Define jerk
“ADD City Councilman Greig Smith to the list of scofflaws violating Los Angeles’ water conservation restrictions,” reports the LA Daily News. “In a direct challenge to the Department of Water and Power, Smith announced Wednesday he is violating the twice-weekly watering limitations …” to keep reading, click here. Via LA Observed.
Note: it has been politely pointed out to me that Councilman Smith is probably not a jerk. The headline was a not-so-subtle editorial on a subject that deserves more civil and serious treatment. The councilman may be right that his lawn looks better when watered on days of his choosing. If he believes so strongly in that lawn regimen, he owes it to his conscience and perhaps even this City to say so, and even to flout the law. But he also owes it to this City to quit his job before taking action that mocks …
Shopping at the science store
US Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) has joined California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in an attempt to return inconvenient data to the science store, reports the New York Times today. They are not happy, not happy at all, with “biological opinions” of federal scientists to do with the health of California fisheries. They would like to hire expertise more to the liking of powerful Central Valley constituents served by water pumped from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta — and more to the liking of one constituent in particular, Beverly Hills billionaire Stewart Resnick.
9/25/2009 Update: Senator Feinstein responds to her critics in the San Francisco Chronicle. Link after the jump.
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The Big Dry: After drought, dust
A WALL of dust stretched from northern Queensland to the southern tip of eastern Australia on the morning of September 23, 2009, reports NASA’s Earth Observatory, while the Washington Post reports dust blanketing Sydney.
From NASA: Strong winds blew the dust from the interior to more populated regions along the coast. In this image, the dust rises in plumes from point sources and concentrates in a wall along the front of the storm. The large image shows that some of the point sources are agricultural fields, recognizable by their rectangular shape. Australia has suffered from a multiple-year drought, and much of the dust is coming from fields that have not been planted because of the drought, said Australian Broadcasting Corporation News. For a Reuters Q & A about the history of Australian dust storms, click here.…
Western eye
"Storm over the Green River" taken in Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Photograph: Robert Turner. Image courtesy of the artist. All rights reserved.
ONE of the first things that people ask photographer Robert Turner on seeing “Storm over the Green River” is if it’s a painting or if it’s been photo-shopped to look like a painting.
“It’s absolutely a straight photograph,” he laughs. “I think there are several reasons it looks like a classic 19th century Thomas Moran landscape,” he says. “It was taken just before sunset during a storm. That clouding effect in the background is caused by rain. And it’s a five-second exposure, so it has a gauzy look to it.”
The composition also has much to do with the painterly quality, he thinks. “It has a very strong diagonal and a sort of implied diagonal going the other way, so it leads your eye way, way back in …
Guardian on U.N. draft climate agreement: “Long, confusing and contradictory”
White House Global Climate Change Report. Click on the cover then follow the prompts to download a copy.
MONDAY 9/28/2009: It is a blueprint to save the world. And yet it is long, confusing and contradictory. Negotiators have released a draft version of a new global agreement on climate change, which is widely billed as the last chance to save the planet from the ravages of global warming. Running to some 200 pages, the draft agreement is being discussed for the first time this week as officials from 190 countries gather in Bangkok for the latest round of UN talks. There is only one short meeting after this before they meet in Copenhagen aiming to hammer out a final version. Click here to keep reading Guardian environment correspondent David Adam’s “Countdown to Copenhagen“
THURSDAY, 9/24/2009: For Time Magazine on our current climate cycle, “The Long …
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