LJ pointed out on my dashboard that I haven't updated in like 18 weeks. Ok, I'm shamed. I'll post something.

Ever since gwynny and I ran across a motherlode of red huckleberries up on richy California street I've been obsessed with finding more free berries. Today I hit paydirt (paysoil?) - I found a nice thimbleberry bush on campus today. I ate a handful of sweet red fruit with a tangy finish. There's a couple of thimbleberry and huckleberry bushes producing outside our apt, but the bushes are growing out of a treacherous hillside and I can't get them. Gomez Cat and I watch each morning as birds pick out the ripest berries - just beyond our reach. Luckily our farm share is providing a half-pint of loganberries and raspberries every week.

I was talking to Dr. Pinch about this free berry thing and a plan is hatching for geolocating the fattest Arcata berry bushes in a KML file or on Google maps. Hasn't happened yet, but it might. Maybe we'll be low tech and just post coordinates on a text file. I'm leaning towards the middle road (like usual) and posting fat bush pics on flickr with a georeference.

I finished the socio-spatial poster on sea level rise for Arcata. I've submitted it to a conference and feel pretty good about it, but haven't heard back yet. HSU GIS submitted the work-up we did for the proposed Palomar Pipeline that's slated to cross the Mt. Hood wilderness. 160+ acres of old growth Doug-fir (and some prime Spotted Owl habitat) for a liquid natural gas pipeline is a lousy deal. I hope BARK can block it. LNG - especially Russian LNG - is a dumb idea anyway. Let's increase our dependence on foreign fossil fuels, shall we? Eventually I'll get the Arcata poster up on Snakecharmer.

In other news: I think I fucked up my back doing deadlifts today. Stupid mistake. Fortunately my RC injury in my right shoulder is improving. I like to only have 1 lifting injury at any given time.

This is a climate change and GIS nerd post. You've been warned.

An interesting development for our local student ASPRS chapter - we're looking at adopting a glacier (actually, a remnant snowfield) in the Trinity Alps. There's a glacier monitoring project based out of Portland State - we're hoping to meet with the program managers at a conference in April. As I understand it, they're using thermoimaging and GIS to monitor and model glacial response to climate change. I'm sure there's more to it, but that's the part that got me interested. Apparently, we'd get access to ASTER imaging to do it.

The glacier project complements my 480 project rather well. I'm about 10 hours into an analysis of the social impact of projected sea level rise scenarios on the peninsula communities of Humboldt County. Most of the literature indicates a 1m rise by 2100 under best case scenarios (CO2, CH4, N2O, O3 and black carbon aerosol emissions decrease) and 3m+ by 2100 if we keep our shit up (IPCC scenarios A1B or B2 - insufficient reduction in GHG emissions).* I'm planning on taking a digital elevation map, plotting sea level rise scenarios on it, and overlaying census block data for analysis. It's a lot harder for poor folks to move households (consider the Katrina event), so my hypothesis is that the poor will be hardest hit in the peninsula communities. Yeah, I know, it's obvious heuristically, but telling policymakers something is "obvious" doesn't work as well as pushing a scientific study under their noses. Of course, a lot of times that doesn't work either. It might be moot, though. I'm not sure I'm going to be able to do a good analysis at this point - all the elevation models I've found so far don't have the precision I need to make the project work. I'm wondering if I'm going to have to do measurements myself with a GPS unit; I ain't paying for a LIDAR flyover, that's for sure.

Of course, all bets are off if 1500 sq mile ice sheets keep dropping into the sea. Those models predict as much as a 150+ feet rise in sea level. For reference, that's about the height of the Statue of Liberty.**

Buy a bike...and consider saving up for a good canoe.

* = Hansen, James, et al. 2006. “Global Temperature Change.” Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences 103: 14288-14293.

Incidentally, Hansen (a NASA Climate Scientist) is the same guy that said we have about 10 years to reverse course before we are basically committing to dangerous climate change (catastrophic sea level rise and 60%+ species extinction, etc).

** = Bell, Robin E. 2008. “The Unquiet Ice.” Scientific American 298: 60-67.