 NY Times.
"Climate change is real, and we clearly believe we are on a route to mandatory controls on carbon dioxide," Mr. Rogers said. "And we need to start now because the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive this is going to be."
Global warming is not only an environmental hazard, but also a great challenge for economic policy. Without economic incentives, analysts say, the needed investments in industrial cleanup, innovative low-carbon technologies, fuel-efficient cars and other ways of reducing energy waste will not occur.
Mr. Rogers's stance is far from universal within the power industry, but it has surprising support, particularly from those, like him, who also produce electricity from carbon-free nuclear reactors.
What does this mean? It is further evidence that the train is leaving the station and that the smart ones are jumping on early before that thing is running fast. It also means Congress is even more likely to pass something significant on GHGs in the 110th session (with or without a veto threat). With that veto looming, though, let's expect something in the 111th session.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 2:58 PM • 7 Comments
December 12, 2006
Category: Science politics
Ok, so I haven't posted anything on AGU yet. The realclimate guys did a better job than I of anticipating how draining this meeting is and how it affects blogging, although considering that other conferences have stoked a avalanche of blogging from me (check the April archives), I expected more. The other reason is that I have in progress a very long and very complicated post that came out of multiple conversations yesterday (and today) with numerous climate scientists and it's going to be pretty controversial. I've worked and reworked it a bunch and it's just not finishing itself, but hopefully tonight I can get it done and post it.
In the meantime, something caught my eye out of the press officer of the Democrat side of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. I post this having told you its origins, so you know off the bat that it is partisan (and if you're a close reader you know that I am very political and yet [feel] very non-partisan), but it's worth reading:
Apparently eager to avoid Congressional and public scrutiny, the U.S. Forest Service has continued its holiday tradition of trying to bury bad news. Yesterday, just hours after Congress adjourned, the USFS issued a final rule that will eliminate environmental analyses and the public's right to participate in forest management planning under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA).
Under NEPA, public involvement and environmental analyses are required whenever the Forest Service wants to change the way it manages a forest - a process that occurs for each U.S. Forest every 15 years. However, under the rule announced yesterday, any update (or significant change) to those individual forest plans would be exempt from NEPA review.
Public participation is an absolute must for the health of a functioning democracy. For obvious reasons, many politicians and other non-elected policy makers would like to be able to avoid any and all public scrutiny because actually having to answer to the public decreases their power. We see this see-saw battle between openness and obfuscation constantly, and it represents one of the most important dynamics in our democracy. This issue is every much as important as the voting access issues we have been discussing for the past six years. Democracy does not start and end with the major every-two-year voting days, it starts and ends with the everyday interactions between we the citizens and our government. We forget that, or let ourselves overlook that, at our peril.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 8:22 PM • 2 Comments
December 11, 2006
Category: Annoucements • Earth Science (general) • Geology • Natural hazards/disasters
I've been meaning to pull together a geobloggers confab at AGU this year but didn't get it done, so we'll have to wait until next year. In the meantime, I'm at the AGU Fall Meeting all week and am giving a poster Wednesday morning on my earthquakes damages and earthquakes policy work. Link to the abstract is here (PA31A-0824). If you're at the conference please stop by Wed. morning or shoot me an email if you'd like to put a live face with the name.
Oh, and speaking of Laurie David (we're we?), check out her latest in a radio interview she granted to Living on Earth. More "judge for yourself" material, and at this point my opinion still hasn't changed. David has an axe to grind and comes out looking like a hysterical conspiracy theorist with no ability to actually listen to NSTA and say, "Oh, well yea, that might be a reasonable explanation." Wheeler again comes out looking almost as bad, like he is sort of trying to hide and cover up something.
Posted by Kevin Vranes at 10:29 AM • 6 Comments
Kevin Vranes has a phud in Physical Ocean- ography and Cli- matology. He now studies sci- ence policy and politics at the 
