lotusville

The Fire This Time

2010-08-05T09:53:00.000-07:00

Russia is banning the export of grains, as it faces an unprecedented drought and heat wave, with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees for the first time since records have been kept.

This summer's heat wave and drought in Russia have caused massive crop failures, wildfires, and hundreds of deaths.

The price of wheat and other grains is currently skyrocketing around the world on the news of Russia's ban on exports.

In the Navy

2010-05-20T15:20:00.000-07:00

The U.S. Navy has apparently been making breakthroughs in training dolphins and sea lions to assist in counter-terrorism operations:

A Navy seal -- actually a sea lion -- took less than a minute to find a fake mine under a pier near AT&T Park.

A dolphin quickly located a terrorist lurking in the black water before another sea lion, using a device carried in its mouth, cuffed the pretend saboteur's ankle so authorities could reel him in.

The specially trained Navy Marine Mammals, based in San Diego, stole the show in a day of anti-terrorism training exercises held at ports throughout California....

The drills include a fake attack on a container ship at the Port of Oakland, a fake bomb explosion at the Port of Redwood City, and fake terrorist attacks in waters off Los Angeles, Long Beach, Sacramento and San Diego....

"Security is of vital importance," he said. "And humans are very slow in the water. Sea lions can see five times as well. And dolphins can use their sonar to spot items that would take humans days or weeks to find."

The marine mammal program is several decades old. LaPuzza said dolphins and sea lions were used during the Vietnam War and Operation Iraqi Freedom.

LATIMES

I'm posting about this because the BP spill in the Gulf is, truly, too depressing to even think about. Ugh.

Rise of the Jellyfish

2010-05-01T00:00:00.001-07:00

I've tried to vary topics here over the past few years, but I keep coming back to one theme: the future belongs to jellyfish:

From Spain to New York, to Australia, Japan and Hawaii, jellyfish are becoming more numerous and more widespread, and they are showing up in places where they have rarely been seen before, scientists say. The faceless marauders are stinging children, forcing beaches to close and clogging fishing nets.

But while jellyfish invasions are a nuisance to swimmers and a hardship to fishermen, for scientists they are a source of more profound alarm, a signal of the declining health of the world's oceans.

"These jellyfish near shore are a message the sea is sending us saying, 'Look how badly you are treating me,' " said Josep-Maria Gili, one of the world's leading jellyfish experts, who has studied them at the Institute of Marine Sciences of the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona for more than 20 years.

The explosion of jellyfish populations, scientists say, reflects a combination of severe overfishing of natural predators such as tuna, sharks and swordfish; rising sea temperatures caused in part by global warming; and pollution that has depleted oxygen levels in coastal shallows.

These problems are pronounced in the Mediterranean, a sea bounded by more than a dozen countries that rely on it for business and pleasure. Left unchecked in the Mediterranean and elsewhere, these problems could make the swarms of jellyfish menacing coastlines a grim vision of seas to come....

Jellyfish, relatives of the sea anemone and coral, in fact are the cockroaches of the open waters, the ultimate maritime survivors who thrive in damaged environments — and that is what they are doing.

SEATTLE TIMES.

All Tomorrow's Snowpocalypses

2010-02-10T10:46:00.000-08:00

Image credit: TragicHipster

Weather Underground meteorologist Dr. Jeff Masters explains why those who point to the Snowpocalypse, Snowmageddon, etc. as evidence against global warming have it exactly backwards. Climate change models predict that certain areas of the world will receive even more massive snowstorms in the future, with changes patterns in air currents, air moisture, etc.

According to the National Climatic Data Center, the return period for a 22+ inch snow storm is once every 100 years--and we've had two 100-year snow storms in Philadelphia this winter. It is true that if the winter pattern of jet stream location, sea surface temperatures, etc, are suitable for a 100-year storm to form, that will increase the chances for a second such storm to occur that same year, and thus the odds have having two 100-year storms the same year are not 1 in 10,000. Still, the two huge snowstorms this winter in the Mid-Atlantic are definitely a very rare event one should see only once every few hundred years, and is something that has not occurred since modern records began in 1870. The situation is similar for Baltimore and Washington D.C. According to the National Climatic Data Center, the expected return period in the Washington D.C./Baltimore region for snowstorms with more than 16 inches of snow is about once every 25 years. This one-two punch of two major Nor'easters in one winter with 16+ inches of snow is unprecedented in the historical record for the region, which goes back to the late 1800s....

[I]f climate change is simultaneously causing an increase in ratio of snowstorms with very heavy snow to storms with ordinary amounts of snow, we could actually see an increase in very heavy snowstorms in some portions of the world. There is evidence that this is happening for winter storms in the Northeast U.S ....

Global warming theory predicts that global precipitation will increase, and that heavy precipitation events--the ones most likely to cause flash flooding--will also increase. This occurs because as the climate warms, evaporation of moisture from the oceans increases, resulting in more water vapor in the air. According to the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, water vapor in the global atmosphere has increased by about 5% over the 20th century, and 4% since 1970. This extra moisture in the air will tend to produce heavier snowstorms, assuming it is cold enough to snow. Groisman et al. (2004) found a 14% increase in heavy (top 5%) and 20% increase in very heavy (top 1%) precipitation events in the U.S. over the past 100 years, though mainly in spring and summer. However, the authors did find a significant increase in winter heavy precipitation events have occurred in the Northeast U.S. This was echoed by Changnon et al. (2006), who found, "The temporal distribution of snowstorms exhibited wide fluctuations during 1901-2000, with downward 100-yr trends in the lower Midwest, South, and West Coast. Upward trends occurred in the upper Midwest, East, and Northeast, and the national trend for 1901-2000 was upward, corresponding to trends in strong cyclonic activity."

(Weather Underground)

Looks like I will be missing out on a lot of snow days. For Southern California, the climate change models predict historic droughts and a dramatic rise in extremely hot days and months.

Garbage Patch Twice the Size of Texas Grows in Pacific Ocean

2010-02-09T23:13:00.000-08:00

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch, also known as the Pacific Trash Vortex, floats 1000 miles off the coast of California, and is estimated to be twice the size of Texas:

The patch is characterized by exceptionally high concentrations of suspended plastic and other debris that have been trapped by the currents of the North Pacific Gyre. Despite its size and density, the patch is not visible from satellite photography because it consists of very small pieces, almost invisible to the naked eye and most of its contents are suspended beneath the surface of the ocean.

(Wikipedia)

The patch contains "approximately 3.5 million tons of trash," including "[s]hoes, toys, bags, pacifiers, wrappers, toothbrushes, and bottles too numerous to count ...." (GarbagePatch.Org) The operative word is Plastic:

Plastic constitutes 90 percent of all trash floating in the world's oceans .... The United Nations Environment Program estimated in 2006 that every square mile of ocean hosts 46,000 pieces of floating plastic .... In some areas, the amount of plastic outweighs the amount of plankton by a ratio of six to one. Of the more than 200 billion pounds of plastic the world produces each year, about 10 percent ends up in the ocean .... Seventy percent of that eventually sinks, damaging life on the ocean floor .... The rest floats; much of it ends up in gyres and the massive garbage patches that form there, with some plastic eventually washing up on a distant shore.

(HowStuffWorks)

Climate Change and Western Australia's Worst Drought in 750 Years

2010-02-09T22:36:00.000-08:00

Photo Credit:The Age

New studies suggest a link between Antarctic climate patterns and the epic drought in Western Australia:

Researchers from the Australian Antarctic Division and Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre have identified a link between the drought, which began in the early 1970s, and snowfall at a site in East Antarctica over the same period.

In research published in Nature Geoscience, they say the relationship is inverse - high snowfalls at the Law Dome site correlate with low rain in the South-West.

That is as a result of the atmospheric circulation pattern that brings dry, cool air to Australia, while sending warm, moist air to East Antarctica.

However, the high snowfall at Law Dome was unlike any other in the past 750 years, and led the researchers to believe the drought was similarly unusual....

"It also suggests ... that if the mix of factors that influence [South-West] rainfall over the past century reflects that of the longer term, then the recent drought ... may be similarly unusual," the researchers say.

The Age

The recent studies suggest that humans have influenced the feedback loop that is helping to create the drought in Western Australia. The drought, they conclude, "lies outside the envelope of natural variability and supports the hypothesis of anthropogenically (man-made) induced climate shift."

Attack of the Killer Green Algae

2009-08-28T15:21:00.001-07:00

Algae clean-up in France

Toxic green algae, decaying into a black sludge that releases a noxious gas, recently claimed the life of a horse in France and knocked out the horse's rider:

Decaying ulva algae threatens other beaches around France and the world, from the United States to China, experts say. Last year, the Chinese government brought in the army to remove the slimy growths so the Olympic sailing competition could be held.

In Brittany's Cote d'Armor region, conditions are perfect for its spread — sunlight, shallow waters and flat beaches. Chemical and natural fertilizers like pig excrement, loaded with nitrates and phosphorous, have saturated the land, spilling into rivers and the ocean, feeding the algae that then proliferate.

Harmless while in water, the algae form dangerous gases — notably hydrogen sulfide, with its characteristic rotten-egg smell — when they wash up on land and decay. A white crust forms and traps the gases, which are released when stepped on or otherwise disturbed. Over time, putrefied algae turns sand into a black silt muck, sometimes containing pockets of poison gas.

LAT.

Apparently, the algae has been around for a while. "A man was found dead on the same beach two decades ago, his arm sticking out from a pile of algae." [LAT] Though the recent levels of algae washing up on the shores of Brittany appear to be unprecedented. Environmentalists are pointing to runoffs from pig and poultry farming.

Giant Jellyfish Returning to Japan to Lay Waste to Everything

2009-07-20T09:10:00.000-07:00

"Giant jellyfish descend on the Sea of Japan, causing untold devastation to coastal villages and leaving a trail of destruction and human misery behind." CNN. This is the reporting from Japan, where real-life mutants are coming from the sea to wreak havok. (Godzilla once battled a giant mutant jellyfish, but it looked a little different.)

As we reported a while back, changes in ocean currents have been bringing massive, 450-pound jellyfish to the waters off of Japan.

The massive sea creatures, called Nomura's jellyfish, can grow 6 feet (1.83 meters) in diameter and weigh more than 450 pounds (204 kilos). Scientists think they originate in the Yellow Sea and in Chinese waters. For the third year since 2005, ocean currents are transporting them into the Sea of Japan.

CNN.

As noted in the earlier post, besides being freakishly large and scary, these giant jellyfish cause real damage by clogging up and tearing through the complex set of underwater nets set by fishermen off the coast. Which raises the disturbing (and admittedly ridiculous) possibility that these giant jellyfish have, in some way, been "sent" by the ocean to strike back at humans and our unsustainable use of the oceans. Now, if only the giant jellyfish could clog up the propellers on modern-day whaling ships....

Mystery Blob Off Alaska

2009-07-18T22:46:00.000-07:00

A great, oily, oozing ~~blog~~ blob off the coast of Alaska, originally thought to be an oil spill, has been identified as a massive algal bloom:

"We responded as if it were an oil product," says Coast Guard Petty Officer Terry Hasenauer. "It was described to us as an oil-like substance, thick and lingering below the surface of the water. Those characteristics can indicate heavy, degraded oil, maybe crude oil, or possibly an intermediate fuel oil." Meanwhile, the story spread over the internet like an oil-spill, giving lots of people a queasy feeling.

Test results released Thursday showed the blob wasn't oil, but a plant — a massive bloom of algae. While that may seem less dangerous, a lot of people are still uneasy. It's something the mostly Inupiat Eskimo residents along Alaska's northern coast say they could never remember seeing before.

Algal blooms are a common and often menacing event along many U.S. coastlines. Some strains are toxic and can close beaches and poison seafood, posing a hazard to consumers. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration maintains a forecasting system for the Gulf of Mexico to warn of harmful Florida blooms. . . .

While Alaskans may find the algal blob unusual if not frightening, scientists say that algal blooms are nothing new in Arctic Ocean waters, though the blob itself might be a little weird. Brenda Konar, a marine biology professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, said algal outbreaks can and do occur even in icy Arctic waters. It just takes the right combination of nutrients, light and water temperature, she said. "Algae blooms," she says. "It's sort of like a swimming pool that hasn't been cleaned in a while." The blob, Konar said, is a microalgae made up of "billions and billions of individuals." "We've observed large blooms in the past off Barrow although none of them at all like this," Barry Sherr, an Oregon State University professor of oceanography, said in an e-mail. "The fact that the locals say they've never seen anything like it suggests that it might represent some exotic species which has drifted into the region, perhaps as a result of global change. For the moment that's just a guess."

TIME.

Critters and Climate

2009-05-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

Watch out, jellyfish. It turns out that global warming won't benefit just you: apparently, climate change will also be a boon to starfish:

“Mollusks, bivalves, clams and mussels respond negatively to increased carbon dioxide,” says Rebecca Gooding, a doctoral student in zoology at the University of British Columbia and lead author of the paper. On the other hand, she says, compared to their invertebrate cousins, “starfish are growing faster, getting bigger faster, and they’re eating more.”

SciAm.

So the earth will be inherited by jellyfish -- and starfish. The two will make good company: like jellyfish, starfish don't have true centralized brains; instead they have a network of interlacing nerves called a nerve plexus -- similar to the "nerve nets" of the jellyfish.

Evolution is not always progress, as we might conceive of it.

The Doomsday Vault

2009-03-29T23:16:00.000-07:00

A tour inside the "Doomsday" Global Seed Vault in Svalbard, Norway, which I mentioned here about a year ago.

The seedbank is constructed 120 metres (390 ft) inside a sandstone mountain at Svalbard on Spitsbergen Island.[4] The bank employs a number of robust security systems. Seeds are packaged in special four-ply packets and heat sealed to exclude moisture. The facility is managed by the Nordic Genetic Resource Center, though there are no permanent staff on-site.

Spitsbergen was considered ideal due to its lack of tectonic activity and its permafrost, which will aid preservation. The location 130 metres (430 ft) above sea level will ensure that the site remains dry even if the icecaps melt.[4] Locally mined coal provides power for refrigeration units that further cool the seeds to the internationally-recommended standard −18 °C (−0 °F).[5] Even if the equipment fails, at least several weeks will elapse before the temperature rises to the −3 °C (30 °F) of the surrounding sandstone bedrock.[1]

Prior to construction, a feasibility study determined that the vault could preserve seeds from most major food crops for hundreds of years. Some seeds, including those of important grains, could survive far longer, possibly thousands of years.

Wikipedia.

It's terrifying to imagine a day when we will need to resort to vaults such as the one Svalbard, but it's somewhat reassuring to know that people are taking the steps to insure that we have somewhere to turn if climate change brings on global crop failures and crop extinction.

Shrinking Tibetan Glaciers Threaten Water Shortages for 2 Billion in Asia

2009-01-26T17:38:00.001-08:00

As the earth continues to warm, Tibetan glaciers holding vast reserves of fresh water are melting away into the sea, threatening water shortages for roughly two billion in Asia:

Roughly 2 billion Asians will experience water shortages in the coming decades as global warming diminishes glaciers on the Tibetan Plateau, scientists warned on Friday.

The plateau has more than 45,000 glaciers that accumulate during the region’s snowy season, before they drain into Asia’s main rivers, which include the Yellow, Yangtze, Brahmanputra and Mekong. Some scientists refer to the plateau as the "Third Pole" due to its massive glacial ice sheets.

However, temperatures on the plateau are rising at twice the rate of other parts of the world, according Lonnie Thompson, an Ohio State University glaciologist who for decades has gathered ice cores from glaciers around the world.

As these higher temperatures cause the glaciers to melt at faster rates, Asians have developed a false sense of security about the area’s water supplies, he said.

Should the melting continue at current levels, two-thirds of the plateau's glaciers will likely disappear by 2050, he said during a meeting on climate change at the Asia Society in Manhattan.

However, those who depend on the water will begin to see dwindling supplies long before then, he said.

"The scary thing is that a lot of structures, cities and lifestyles that have been developed in the region over the last 100 years were based on an abundance of water," Thompson said.

Nearly 2 billion people in India, China, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Bhutan would experience water shortages as the rivers slow, said Geoff Dabelko, director of the environment and security program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, during an interview with Reuters.

Red Orbit.

Argentina Facing Record Drought Conditions

2009-01-26T17:22:00.000-08:00

Argentina's current plight -- drought conditions potentially causing a 40% reduction in crop output -- may present a prophetic image of the ramifications of unchecked climate change:

Argentina's President Cristina Fernandez on Monday declared an agricultural emergency in areas affected by the worst drought to hit the country in four decades.
The state of emergency will allow farmers in affected areas to defer some tax payments for one year, Fernandez said.

Argentina, a leading world producer of soy, corn, wheat and beef, is suffering from dry conditions in much of its agricultural belt. Crop estimates are being cut as cattle die of thirst.

"In the face of this hard, painful reality, the government is extending its hand to these farmers," Cabinet Chief Sergio Massa told reporters after Fernandez announced the state of emergency.

Farmers, locked in political battle with the government over what they call high export taxes, say they want better long-term emergency planning rather than the subsidies and other short-term benefits offered by Fernandez.

The corn planting season is just ending, but output in the current crop cycle could fall up to 40 percent from the last harvest, the Buenos Aires Grains Exchange has forecast.

Guardian.

Our Big Screen TVs Mean More Big Dead Zones

2009-01-26T17:15:00.000-08:00

Increased global warming is projected to create larger "dead zones" in the world's oceans -- "low-oxygen areas in the ocean where sea life including fish, crabs and clams cannot survive." LAT.

Resistance Is Futile: the Jellyfish Are Winning

2009-01-08T08:56:00.000-08:00

"In the Gulf of Mexico's densest jellyfish swarms there are more jellyfish than there is water -- 100 jellyfish can occupy each cubic meter of water."

We people, with our "financial meltdowns," our "ethnic conflicts," our "plans for the future" -- we're just minding the store for a while before the jellyfish completely take over everything. I was trying to pretend for a while that this blog was about stuff other than just jellyfish, but why pretend anymore? The jellyfish swarms will inevitably conquer all -- including this blog.

Jellyfish swarms have damaged fisheries, fish farms, seabed mining operations, desalination plants and large ships, and they have disabled nuclear power plants by clogging intake pipes.

In the Gulf of Mexico's densest jellyfish swarms there are more jellyfish than there is water - 100 jellyfish can occupy each cubic meter of water.

"I'm often asked whether a single, overarching condition is triggering jellyfish swarms in diverse locations," says Monty Graham of Alabama's Dauphin Island Sea Lab on a barrier island in the Gulf of Mexico. Graham says the abnormally large, dense or frequent jellyfish swarms are "a symptom of an ecosystem that has been tipped off balance by environmental stresses."

"The exact nature of such balance-tipping environmental stresses may vary from place to place and usually involve unique interactions with local ecology," Graham explains. "But such stresses are often caused by people."

So, just as a weakened person is vulnerable to opportunistic diseases, stressed ecosystems are vulnerable to infestations of jellyfish.

"There is clear, clean evidence that certain types of human-caused environmental stresses are triggering jellyfish swarms in some locations," William Hamner of the University of California at Los Angeles says in the report.

These stresses include the introduction of jellyfish species into non-native habitats by ships; the formation of ultra-polluted areas, known as Dead Zones, where jellyfish face few predators and competitors; and increases in water temperatures, which accelerate the growth and reproduction of many jellyfish species.

Environment News Service.

Please also refer to this recent report from the National Science Foundation: "Jellyfish Gone Wild!: Environmental Change and Jellyfish Swarms".

Hey, National Science Foundation: the jellyfish have no sense of humor to appreciate your wacky report because they have no brains. The earth shall be inherited by swarms of gelatinous, brainless organic matter operating on rudimentary "nerve nets". That's just how Mother Nature rolls.

U.S. Drought Monitor

2008-12-09T23:59:00.000-08:00

Current status: extreme drought on the Southeastern coast and in central Texas. Most of California is in "severe" drought.

Blinded by Noise

2008-12-04T14:42:00.000-08:00

Last month, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the Ninth Circuit's decision banning the use of offshore sonar, allowing the Navy to continue blasting high-decibel bursts into waters off the coast of Southern California. The sonic blasts are believed to have the capacity to disorient, shock, and deafen whales and other cetaceans.

Meanwhile, new studies are showing that increasing carbon dioxide levels, which are being partially absorbed by the oceans, are compounding the issue of ocean noise -- producing a lethally -- and blindingly -- cacophonous environment for cetaceans, for whom underwater sound plays the role of both hearing and vision.

Wastetopia

2008-11-18T22:26:00.001-08:00

There is something wonderful about these incinerator hot spots in Japan:

Besides not being smelly, smoky or deadly, Japan's urban incinerators are often not ugly. Indeed, many are architecturally significant and some are social hotspots.

The renowned architect Yoshio Taniguchi, designer of the expanded Museum of Modern Art in New York, also designed Hiroshima's incineration plant, an eye-catching tourist attraction that the architect has called "my museum of garbage."

Here in Tokyo, about 186,000 people a year frequent the Toshima Incineration Plant. These visitors, most of whom live in the neighborhood, come to swim and exercise in the plant's handsome and affordable fitness center.

The center was added to the incinerator complex when it was built in the late 1990s to appease neighbors appalled by the prospect of millions of tons of garbage being burned in their back yard.

Those neighbors now swim in a pool heated by burning garbage. They work out in rooms lighted by electricity generated from a steam-driven turbine linked to the furnace that burns the garbage. Surplus electricity, enough for 20,000 homes, is sold into the grid. The complex also has a health clinic for the elderly.

Ash from the incinerator is melted into a sandy slag used in asphalt, bricks and concrete.

Wash Post.

The Japanese, for reasons of geography and space, have always had to economize. There seems to be a lot that can be learnt from their new use of and relationship to waste.

Precious Bodily Fluids

2008-11-11T21:31:00.000-08:00

Space toilet.

The election is over, and now I can stop obsessing about daily polling out of Western Pennsylvania. Time to care about water, the earth, sea mammals, weather, pollution, invasive species, and jellyfish again! I'm sure I've lost any and all readership this site once had during the long political hiatus. Oh well, we'll just have to start from scratch.

Toilet to tap is not just for the OC: it's coming to a space station near you!

Under the new system, urine undergoes an initial distillation process and then joins the rest of the recovered fluids in the water processor. The processor filters out solids such as hair and lint and then sends the wastewater through a series of multifiltration beds, in which contaminants are removed through adsorption and ion exchange.

"What's left over in the water are a few non adsorbing organics and solvents, like nail polish remover, and they go into a reactor that breaks them all down to carbon dioxide, water and a few ions," said Hand, a professor of civil and environmental engineering.

After a final check for microbes, the water is again clean and ready to drink.

Science Daily

Just a matter of time before we have this system in our homes, now that we are officially a hardcore commie nation.

Beluga Whales in Alaska Receive Protection -- Despite Palin's Best Efforts

2008-10-27T23:51:00.000-07:00

The U.S. government acknowledged earlier this month that beluga whales are now endangered:

The Bush administration Friday designated a small, isolated population of beluga whales in Alaska's Cook Inlet as endangered, rejecting arguments from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin that the small, white whales were on their way to recovery.

The National Marine Fisheries Service decided to extend federal protections to these whales near Anchorage after their numbers declined nearly 50% in the 1990s. The whales failed to rebound despite a decade-long program to revive the species.

"In spite of protections already in place, Cook Inlet beluga whales are not recovering," said James W. Balsiger, acting director of the National Marine Fisheries Service.

LAT

As you may recall, Palin had previously made an unsuccessful bid to keep polar bears off the endangered species list. Her reasoning in both cases was that placing the polar bears and whales on the endangered species list might hinder off-shore drilling and other gas exploration. Imagine Palin's incredible short-sightedness that causes her to come out against protecting these animals -- in the face of climate change, increased pollution, and a generally degraded environment that threatens to render species extinct -- never to be seen on our planet again -- Palin opts to continue our short-term goals of getting a little more gas to drive our snow machines and SUVs for a few years more.

Goats Flight

2008-09-10T00:02:00.000-07:00

I used to ride the bus to an office building downtown. I got off the bus at Hill Street, and walked up the steps next to Angels Flight. I am quite sad that my commute no longer takes me that way, as I am missing walking past goats grazing on the Angels Flight hill:

Leaders of the Los Angeles Community Redevelopment Agency hired 100 goats to nibble away thick weeds on a steep slope at the corner of 4th and Hill streets, next to the Angels Flight funicular.

Agency officials said the goats were cheaper and more environmentally friendly than two-legged brush-clearers armed with gasoline-powered weed-whackers.

And they are much more fun to watch, downtown office workers and other passersby quickly decided, as the animals fanned out over the 45-degree slope and chowed down.

LAT.

Postcard from Germany; the Future Belongs to Dead Zones; Clean and Natural

2008-08-14T22:39:00.000-07:00

First, a note that this blog is not solely about jellyfish. That said, the glorious jellyfish photo above was sent to me by my good friend the Tonic Blotter. He took this photo in Travemünde, Germany. He reports that the harbor there was full of these jellyfish. Normally, he takes fantastic pictures of birds.

Speaking of the march of the jellyfish, dead zones are appearing at a terrifying rate in coastal waters, doubling every decade since the 1960s:

In the latest sign of trouble in the planet's chemistry, the number of oxygen-starved "dead zones" in coastal waters around the world has roughly doubled every decade since the 1960s, killing fish, crabs and massive amounts of marine life at the base of the food chain, according to a study released yesterday.

"These zones are popping up all over," said Robert Diaz, a professor at the Virginia Institute of Marine Science who led the study, published online by the journal Science.

Diaz and co-author Rutger Rosenberg of the University of Goteborg in Sweden counted more than 400 dead zones globally, ranging from expansive ones in the Baltic Sea and the Gulf of Mexico to small ones that episodically appear in river estuaries. Collectively, they cover about 95,000 square miles.

Low oxygen, known as hypoxia, is in significant measure a downstream effect of chemical fertilizers used in agriculture. Air pollution, including smog from automobiles, is another factor. The nitrogen from the fertilizer and the pollution feeds the growth of algae in coastal waters, particularly during summer.

The result is feast-then-famine: The algae eventually die and sink to the bottom, where the organic matter decays in a process that robs the bottom waters of oxygen. The ensuing die-off of marine life cuts down on the productivity of commercial fisheries. The "biomass" missing because of depleted oxygen in the Chesapeake Bay, Diaz estimated, is enough to feed half the number of crabs that are commercially harvested in a typical year.

Wash. Post.

And I am obligated to post the story the NYT ran in last Sunday's magazine on the growing number of cities implementing toilet to tap to process waste water into potable drinking water. Coming to a tap near you.

Jellyfish Take Over Planet

2008-08-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

In the end, the world will be left to the cockroaches, Wall*E, and the . . . jellyfish, which, as noted here last year, are exploding in population and spreading across the globe, as oxygen levels in oceans drop, their predators are over-fished, and waters warm:

Jellyfish, relatives of the sea anemone and coral that for the most part are relatively harmless, in fact are the cockroaches of the open waters, the ultimate maritime survivors who thrive in damaged environments, and that is what they are doing.

Within the past year, there have been beach closings because of jellyfish swarms on the Côte d’Azur in France, the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, and at Waikiki and Virginia Beach in the United States.

In Australia, more than 30,000 people were treated for stings last year, double the number in 2005. The rare but deadly Irukandji jellyfish is expanding its range in Australia’s warming waters, marine scientists say.

While no good global database exists on jellyfish populations, the increasing reports from around the world have convinced scientists that the trend is real, serious and climate-related, although they caution that jellyfish populations in any one place undergo year-to-year variation.

“Human-caused stresses, including global warming and overfishing, are encouraging jellyfish surpluses in many tourist destinations and productive fisheries,” according to the National Science Foundation, which is issuing a report on the phenomenon this fall and lists as problem areas Australia, the Gulf of Mexico, Hawaii, the Black Sea, Namibia, Britain, the Mediterranean, the Sea of Japan and the Yangtze estuary.

NYT.

Scientists see the rise of the jellyfish as an ominous sign that something has gone seriously wrong in the delicate balance of life in the ocean. Does the future belong to faceless, mindless stinging goop? I guess we could adapt, like "Jellyfish Fukuda" in Japan, and start munching on the new crowds of jellyfish.

It's going to be a long century.

The End is Here?

2008-07-21T22:48:00.001-07:00

An opinion piece in the Sunday L.A. Times on the need to scale back or end growth in Southern California in the face of disappearing water sources touches on most of the core themes of this blog -- and should scare the crap out of SoCal residents.

Poo-water coming (back) to L.A.

2008-07-17T22:45:00.000-07:00

Apparently, L.A. tried the recycled water plan before, but people were grossed out by the "toilet-to-tap" label. But people are adaptable: with the drought and the price of water continuing to rise, we'll probably be fine with the recycled water.

The Future Looks -- Dry

2008-06-19T16:03:00.000-07:00

From Mongabay.com:

By 2025 more than half of countries will face freshwater stress or shortages and by 2050 as much as 75 percent of the world's population could face freshwater scarcity, but policy measures and new technologies could help reduce the shortfall, report researchers writing in the journal Nature.

Shark Attacks

2008-06-19T15:50:00.000-07:00

Sharks off the coast of Mexico are apparently hungry: the first deaths from shark attacks in Mexico in 30 years took place this spring. Some believe the recent uptick in shark sightings and attacks at beaches may relate to the decline in the populations of sharks' traditional prey, like salmon.

The Waters

2008-06-19T15:46:00.000-07:00

I haven't followed the stories about the flooding in the Midwest as closely as I should have. One thing seems clear: the weather is out of joint. Drought here in Southern California, uncontrollable flooding in the Midwest, killer cyclones in Southeast Asia: water, the lack of it or the surfeit of it, seems to be something we will be dealing with for a long time to come.

L.A. Is Green?

2008-05-31T15:46:00.000-07:00

Well, that's what some survey released this week says. There are, of course, some caveats and qualifications:From the air, Los Angeles hardly looks like an environmental paragon. It sprawls heroically, seeming to begin well before passengers from the east are told to fasten their seatbelts. On warm days a thin brown haze hangs over the city. Its most striking feature is its freeways—rivers flowing with glass and steel that turn red and white at night. Yet on May 29th the Brookings Institution reported that the residents of the “neon-lighted slum”, as Raymond Chandler called it, generated less carbon per person than any other metropolis in continental America.Economist.

The study's authors defended L.A.'s number two spot on the greenest cities list, noting that many of the popular conceptions about L.A. are simply wrong:

Los Angeles' spot as No. 2 in low per capita emissions brought surprise from some urban development experts who look upon the region as a poster child for sprawl, flaunting a committed car culture and low transit ridership.

But the study authors defended the rankings by saying Los Angeles is "not your parents' L.A."

"Los Angeles has changed. Over the last 10 years, we've seen that statistically Los Angeles is a surprisingly dense metropolitan area. While it lacks the impressive profile of New York, we see small lot sizes, shared walls, multifamily buildings, and the development is often master planned," said Mark Muro, policy director at Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program.

"It's an intensely urban place. We call it dense sprawl," Muro said.

SF Chronicle.

It appears that one major reason behind L.A.'s surprising standing in the survey is our famously mild weather. We use less heating and air-conditioning than places like D.C. or Baltimore. The Economist reads a somewhat startling development prescription in the Brookings study:

These days Los Angeles is trying to improve its environmental image by encouraging developers to build blocks of flats. The Brookings report suggests this approach is wrong, or at least inadequate. The metropolis should build more bungalows rather than force families who want them to live farther inland, where temperatures are higher. There is plenty of room for more concrete on the coast. Between Orange county and the city of San Diego, for example, lies little besides tomato farms and a military base. To save the planet, fire up the bulldozers.

Free Prescription Drugs?

2008-04-18T10:39:00.000-07:00

Recent studies have found disturbing cocktails of pharmaceutical drugs in municipal drinking water supplies around the country. The drugs make their way into the water supplies after being imbibed, injected, or ingested by people, and then being washed down into the sewage system. No one is quite sure what the health risks are of these trace levels of drugs in drinking water. Filters at home -- and even bottled water -- will not prevent exposure to the drugs in drinking water:

So how are all these drugs getting in the water in the first place? Some fraction of every dose a person takes passes through unmetabolized and is evacuated by the body and flushed into sewage systems. Sewage treatment plants are meant to remove the more familiar kinds of pollutants, and typically do not remove pharmaceuticals from waste water as it is cleaned up and released back into the environment, eventually to find its way into other water supply systems. In some places, treated sewage water is reused directly for drinking water after several filtration processes to make it safe, although none of the systems in wide use effectively remove pharmaceuticals.

That Brita filter in your kitchen is not likely to do the trick, either. As for bottled water, it, too, may come from a tap, rather than some remote mountain spring. And the trade group representing bottled-water sellers told The A.P. that they aren’t testing for the presence of trace drugs anyway.

NYT.

Don't worry, though. The experts say everything is fine.

The Coming Water Wars

2008-04-09T22:49:00.000-07:00

My good friend the Tonic Blotter tips us to an interesting article on possible future U.S. exploitation of our good friends to the north and their fresh water reserves: "Canada, with less than 1 percent of the world’s population, is estimated to have as much as 9 percent of the world’s renewable fresh water supply." Canada Dry, anyone?

Aqueducts and Empire; Fortress L.A.

2008-04-04T15:48:00.001-07:00

An interesting article on the relationship between the Roman aqueducts and the strength and scope of the Roman Empire.

Also, for Mike Davis fans, a piece in the LA Times a few days ago about the rise of bunker (and bulletproof) architecture in L.A:

Seniors in Steel Plaza's retirement complex in Pico-Union sometimes like to take their morning walks in the building's courtyard, protected by a black wrought-iron fence and perched 30 feet above the intersection of West 3rd Street and South Union Avenue.

"We're quite safe here," said Victor Gamad, 73, who has lived in the building since it opened a decade ago. "We never get frightened, except for when someone sets the fire alarm off."

Steel Plaza, which opened in 1998, was designed to be "drive-by proof."

It is one of the early examples of what has become a growing movement in urban sections of Los Angeles to blend public safety with architecture -- with some surprising results.

Last year, officials built a dirt hill at a new state park north of downtown aimed at shielding a play area from motorists who might commit drive-by shootings. Workers are now building a South L.A. community center with a community garden on the roof rather than at street level to protect against crime.

LAT.

Lake Mead and Vegas

2008-03-20T23:33:00.000-07:00

The loss of water supply on the Vegas strip the other day may just be a foreshadowing of things to come.

Warm Dead Waters

2008-03-17T22:56:00.001-07:00

More ominous news from the Pacific Northwest: Chinook salmon are disappearing. A prime suspect? changing ocean conditions:

Bill Petersen, an oceanographer with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s research center in Newport, Ore., said other stocks of anadromous Pacific fish — those that migrate from freshwater to saltwater and back — had been anemic this year, leading him to suspect ocean changes.

After studying changes in the once-predictable pattern of the Northern Pacific climate, Mr. Petersen found that in 2005 the currents that rise from the deeper ocean, bringing with them nutrients like phytoplankton and krill, were out of sync. “Upwelling usually starts in April and goes until September,” he said. “In 2005, it didn’t start until July.”

Mr. Petersen’s hypothesis about the salmon is that “the fish that went to sea in 2005 died a few weeks after getting to the ocean” because there was nothing to eat. A couple of years earlier, when the oceans were in a cold-weather cycle, the opposite happened — the upwelling was very rich. The smolts of that year were later part of the largest run of fall Chinook ever recorded.

NYT.

Inter-species Communication

2008-03-14T18:42:00.001-07:00

An amazing story about a dolphin that apparently communicated with stranded whales in New Zealand, and thereby helped save them.

The Doomsday Vault: Archive Fever in Cold Storage

2008-02-29T19:23:00.000-08:00

The NYT runs a fascinating article today on a seed archive being built deep underground on a Norwegian island:

With plant species disappearing at an alarming rate, scientists and governments are creating a global network of plant banks to store seeds and sprouts, precious genetic resources that may be needed for man to adapt the world’s food supply to climate change.

This week, the flagship of that effort, the Global Seed Vault near here, received its first seeds, millions of them. Bored into the middle of a frozen Arctic mountain topped with snow, the vault’s goal is to store and protect samples of every type of seed from every seed collection in the world.

As of Thursday, thousands of neatly stacked and labeled gray boxes of seeds — peas from Nigeria, corn from Mexico — reside in this glazed cavelike structure, forming a sort of backup hard drive, in case natural disasters or human errors erase the seeds from the outside world.

Descending almost 500 feet under the permafrost, the entrance tunnel to the seed vault is designed to withstand bomb blasts and earthquakes. An automated digital monitoring system controls temperature and provides security akin to a missile silo or Fort Knox. No one person has all the codes for entrance.

The Global Vault is part of a broader effort to gather and systematize information about plants and their genes, which climate change experts say may indeed prove more valuable than gold. In Leuven, Belgium, scientists are scouring the world for banana samples and preserving their shoots in liquid nitrogen before they become extinct. A similar effort is under way in France on coffee plants. A number of plants, most from the tropics, do not produce seeds that can be stored.

NYT.

Because Scandinavians are involved, the article had to note that the boxes were "neatly stacked" and that everything was nicely "organized". I have a couple reactions to this doomsday seed vault. First, it's a little terrifying to realize that so many people, organizations, governments, etc., are so concerned and investing in this bomb-proof seed vault. On the other hand, it's also sort of amazing and life-affirming that people in all sorts of place, various states, etc., are coming together to put this vault together. This cooperation to preserve humanity fills me with that warm Star Trek, or Deep Impact humanity-united-to-save-itself feeling.

Of course, if the apocalypse did come and everything was left dead, there would surely be a war on for this archive of seeds. And even Scandinavian organization and neatness would go by the wayside as groups battled to own the past, and therefore, the future.

In any event, I've always been taken with the idea of a seed archive -- all of these life-containing materials from the past waiting, in storage, filed away, for a day when they will be referenced, hybridized, brought into bloom again, as something new -- the past bursting into the present. An archive, gathering and organizing the past, contains the promise of -- and to -- the future:

In an enigmatic sense which will clarify itself perhaps . . . , the question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past, the question of a concept dealing with the past which already might either be at our disposal or not at out disposal, an archivable concept of the archive, but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow. Perhaps. A spectral messianicity is at work in the concept of the archive and like religion, like history, like science itself, this ties it to a very singular experience of the promise.

Jacques Derrida, An E-mail to Freud (in Archive Fever).

(P.S. -- To any survivors of some future apocalypse searching the internet for keys to survival who have come across this post -- the Global Seed Vault is located on the Norwegian island of Spitsbergen. Good luck to you!)

Running on Empty

2008-02-25T12:02:00.000-08:00

The L.A. Times is running a series of editorials on water and water policy. It's welcome news that the Times is taking the issue of L.A.'s water resources seriously. From today's editorial:

The early history of Los Angeles was defined by its struggle to get water wherever, and whenever, it could. William Mulholland and his colleagues did such a good job of securing water supplies during the early 20th century -- building the 223-mile-long, gravity-fed Los Angeles Aqueduct, which imports water from the Owens Valley; establishing the Metropolitan Water District, which brings in water from the Colorado River and Northern California -- that those of us living here today take for granted our lush gardens and year-round blooms. They appear a native bounty when they are, in fact, a work of man. We offer pious lip service to the notion that water is scarce when the weather is dry, only to forget our concerns at the fall of the first raindrop. Implicitly, we behave as if water will always be available and unlimited.

This must change. This page did not like the water bond that Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger backed last year, but he is on to something when he insists that California needs to rethink its complicated and woefully overburdened water system. It has been said many times before, but it bears repeating: Our state's breathtaking natural beauty, envied easygoing lifestyle and booming economy . . . depend on an ambitiously conceived network of aqueducts, pumps, dams and pipes that will literally run dry if we don't invest heavily to change the way we use, capture, store and distribute water.

LAT.

Dead Zones

2008-02-17T23:00:00.000-08:00

Apologies for my long absence.

First, an interesting interview at Alternet with Maude Barlow on the future of water.

Second, of special interest for inhabitants of the American Southwest, the frightening developments at and forecasts for Lake Mead:

Lake Mead, the vast reservoir for the Colorado River water that sustains the fast-growing cities of Phoenix and Las Vegas, could lose water faster than previously thought and run dry within 13 years, according to a new study by scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography.

The lake, located in Nevada and Arizona, has a 50 percent chance of becoming unusable by 2021, the scientists say, if the demand for water remains unchanged and if human-induced climate change follows climate scientists’ moderate forecasts, resulting in a reduction in average river flows.

Demand for Colorado River water already slightly exceeds the average annual supply when high levels of evaporation are taken into account, the researchers, Tim P. Barnett and David W. Pierce, point out. Despite an abundant snowfall in Colorado this year, scientists project that snowpacks and their runoffs will continue to dwindle. If they do, the system for delivering water across the Southwest would become increasingly unstable.

“We were really sort of stunned,” Professor Barnett said in an interview. “We didn’t expect such a big problem basically right on our front doorstep. We thought there’d be more time.”

NYT [hat tip to Tonic Blotter]

Third, vast dead zones in the Pacific, off the coast of Washington:

Where scientists previously found a sea bottom abounding with life, two years ago they discovered the rotting carcasses of crabs, starfish and sea worms, swooshing from side to side in the current. Most fish had fled -- and those that didn't or couldn't joined the deathfest on the sea floor.

Extraordinarily low oxygen levels were to blame -- swept up from the deep ocean into normally productive waters just off the Pacific Northwest coast by uncharacteristically strong winds.

On Thursday scientists announced they had documented that low oxygen levels that killed the sea life in 2006 were the lowest in a half-century -- and that for the first time, parts of the ocean off our coast were measured with zero oxygen in the water; 2007 looked only a bit better.

Strong winds and low oxygen levels have persisted for eight summers now, leading scientists to conclude that the ocean may be "poised for significant reorganization"-- their way of saying an ecosystem gone awry.

It looks like the Pacific has reached a "tipping point," a threshold where low-oxygen levels are becoming the rule, researchers said. And while scientists can't prove it's caused by a changing climate, that's consistent with what is predicted by computer projections built to anticipate global warming.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Finally, a murder mystery. Someone or something is killing sea lions on the Galapagos:

Ecuadorean officials are investigating the slaughter of 53 sea lions from the Galapagos Islands nature reserve, which were found with their heads caved in.
The dead animals included 13 pups, 25 youngsters, nine males and six females.

Galapagos National Park official Victor Carrion told AFP news agency that each was killed by "a strong blow from someone", though the motive is unknown.

They had not been injured in any other way, he said, discounting the notion they had been killed for their parts.

BBC.

Year of the Rat Begins Inauspiciously

2008-01-31T14:26:00.001-08:00

They're having super weird weather in China, which is messing up Lunar New Year travels (think of several hundred million people starring in their own versions of Planes, Trains, & Automobiles, but in China):

China's worst snow storms in decades forced the cancellation of more than 3,250 flights over the six days through noon on Wednesday, the official Xinhua news agency said on Thursday.

The weather also delayed 5,550 flights and caused 380 planes to be diverted, Xinhua quoted the General Administration of Civil Aviation of China as saying.

Reuters

They don't do small in China. In response to the massive snowstorms, the government has dispatched "about 460,000 army troops and paramilitary forces . . . to areas hit worst by the heavy snows to help clear roads, restore power and conduct relief operations . . . ." NYT. The Year of the Rat and the first Summer Games in China looks to be off to a rocky start.

The Deluge

2008-01-27T23:36:00.000-08:00

A rainbow over Eagle Rock during a break in the rains

It's been raining for a week straight here in Los Angeles.

Napoli sta annegandosi in rifiuti

2008-01-22T23:11:00.000-08:00

Naples is drowning in trash:

Nobody knows how much garbage has been rotting in the streets of Naples for the past several weeks. It is several meters high in some places, and in total may be up to tens of thousands of tons. Naples has always been a doomed city (it is only a matter of time before Vesuvius erupts again), and the current crisis has provoked predictably grim headlines, such as "Naples Beneath an Eruption of Garbage."

WSJ; see also AFP.

George Bush vs. Marine Mammals

2008-01-16T22:35:00.000-08:00

image by Alessio Marrucci; GNU FDL

Earlier this month, a district judge ruled that the Navy had to stop using powerful sonar in training missions in Southern California waters unless the Navy used the sonar more than 12 miles off the coast and adopted other measures to lessen the effect on whales and dolphins. The powerful sonar blasts used by the Navy were deafening whales and dolphins, resulting in the animals losing the ability to navigate, ending up beached, and death:

In her rulings, [Judge] Cooper has said she tried to balance national security needs with environmental protections -- specifically those to prevent unnecessary harm to whales and dolphins from mid-frequency active sonar. That's the type the Navy uses to detect quiet diesel-electric submarines.

She has cited scientific studies linking U.S. and NATO warships' use of sonar to the deaths and injuries of beaked whales and other marine mammals. She also has reiterated the Navy's own predictions that the upcoming exercises off Southern California "will cause widespread harm to nearly 30 species of marine mammals."

LAT.

In response to the Judge's ruling, President Bush decided to step in and offer some kind of "waiver" to the Navy; it's unclear whether he has any grounds to do this.

Meanwhile, some of you may wonder what it is that these sonar blasts into the oceans are for; they're to help protect us from quiet diesel-electric submarines off our shores sent there by all those countries that want to attack us and start a war with the United States.

Pulling Back

2008-01-15T10:20:00.000-08:00

Image: Hannes Grobe 21:51, 12 August 2006 (UTC), Alfred Wegener Institute for Polar and Marine Research, Bremerhaven, Germany - Creative Commons License

A large construction project in the high desert outside L.A. is put on hold because builders cannot guarantee that there will be enough water for the development. This feels like the beginnings of a settling in of the realization that Greater Los Angeles cannot simply continue to ooze endlessly into the desert. With the drought on the Colorado River, in the snow packs of the Sierras, and the Delta Smelt ruling, Southern California will be forcing more of these hard choices in the future.

Meanwhile, in Antarctica, a new study finds that the western Antarctic ice sheet is melting at a rapidly accelerating rate:

[T]he new study is the first to show that this loss is accelerating, at least in western Antarctica and the Antarctic Peninsula, the researchers say.

"In all the ice sheet models we have at present for Antarctica, things happen very slowly," Bamber said.

"[But] we're seeing things happen rather quickly."

They found that for Antarctica overall, ice loss increased about 75 percent over the ten-year period, from 112 gigatons of ice per year in 1996 to 196 gigatons of ice per year in 2006.

Too little water, too much water.

It's Been A Long Time

2008-01-09T22:32:00.000-08:00

And I'm very sorry. I got too caught up in the Road to the White House 2008.

While I was away, I failed to cover the deluge that hit Southern California over the weekend. It was amazing and terrifying.

Orange County's turning sewage into drinking water is now on-line.

Somewhere, up north, the delta smelt lives on.

Feliz Navidad de Los Ángeles

2007-12-24T11:04:00.000-08:00

Happy Christmas Eve from Los Angeles, where the weather is lovely -- although all that sunshine, mixed with bromide, chlorine, and dissolved oxygen, is producing carcinogens in some of our local reservoirs, including the scenic Silverlake Reservoir. The LA DWP will have to drain 600 million gallons of water from reservoirs to address the problem. The most stunning aspect of this story for me is that 600 million gallons of water equals just one day's supply of water.

Happily, it's been a wet December, and we're all looking forward to a good soaking in January.

I'm Dreaming of a Wet Christmas

2007-12-20T20:46:00.000-08:00

Hiroshige, Ichiyusai (1797-1858), Travellers Surprised by Sudden Rain [public domain]

What you see above is actual rainwater, on a plant in front of our house. In an amazing, miraculous, and magical turn of events, it's been pouring in L.A. for days now.

I am absolutely loving it. We aren't going to get a White Christmas out here, but we have received the next best thing: a Wet Christmas.

Thanks, Santa!

Clarence H. White (1871-1925), Drops of rain (1903) [public domain]

Deluge

2007-12-03T00:10:00.000-08:00

I was working through the night at the office on Thursday into Friday; when I walked outside for the first time at 3:30 on Friday afternoon, I was shocked: it was raining. Someone told me that it had been pouring for like 18 hours. There were mudslides, there was flooding, massive car pile-ups on the 10 and 134 -- and I missed it all. What the f*ck?

Anyhow, the story of the rains abounds with ironies. Because of all the fires that ravaged the region due to a lack of rain in our historic drought, the fire-ravaged hills are now more vulnerable to mudslides when it rains too much. So over the last few days, people who had to evacuate their homes a few weeks ago because of the fires (caused in part by the long-standing lack of rain), had to evacuate their houses again because of the rain.

L.A. -- it really is the promise land.

Toilet to Tap: Drinking Purified Sewage

2007-11-27T15:06:00.000-08:00

Axel Koester for The New York Times
Desperate times . . . . The Orange County Water District is beginning a project that will purify sewage into drinking water:

It used to be so final: Flush the toilet and waste be gone.

But this week, for millions of people here in Orange County, pulling the lever will be the start of a long, intense process to purify the sewage into drinking water - after a hard scrubbing with filters, screens, chemicals and ultraviolet light and the passage of time underground.

On Friday, the Orange County Water District will turn on what industry experts say is the world's largest plant devoted to purifying sewer water to increase drinking water supplies. They and others hope it serves as a model for authorities worldwide facing persistent drought, predicted water shortages and projected growth.

NYT.

Look for bottled water sales in Orange County to skyrocket. The project makes a great deal of sense; it's just an issue of seeing whether Orange County residents will be able to get past the knowledge that they are drinking reclaimed sewage.

Billions of rampaging killer jellyfish -- coming soon to coastal waters near you!

2007-11-21T11:51:00.001-08:00

A swarm of billions of jellyfish wiped out a salmon farm off the coast of Ireland the other day. The swarm of Pelagia nocticula jellyfish, which were ununusually far north, away from the more southern waters in which they are usually found, made quick work of more than 100,000 fish:

The Northern Salmon Co. Ltd. said billions of jellyfish -- in a dense pack of about 10 square miles and 35 feet deep -- overwhelmed the fish last week in two net pens about a mile off the coast of the Glens of Antrim, north of Belfast. . . .

The species of jellyfish responsible, Pelagia nocticula -- popularly known as the mauve stinger -- is noted for its purplish night-time glow and its propensity for terrorizing bathers in the warmer Mediterranean Sea. Until the past decade, the mauve stinger has rarely been spotted so far north in British or Irish waters, and scientists cite this as evidence of global warming.

CNN.

The moral here? Global warming = really good for jellyfish.

The Fog

2007-11-20T11:05:00.000-08:00

Very weird times here in the City of Angels. I walked out the door of our place yesterday morning into a thick fog. It smelled - deliciously - like the mist from a humidifier. I had to turn on my wipers to wipe away the condensation on my windshield. I can't remember the last time I had to do that. Now I'm sitting up in my office, staring out into a cloud.

It's not just Southern California

2007-11-07T07:59:00.001-08:00

Water woes and drought throughout the country.

You want evidence that something is seriously wrong? There's a drought in Southern Florida.

The Tastiest City on Earth

2007-10-29T22:50:00.000-07:00

Off and on for some time now, I've been trying to push a logo for Los Angeles. One I liked for a little while was "Los Angeles: The Tastiest City on Earth". That logo was meant to emphasize the tremendous variety of ethnic food we have here. The "I ♥ L.A." logo doesn't really work for me. It makes the whole city look like a cheap knock-off. Also, the State of New York owns that logo as a registered trademark, and it's very likely that any "I ♥ L.A." merchandise you come across is infringing on that trademark.

How about "Cheney Has Never Slept Here?"

Welcome to the Hotel California

2007-10-22T22:38:00.001-07:00

photo submitted to L.A. Times by Irvine Resident

It's a standard Southern California trope, the pendulum between Paradise and Hell. In the past few days, the pendulum has swung terrifyingly far in the direction of Hell.

Five hundred thousand people have been evacuated from San Diego and Orange Counties as of this evening. The fires have been rocketed along by the Santa Ana winds, which have been exceeding 80 m.p.h.

Drought has left our entire region as the most combustible kindling, which has now exploded into flame.

The conflagrations, which one firefighter likened to Armageddon, are being fed by the desert gales known as Santa Ana winds. Almost all of the great Southern California fires of the past have been fed by Santa Anas, which typically blow in early spring and fall.

The result of air pressure buildup in the Great Basin between the Sierra Nevada and Rocky Mountains, Santa Ana winds sweep from the mountains through the lowlands toward the sea.

This year they are particularly strong. Sustained winds of 30 to 40 miles per hour, with gusts of up to 100 miles per hour, have fanned the flames, which are crackling through brush that is crumbly dry from the prevailing drought conditions.

SF Chronicle.

Slip Sliding Away

2007-10-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

image by Ervín Pospíšil - GNU F.D.L.

Sometimes, very rarely, it rains here in Southern California, and the effects are usually disastrous.

Nearly every day our LA Times comes in a plastic wrapper. I used to wonder why, since it never rains. I kept meaning to call them to tell them I didn't need the plastic wrapper, but they would throw me off by leaving off the plastic wrapper every now and then. (I also realized at some point that the papers came in wrappers so they weren't soaked by 6 a.m. lawn sprinklers.) In the last couple days, with the early morning drizzles and sprinkles, when I've picked up the paper, the wrapper has been wet. The wet newspaper wrapper was a strange feeling -- unusual for me here in L.A. -- it took me back to days of fetching the Hartford Courant from the bottom of my parents' driveway so I could read Doonesbury. We lived at the top of the hill, and everything was always wet in the morning. And it rained a lot.

Also, on a prematurely dark April afternoon in fourth grade, in response to my teacher's question about the weather outside, I said it was "precipitating" and the entire class and my teacher laughed at me for like two minutes. That was also the year that my teacher confiscated my Casio watch because I couldn't figure out how to disable the hourly two-beep chime. She never gave it back.

I No Longer Heart New York

2007-10-14T19:51:00.000-07:00

Geoff Manaugh, author of BLDGBLOG, recently left L.A. for San Francisco, but he's still in love with L.A:

In L.A. you can grow Fabio hair and go to the Arclight and not be embarrassed by yourself. Every mode of living is appropriate for L.A. You can do what you want.

And I don't just mean that Los Angeles is some friendly bastion of cultural diversity and so we should celebrate it on that level and be done with it; I mean that Los Angeles is the confrontation with the void. It is the void. It's the confrontation with astronomy through near-constant sunlight and the inhuman radiative cancers that result. It's the confrontation with geology through plate tectonics and buried oil, methane, gravel, tar, and whatever other weird deposits of unknown ancient remains are sitting around down there in the dry and fractured subsurface. It's a confrontation with the oceanic; with anonymity; with desert time; with endless parking lots.

BLDGBLOG.

Geoff's post is bursting with BLDGBLOG's usual infectious enthusiasm, and you come away from the post wanting to do backflips and karate chop planks of wood in celebration of the void-like nature of L.A. But I do agree with BLDGBLOG that L.A. is now America's greatest city. As I have been telling everyone who will listen to me lately, it's quite clear now that New York has jumped the shark. See, for example, the city's "hot blast of nastiness, jingoism and xenophobia" in reaction to the Ahmadinejad visit, the daily horrors of parents desperate to get their kids into the 92nd Street Y nursery school, the 2004 Republican convention and the banning of protesters from Central Park's Great Lawn to "save the grass", Rudy Giuliani, the corporate takeover and Disneyification of public space in Manhattan and Brooklyn, an average selling price of over $1 million for an apartment in Manhattan, Alex Rodriguez, a rightward trend, and to top it all off, sickening tales of a new gilded age in New York in today's NYT Magazine.

The hedge fund masters of the universe, the big law firm partners dining at Nobu, the self-satisfied Ivy League couples in the Sunday Styles pages, and David Remnick can have New York. I'm done with it. New York has always been a massive financial center, but it feels like this has become its defining feature now, eclipsing its other features (diversity, cultural fervent, etc.). The sheer concentration of wealth in New York is warping the city and changing it from what it once was. Admittedly, I haven't spent much time there since I left, but that's my impression.

Or perhaps these are just the justifications I present to myself as I pull into the Zankou Chicken in Glendale at 10 p.m. and sit alone in my car for a moment in the light of the mini-mall.

Water Rationing: Coming to an Unsustainable Southern California Town Near You

2007-10-11T09:43:00.001-07:00

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California is warning of coming water rationing and rate hikes throughout the Southland. As our friends at Aquafornia note, changing our water consumption behavior should be our goal. The rationing and the rate hikes may force some behavior modification.

When Climate Change Gives You Giant Jellyfish, Make Jellyfish Juice

2007-10-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

Climate change has warmed the waters off Japan, and millions of gigantic (450 lb.) jellyfish have migrated to those warmer waters. An entrepreneurial Japanese guy, Fukuda Kaneo "Jellyfish Fukuda", saw an opportunity: he has created a whole industry of jellyfish derived products, from drinks to snacks to make-up. He's filed some kind of bizarre patent for processed jellyfish with the World Intellectual Property Organization.

Japanese fishermen are less sanguine about the sudden jellyfish explosion: the jellyfish clog up their fishing nets.

We'll see if Jellyfish Fukuda is still happy when a giant mutant jellyfish rises from the sea and destroys Tokyo.

The Good, the Bad, and the Nasally Invasive Brain-Eating Amoebae

2007-09-29T18:19:00.001-07:00

In his comment on my last post, my good friend Tonic Blotter was kind enough to point out a brighter side-effect of climate change: dolphins returning to Germany.

In the spirit of on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand, I regret to convey news of another organism that is migrating to adapt to climate change: nasal-invading, brain-wasting killer amoebae:

It sounds like science fiction, but it's true: Killer amoebas living in lakes can enter the body through the nose and attack the brain, where they feed until you die.

Though encounters with the microscopic bug are extraordinarily rare, it is known to have killed six boys and young men in the United States this year; over the decade ending in 2004, the yearly average was 2.3.

The jump in cases has health officials concerned.

"This is definitely something we need to track," said Michael Beach, a specialist in recreational waterborne illnesses with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. "This is a heat-loving amoeba. As water temperatures go up, it does better. In future decades, as temperatures rise, we'd expect to see more cases."

[. . . .]

Though infections tend to be found in Southern states, Naegleria lives almost everywhere: in lakes, hot springs, even dirty swimming pools, grazing off algae and bacteria in the sediment.

A person wading through shallow water stirs up the bottom, and if water gets up the person's nose, the amoeba can latch onto the olfactory nerve, which is responsible for conveying smells to the brain.

The amoeba makes its way to the brain, destroying tissue as it goes, Beach said.

[. . . .]

People who are infected tend to complain of a stiff neck, headaches and fevers. In the later stages, they show signs of brain damage, such as hallucinations and behavioral changes, he said.

Some drugs have stopped the amoeba in lab experiments, but people who have been infected rarely survive, Beach said. "Usually, from initial exposure it's fatal within two weeks," he said.

LA Times.

This has all the makings of an excellent teen horror summer flick. After putting the campers to bed, the camp counselors sneak off to go skinny dipping. They don't wear their nose clips. The lake is unusually warm this year. Amoebae latch onto the olfactory nerves of the frolicking counselors and . . . BAM! -- Zombie brain-eating camp counselors controlled by killer amoebae that have eaten their brains.

Everything Changes

2007-09-22T16:06:00.000-07:00

Blue whales keep showing up dead off the California coast. A dead blue whale was found floating off of Santa Barbara yesterday. This brings the count to three dead blue whales that have been found in the past two weeks. The usual body count is one dead blue whale found per year. It's a murder mystery out of Raymond Chandler.

A blue whale that washed ashore in Ventura County last week and one found dead in Long Beach Harbor two weeks ago both are believed to have been hit by ships, but it isn't known if the whales were slowed or disoriented by illness.

"If they're all being hit by ships, you have to wonder whether they're compromised in the first place," said Mate, director of the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University. Scientists want to know whether domoic acid played a part. The highly toxic substance, created by bacteria found in algae blooms, can virtually paralyze marine mammals and has killed dolphins and sea lions in the channel.

LA Times.

The algae blooms that produce the debilitating domoic acid are likely to have been expanded due to human behavior. Specifically, sewage release into the ocean increases the amounts of nutrients available for the algae to feed on; climate change may also help increase the algae blooms. Some believe that the whale deaths may be related to suspected changes in the whales' migratory patterns, which in turn have been affected by climate change. There is also the possibility that the dead whales' sonar abilities were damaged by massive underwater military sonar discharges utilized by the U.S. Navy. A Naval base in San Diego uses the damaging sonar blasts, right into the blue whale's migratory path.

Here's hoping that time travel thing of getting to warp 10 by boomeranging around the sun actually works.

Gifts from the Sky

2007-09-20T21:23:00.000-07:00

Still waiting for the rain we were promised. Although, reports say there's a chance of thunderstorms tomorrow. That's exciting. In Peru, they're worried about heavier weather

Townsfolk in this desolate, high-plains hamlet not far from Lake Tititaca and the Bolivian border received the shock of their lives -- a meteorite that struck nearby with a thunderous bang just before noon Saturday, leaving a deep crater, an acrid smell and terrified villagers and livestock. . . .

"Even before it fell, there was a strong sound, like an airplane," said Marina Llanqui Mamani, 53. "And when it hit, it felt like an earthquake. Everyone was terrified. Even my animals were running all around in fear. Then there was a loud noise and a lot of smoke."

The pungent odor, experts say, could have been caused when the crashing object fused with such elements as sulfur in the soil.

LA Times.

L.A. Needs a Time Out

2007-09-19T15:10:00.000-07:00

The L.A. Daily News reports on Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine's impertinent question: should L.A. continue to madly develop if there's not enough water to flow into all those new development double-showers, jacuzzis, and lap pools?

What are those big gray puffy things in the sky?

2007-09-19T14:21:00.000-07:00

The weather weirdness continues here in Southern California. It's September, and we're about to get our first winter storm, which is either wildly late or wildly early, depending on how you look at it:

A storm moving toward the Southland from British Columbia is bringing unseasonably cold temperatures, snow at high elevations and the first rain in Los Angeles in about 150 days.

Meteorologists say it is the Southland's first winter storm, arriving months ahead of schedule and sending temperatures eight to 15 degrees below normal. . . .

The last measurable rain was April 22, Lindaman said.

LA Times (emphasis added). Either way, this is very exciting. I have the windows open and I can feel the storm coming: the air is cooler, the trees are swaying in a steady breeze that seems to be building, the clouds are gathering, and, for the first time in a very long time, I can't see the sun.

Less Oil is More (Expensive)

2007-09-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

oil rigs in Los Angeles in 1896

The price of crude oil is up 33% from a year ago. This is bad news for L.A. drivers. But the Fed cut the interest rate. Which is maybe good news for L.A. homeowners and buyers. But the cut in the interest rate also helps drive up the price of oil. Which is probably bad news for L.A. drivers. Etc.

Perhaps a recession would be a good thing for the U.S. (and for L.A.)?

Guns or Butter: Gas or Twinkies

2007-09-17T23:08:00.000-07:00

photo courtesy of chanchow

Drought and bad weather across the globe in combination with the ethanol wave are driving the cost of wheat to historic highs. I saw a strange billboard today driving home from the West Side: it showed a field of grass or some other type of plants, with a blue sky above. The only words on the sign were in green, centered in the blue sky, and read "gas station". Turning agriculture into fuel is not going to be without its serious costs. Eventually we will all, even here in L.A., have to drive less. Or maybe eat less.

Update: The NY Times basically says the same thing.

Time of Reckoning: Long Beach Water Restrictions

2007-09-14T10:15:00.000-07:00

The extended drought affecting the Southern California region, a drought along the Colorado River that feeds much of Southern California, and the recent Delta Smelt ruling are all factors behind Long Beach's new water usage restrictions:

The Long Beach water board has prohibited residents from watering their grass during the day, and limited it to only three times a week. They cannot use water hoses to clean driveways, patios, sidewalks or any other paved or cemented areas unless they use a pressurized water device.

Long Beach restaurants are barred from serving customers water unless expressly requested by diners. Hotels have to give guests the option of reusing towels and linens without having them washed every day.

Water officials say the city will scrutinize water bills for excessive use and create a hotline and e-mail system for residents to inform on "water wasters."

LA Times.

Experts predict another dry winter this year, which may lead to similar restrictions being implemented in Los Angeles. People that are concerned about Southern California water supplies -- and everyone should be -- have probably already adopted similar types of measures voluntarily.

Metropolis Books in Downtown L.A.

2007-09-13T12:34:00.000-07:00

Downtown L.A. now has an independent bookstore: it's called Metropolis Books (Main St. btw. 4th and 5th). Metropolis, which opened in December 2006, is right next to Blossom, the relatively new Vietnamese restaurant on Main Street, which has seen the arrival of many new businesses and developments in the last few years. Metropolis has good selections of fiction, mystery, sci-fi, African-American fiction, and non-fiction, and a small used books section as well. It's in a nice space that invites leisurely browsing, with some inviting comfy chairs in the middle of the store. The owner, Julia Swayze, a mystery author herself, is friendly and knowledgeable about her stock -- she appears to have hand-picked each of the books on the shelves.

In any event, that the opening of a bookstore is noteworthy gives you a sense of things in downtown L.A. To my knowledge, downtown residents are still waiting on a grocery store to open in their neighborhood; reportedly, a Ralphs is opening downtown sometime soon. [UPDATE: per Capt. Colossal (and other sources), the Ralphs is now open.]

For those you of you in and around downtown L.A., please support our new independent bookstore. Visit Metropolis Books sometime soon!

On the Road: This is Los Angeles

2007-09-11T22:09:00.000-07:00

In the introduction to his celebrated 1971 work, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies, architectural critic Reyner Banham wrote that "like earlier generations of English intellectuals who taught themselves Italian in order to read Dante in the original, I learned to drive in order to read Los Angeles in the original."

I often continue to think of myself as a visitor here in Los Angeles. I don't know if in the back of my mind I keep alive some delusional idea that we will inevitably return to Brooklyn. Every now and then, I fully realize that I now live in Los Angeles. I had one of these moments of clarity yesterday evening on Third Street, on my way to a language class on the West Side.

I was driving into the sunset in a somewhat strange mood, having had an exceptionally uneventful day at the office; my spaciness was aided by the music was listening to: the pleasant droning and pulsing of The Field's "From Here We Go Sublime" (best reading music of 2007). I was stuck in a line of traffic at a light. In the opposite lane, cars crept by with their windows rolled down, radios blaring. A young woman looked at herself in her rear view mirror. A guy my age held his cell phone up to read a text message. I caught myself doing exactly the same thing at that moment, checking my blackberry for messages as I crept forward, and I felt at that moment very much like someone who lived in Los Angeles. I was with my fellow Angelenos in our one true public space -- gathered together in traffic. We extended each other minor courtesies, allowing people into lanes, letting people pull into traffic from the gas station, as we all continued together on our separate ways.

Banham made a kooky and fascinating BBC documentary in 1972 based on his book on Los Angeles (the 52 min. video is pasted below). He spends much of the documentary in a rented car, visiting architectural sites in the city such as the Gamble House, Ennis House, Watts Towers, and various gas stations, tiki restaurants, and hot dog stands.

Water Rationing in the Near Future?

2007-09-10T14:18:00.000-07:00

The ramifications of the Delta Smelt ruling continue to settle in: the new talk is of water rationing in Southern California in 2008.

The New Wave

2007-09-05T23:11:00.000-07:00

The recent heat wave that baked Los Angeles for the past week, keeping temperatures above 100 degrees for long stretches through most of the region, resulted in 25 deaths.

Victory for the delta smelt; Los Angeles to return to dust

2007-09-03T22:38:00.000-07:00

On the plane to Baja California on Saturday (it wasn't hot enough for us up here in L.A.), two stories in the LA Times caught my eye:

1) A tropical storm turning into a hurricane was headed for Baja and was likely to hit while we were there, and

2) the judge in the delta smelt versus continued flow of Northern California water to L.A. case had ruled in favor of the tiny, endangered delta smelt.

Both stories freaked me out a bit.

Some state water officials are saying that the ruling and the necessary cut-backs on the pumping of water from the Sacramento-San Joaquin River Delta could result in cuts of up to a third of the water supplied from the Delta. And that's a pretty big chunk of the total water we get in L.A.:

The Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, which provides drinking water to nearly 17 million people, obtains 60% of its water from the delta. The district has already warned local farmers to expect a 30% cutback Jan. 1.

L.A. Times (emphasis added).

Others say that the state officials are playing Chicken Little. I really do hope that's the case. Otherwise, we're going to be seeing a great reduction in general turgor pressure here in the Southland. The tropical storm that was headed for Cabo dumped tons of water on Chiapas, killing seven, veered out to sea a bit, and veered back toward the Cabos, and is likely to hit tomorrow. We got on the last flight out before the storm was slated to make landfall. I wonder what the last flight out of L.A. will look like.

When Quaggas Attack

2007-08-27T23:43:00.001-07:00

Today's water-related post is essentially the inverse of the last post. In the previous post, we considered the plight of the delta smelt, an endangered fish that is killed in the diversion of water from Northern California. Meet the quagga mussel. These mussels are native to the Ukraine and Russia; they were brought to Lake Erie by ships from Europe, and have been exploding through water supplies, recently reaching the Colorado River and the aqueducts bringing water to Southern California. The quaggas reproduce at a fantastic, tribble-like rate, and clog up reservoirs, aqueducts, and other important water-related stuff.

Quagga mussels and their cousins, the zebra mussels, have already wreaked havoc in other parts of the country; the E.P.A. estimates that quagga and zebra mussels caused $750 billion in damage in the Great Lakes region. California state biologists and engineers are deeply concerned about the arrival of the quaggas: engineers twice drained the major Southern California Aqueduct in order to chlorinate it in an attempt to remove its quagga infestation this year. The quaggas filter tremendous amounts of nutrients and plankton from the water, changing the ability of rivers and lakes to sustain other wildlife.

Endangered fish endangers L.A.'s water supply

2007-08-22T22:42:00.000-07:00

There's a federal case going on right now (a week-long hearing began yesterday) that could result in a cutback in the amount of Northern California rain and snowmelt runoff diverted to Los Angeles in order to protect an endangered fish, the delta smelt; many delta smelt are apparently killed in the pumps used in the massive water diversion process.

The endangered delta smelt -- we will wither away in the desert sun so that he may live

A little context on current conditions here in Southern California from the MSNBC article:

Southern California's current water supply situation has been brought to the brink of crisis, meanwhile, by a perfect storm of drought conditions.

The Southern California region itself, particularly the Los Angeles area, is in the midst of a historic single-year drought. Meanwhile, the region's traditional sources of imported water are also drought-ridden. The Colorado River is in its eighth year of drought. And the State Water Project was only about 65 percent full this year after record-low Sierra snows.

I am all for endangered fish. But as I heard this story on the radio this morning, driving into work, I caught myself thinking "Screw the goddamn fish. We need that fucking water." Then, of course, I felt bad.

I'm truly going native here in Lotusville.

In Paradise

2007-08-20T19:26:00.000-07:00

Leaving work tonight, I crossed Grand Avenue and looked up the street to the northeast: the view was breathtaking. The day was spectacularly clear and the San Gabriel mountains rose massively green and hugely crinkled, just behind the flying silver forms of the Disney Center, right up the street from where I stood, gawking in the crosswalk.

I often forget how beautiful Los Angeles can be. Glimpses like the one I caught today hint at the fantastic potential of this place, situated between giant mountain ranges and luscious beaches, and tug at the hopes denizens of L.A. keep buried under our accumulated disappointments with and cynicism for our city.

Thunderstorm in Connecticut

2007-08-20T00:03:00.000-07:00

I went home to Connecticut this weekend, where it rained. There was a long thunderstorm on Friday evening. It was wonderful.

Alchemy to the Rescue

2007-08-11T23:09:00.000-07:00

We went to the beach in Santa Monica today. It's a very nice beach. One feels as if one is in a perfect place out by the beach in Los Angeles. (Though, of course, the beach communities are separately incorporated.) All that beautiful water, making us feel better, cooling off the air, but otherwise basically useless. Of course, G.E. offers us hopeful commercials on Sunday mornings during the weekly talk programs -- mixed in with the pharmaceutical commercials justifying extortionate prices with vague promises of curing us of all ills of soul, libido, and metastasis -- suggesting that the arrival of cheap and easy desalination of sea water is imminent; but I'm not holding my breath.

Water water everywhere -- but here

2007-08-08T21:59:00.001-07:00

So, as I have been complaining to people trapped in elevators with me at work, I really really miss rain -- especially thunderstorms. So what happens this week? My former home, New York City, gets the storm of a century, with massive thunderstorms and a deluge that knocks out the entire subway system.

Sometimes -- and this is true -- I have these dreams where all of L.A. is flooded with clean blue water, and we're all just wading around in our flip flops in the cool, transparent, knee-high water, drinking smoothies. It would cut down on our driving.

The same theme, continued

2007-08-02T23:37:00.001-07:00

I was in a conference room with other people high above Bunker Hill talking about rain. About how it never rains. About how we wish it would rain. About the El Niño years when it rained in biblical quantities.

Now the rain has stopped. I've begun to get queasy when I see things like a car repair shop attendant hosing down the floor of his garage, or six people and their cars, side by side in the 24-hour do-it-yourself car wash on Colorado, or the sprinklers chugging away across the neighborhood as I go out to retrieve the paper. Where's the water coming from? It can't go on like this.

The geniuses at the DWP better have something good in the works.

Garden of Eden in the Endless Drought

2007-08-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

My entire backyard is dead. All of the grass is completely yellow and dry. There are some scattered dying rose bushes back there as well. I don't feel too bad about it. If the shit was supposed to live, it would live without my help. (That principle becomes a bit scarier when applied to myself out here in the desert.)

There are, inexplicably, grapes and figs growing back there as well. WTF?

It never thunders in L.A.

2007-08-01T00:01:00.000-07:00

After the driest year on record for Los Angeles, I am hoping for some rain. I was talking to someone recently about how there are never any thunderstorms out here in L.A. It's an empty thing, a summer without a few massive thunderstorms. Thunderstorms make you feel as if the atmosphere is gathering heavily above you, crowding down on you. It feels comfy and safe to be inside on a July evening with the air conditioner on as a thunderstorm booms away above. You never get that here in L.A., and it's weird. Instead, the sky is almost always clear and fantastically empty -- nothing but blue space above. It can be a terrifying, agoraphobia-inducing type of clarity in the sky.

Why this blog is not titled Lotusland

2007-07-30T23:49:00.000-07:00

I originally wanted to call this blog "Lotusland" but that name was taken -- by this person.

I Have Mixed Feelings About Los Angeles

2007-07-30T23:39:00.001-07:00

I can't decide if life is good or awful. Just as I can't decide if I love or hate Los Angeles. This city is endlessly fascinating and deathly boring at the same time. It's beautiful and lovely, and giving us all cancer. The earth is turning against us one final time, it seems, and the water is going away. Perhaps L.A. will have to die. It's like the super green lawn my neighbors have in the middle of a historic drought. Beautiful, full of life, but obviously doomed.