Category: Current Affairs

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Need Ice?

seaice031609.jpg

In this age of (apparently) shrinking polar ice caps, I pondered what’s been happening up north this winter–way north, in the Arctic night. The first site that Google produced for the phrase “arctic sea ice” was this: Arctic Sea Ice News and Analysis. The news: the extent of Arctic sea ice is greater than it was in the minimum season (two years ago); the extent of Arctic sea ice is significantly below the average recorded for the years 1979-2000. But check out the sight for yourself.

And a bonus for Arctic ice fans: The Catlin Arctic Survey (patron: HRH The Prince of Wales): Three Brits on the ice plus a logistics team tracking and resupplying them. The team is to trek from a spot north of Canada’s Arctic coast to the North Pole, about 1,000 kilometers; its mission is to measure the thickness of the ice along the way; that could be important evidence about ice deterioration under the pressure of global warming.

The adventurers set out on March 1, and in their 15 days on the ice they’ve traveled all of 28 kilometers. That’s about 17 miles, if you’re keeping score in the United States, or a little more than a mile a day. Luckily, the weather is fine: currently -41 degrees C. (-42 F.) and sunny. The BBC’s running a nicely done diary site, complete with audio reports from the trekkers.

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Big Bathtub I: The Acre Foot

An acre foot is the amount of water it would take to flood an acre to a depth of one foot. An acre is, ballpark number only, a patch of land 100 feet by 400 feet. If you were standing on that patch of land with water about halfway up to your knees — well, you’d be having a direct experience of the acre foot.

An acre foot is 325,000 gallons. If you pay a water bill that shows how much you use, you can figure how long that much water would last you. The rule of thumb, that we journalists borrowed from “water experts” here in California was that an acre foot was enough to supply two average households for a year. That’s for use inside and outside the home for three or four people say, and it comes out to about 460 gallons a day for each household. Of course, there’s a lot of variation. An inner city apartment dweller uses a lot less than someone whose lawn looks like a fairway at Augusta National. Someone in a cool coastal area — Berkeley, for instance — uses less than someone in a much hotter area on the other side of the hills, lawn or no lawn.

The acre foot is a basic unit of life in California. Yes, weather people and water management officials count inches of rain and snow in the winter. But those units are incidental in a place that needs to capture and store an immense amount of water to irrigate roughly 15,000 square miles of crops and to supply 36 million people. The acre foot is the fundamental currency of reservoir storage and water delivery.

Up and down California, the federal government, the state government, electric utilities, county and city water companies, and irrigation districts have built reservoirs. They’re big bathtubs that together hold something like 42 million acre feet; that would be enough to submerge the entire state of Wisconsin under a foot of water. They reservoirs are expected to fill up in the winter and spring with runoff from the rains and melting snow running down from the Sierra Nevada. Then the water is pumped out during the dry season to help the fields and orchards thrive and to keep the showers and garden hoses flowing. Some water is even set aside for the fish that swim in dwindling numbers through the maze of waterways between reservoir, farm, and town.

A wet winter here–what people like to think of as normal, with nature’s tap switched on when we get into the middle of autumn–keeps our big bathtubs full and the water running where it’s needed. But there are other kinds of winters, too. Very wet ones, where the system simply can’t hold all the water coming down the rivers. And dry and very dry ones, where the water level in the reservoirs falls and keeps falling if two dry years come back to back.

We’re in what appears to be our third dry–or drier than “normal”–year in a row. Three of the biggest federal reservoirs in Northern California– Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom–all fell to critically low levels in December and January. Together, the three reservoirs can hold about 9 million acre feet; that’s about enough to supply a year’s worth of household water for New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. That’s every U.S. resident east of the Great Lakes and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Remember,: that’s the capacity of just three reservoirs. There are dozens of others. During the last five weeks, copious rains have fallen and the water has started to rise in some of those big bathtubs. More about that later.

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Water, Water Everywhere

We’re in a drought here, or what they call a drought in California, so I’ve been thinking about water. Unfortunately, I’ve been thinking in terms that use lots of words and have led so far to dead ends. (Just a minute: a blog, dead ends–what’s the problem?) Anyway, for now, just a couple of numbers, from Shasta Lake, the biggest of the big network of reservoirs built to turn California’s mountains and rivers into a reliable water bank. In the past month at Shasta Dam, on the Sacramento River just north of the city of Redding:

–More than 20 inches of rain has fallen.

–The amount of water in the reservoir has increased by about one-third, from 1.41 million acre feet to 1.86 million acre feet.

–The amount of the increase over just a month, 450,000 acre feet, is about enough water to supply 2.2 million people for a year.

–But that’s not a lot in term of the demand for water here: About 80 to 85 percent of the “developed” water in California–water that’s impounded behind dams and delivered on demand to customers around the state–goes to farms. The rest goes to industry and residential users. The population of California is 36.5 million.

I’ve got lots more numbers kicking around, but that’s enough for now. In the next installment–soon!–I’ll try to make some sense of them.

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Tour of the Rain

Over the last 10 days, we’ve gone from a dry season, a sort of perpetual autumn, to full Northern/Central California winter. Which means: rain in the lowlands and someplace unseen, far to the east, the Sierra Nevada living up to their name. We have a storm parked offshore now, and the rain has fallen all day without much of a let up. We got out this morning to walk Scout during a break of an hour or so. But a couple of later excursions took place in a pounding-down rain, and the dog was soaked when we got back (he doesn’t seem to mind; and he seems to like the process of us toweling him down before we let him back in the house).

Over in Davis this morning, just this side of Sacramento, Stage 1 of the Tour of California hit the road. The route was 107 miles to Santa Rosa over many of the same roads I’ve ridden on brevets, or centuries or just on rides with friends. The big climb of the day was up Howell Mountain Road. I remember it as a steep 2.5- to 3-mile grind I once did with my friend Pete. The eventual stage winner made one of his big moves on that climb today.

I’ve ridden some of these roads in the rain, but today it looked like the racers got pelted from beginning to end of the stage. You see all everyone wearing rain jackets, shoe covers, tights, and what look like scuba gloves. None if keeps you dry. The longer you’re out in the rain, the more water you get in your shoes, the more sodden your shorts get, the colder you become. Of course, the elite pros in today’s peloton really raced today; it’s very, very rare for weather to interfere with the running of a race (one exception I remember: heavy snow in the mountain passes during a stage of the Tour of Italy maybe 15 years ago caused the race organizers to abbreviate a stage). They raced today, but they were miserable, just like the fraternity and sorority of just regular riding folks.

How bad was it? Here’s the Twitter Lance Armstrong sent out after finishing:

“Holy hell. That was terrible. Maybe one of the toughest days I’ve had on a bike, purely based on the conditions. I’m still freezing.”

More rain in the forecast tomorrow. And some patchy, wild roads, too, including another one I rode with Pete once: Tunitas Creek. It turns into a wild one-lane route through a redwood forest. When we road it, the road was all patches and patches on patches. I saw a report from a local cyclist today that the route had debris on it today. Which makes it kind of amazing to me that the best cyclists in the world are riding it. It’s more than a little like the Yankees showing up to play on your local diamond, complete with pebbles in the infield and potholes in the outfield. Seeing the best on your home field — well, it changes the way you see the field.

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‘Obstinately Persisting…”

Interesting word:

perverse

SYLLABICATION: per·verse

PRONUNCIATION:   pr-vûrs, pûrvûrs

ADJECTIVE: 1. Directed away from what is right or good; perverted. 2. Obstinately persisting in an error or fault; wrongly self-willed or stubborn. 3a. Marked by a disposition to oppose and contradict. b. Arising from such a disposition. 4. Cranky; peevish.

(From “The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition.”)

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‘They Did Not Care’

One of the things that has preoccupied me this month, as I look back from its tail end:

Early the morning of New Year’s Day, a police officer with BART, the local rapid transit agency, shot and killed an unarmed man who was lying face down on a station platform. Even if you live clear across the country, you might have heard about the case. One element made it sensational: dozens of train passengers and other bystanders witnessed the shooting, and several, at least, were recording the scene on cellphones or other video devices. And one more factor added to outrage over what looks like an unprovoked shooting: the cop was white and the victim was black.

So, the past month has been marked by a slow and possibly botched investigation, the refusal of the police officer to answer any questions about what he did or why, multiple street protests that on one occasion turned into a riot in downtown Oakland, a murder charge, and today, finally, the first hint of an explanation for what the cop did.

The police officer, named Johannes Mehserle, was in court for a bail hearing yesterday. Beforehand, his lawyer filed a motion that described some of the events on the BART platform when the shooting took place. The story is simple: Mehserle and a fellow officer were having trouble subduing Oscar Grant, a 22-year-old they were trying to arrest for resisting arrest (one of my favorite circular-logic law-enforcement scenarios). Mehserle decided to use his recently issued Taser on Grant. He mistakenly pulled his semi-automatic pistol and fired a shot that killed Grant. Or maybe the story isn’t so simple: Mehserle reportedly told another officer that he shot Grant because he thought Grant was reaching for a gun.

The judge at the hearing granted bail of $3 million after noting that Mehserle’s story contained some serious inconsistencies. He’s not out of jail yet, and he has a prelminary hearing set in March. Sooner or later, he’ll be tried for some manner of homicide — either murder, as now alleged, or manslaughter.

The defense bail motion consists of nuggets picked out of about 700 pages of “discovery” — mostly interviews with witnesses and other police officers. It’s a document meant to show Mehserle in the most positive possible light so that the judge might see that justice might only be served by turning him loose on bail. My favorite tidbit in the motion’s Mehserle biography is this: “Mr. Mehserle enjoys music and has played the electric and acoustic guitars since age 14. He plays blues, jazz and rock and roll.”

The motion also tries to set the scene on the BART platform before the shooting. Other BART officers describe people screaming and swearing and advancing menacingly. Grant was cursing the cops and defying an order to sit until a BART officer struck him twice in the face. Here’s the situation as one officer recounted it:

Domenici stated she has been in other situations like Raiders games and has handled large amount of crowds. But the crowd on New Year’s Eve night was not a typical crowd. She stated everybody on the train was “out of control” and that it was “just too much.” Domenici stated the crowd did not care and was not concerned with authority figures. “They did not care what we represented as law enforcement figures. The people did not care that we were police officers.”

Domenici said, “You do what you’re trained to do and try to control the situation. But when people are not listening to you, knowing you are in full uniform and you are in authority, and they keep coming at you … I was afraid. I was afraid for my life and the officers’ lives. I kept thinking ‘I need to protect us.’ ‘I need to protect us.’ There’s all these people coming at us, not listening to us. I was afraid for my life and the other officers there. It just seemed like an eternity. We could not control the scene at all.”

I’m happy to say that except for the once of twice I’ve had an officer pull a gun and point it at me, I’ve had a mostly friendly, cooperative relationship with the police. I’ve talked to them as part of my work, I’ve been more than willing to do my part as a citizen and call them when I’ve seen a possible crime in progress, and I’ve never hesitated to call them when I need their help.

But I’m also acquainted with the fact not everyone has such a trusting feeling toward law enforcement. For lots of people–people who don’t live on a quiet little street in Berkeley, people who may be poor, who live in neighborhoods full of violent crime, who fit a certain suspect profile–law enforcement represents something else.

In fact, I can imagine there are those who see police officers, the representatives of law enforcement, as a class of people who believe their uniform confers authority and should command not only respect, but unquestioning obedience; whose default responses to resistance are threat and force; and who seem to believe that their own behavior ought to be tolerated as part of the price of keeping order.

[In case you’re curious: The Mehserle Bail Motion]

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I Look This Stuff Up, So You Don’t Have To

I read a piece in The New York Times in the last couple of weeks that suggested a common sense way of doing — what would you call it? — historical lexicography, maybe. Or in plain English: investigating when certain words and terms came into common use.

Here’s the technique: Go to Google Books, then search on your term. Sift through the pile of results until you get a rough sense of the earliest references. It gives an approximation of when terms appeared — sort of a quick and easy way of what the Oxford English Dictionary’s researchers and informants have been doing for more than a century in tracking down words to their original uses and contexts.

As I said, you’ll have to sift through a lot of results to get an idea of when your word or phrase appeared, though Google helps with an advanced search that lets you look for publications by date. For me, anyway, the sifting is part of the fun.

I’m curious about when the idea of “ethics in journalism” or “journalism ethics” gained currency. I’m not surprised to find lots written about it, including works that deal with the invention of journalism ethics, published in the last ten, twenty, thirty years. Searching for stuff written before 1970, I find a 1922 essay in the International Journal of Ethics, “Journalism, Ethics, and Common Sense.” It starts:

“Several books and many articles have been published lately on the far from fresh subject of journalistic ethics–rather the lack of ethical standards and principles in contemporary journalism. Some writers have not hesitated to indict the entire newspaper business or profession on such charges as deliberate suppression of certain kinds of news, distortion of news actually published, studied unfairness toward certain classes, political organizations, and social movements, systematic catering to powerful groups of advertisers, brazen and vicious faking and reckless disregard of decency, proportion, and taste for the sake of increased profits. Other writers have been more moderate and have recognized that there are three species of newspapers–good, intelligent, honest newspapers, morally pernicious and intellectually contemptible newspapers, and colorless, indifferent, innocuous newspapers.”

I want to go further back. Here’s an entry for a 1918 publication, “Instruction in Journalism in Institutions of Higher Education,” from the Department of the Interior’s Office of Education. I’m amazed who I find there.

A page from 1918 Department of Interior bulletin on journalism education.
March 1869: Robert E. Lee, president of Washington College, puts forward proposal for a journalism program.

(Washington and Lee’s Department of Journalism says this about the program’s inception: “To help rebuild a shattered South, the college developed several new programs; among them were agricultural chemistry, business and journalism. It is not clear how many young men, if any, actually received the scholarships that Washington College widely advertised, but it is certain that the program lasted only a few years.” A permanent school was established in the 1920s.)

The Office of Education’s account includes the warm welcome Lee’s idea was accorded by the doyens of the profession. “Frederic Hudson, the managing director of the New York Herald, when asked, ‘Have you heard of the proposed training school for journalists?’ promptly replied, ‘Only casually in connection with Gen. Lee’s college and I can not see how it could be made very serviceable. Who are to be the teachers? The only place where one can learn to be a journalist is in a great newspaper office. ”

That reaction puts me in mind of what I still hear from long-time journalists; except now they’re all for journalism education, and they’re decrying all this online stuff that’s breaking down their walls and their bottom lines.

(And as to the original question: the earliest instance I can find of “journalism ethics” — actually “ethics of journalism” — is 1846.)

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Quality Control

It all too often comes to the attention of the management here that typos, wrong words, random omissions and a variety of other gaffes make it into what passes for the finished product here. Don't hesitate to point them out to the proprietor. He makes no pretense to perfection but would still like to think he can get things right eventually. Your assistance in this matter is appreciated.