Wickersham’s Conscience ran this post back on December 17, 2017. It’s just one data point among many why Don Young needs to be voted out. The original post has been updated slightly, and a few typos fixed. The provision to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration and development was enacted into law…
Long-time Alaskans – those who were in Alaska in 1989 – know better than to trust anything Exxon Mobil says. Now it turns out Exxon Mobil will even lie to its own investors. WC isn’t even slightly surprised. The public has known for a few years that Exxon Mobil has been lying to the general…
Long time readers of Wickersham’s Conscience know that at irregular intervals WC tries to follow-up on topics discussed earlier. It’s not systematic and it’s certainly not due diligence, But readers may be interested in what has happened since on some subjects, so here’s an effort. Nor is it stump grinding, but we’ll get to that…
WC used to get quite a lot of email from a reader who was deeply concerned about possible radiation from the Fukushima nuclear reactor disaster reaching Alaska and the west coast of North America. Right concern; wrong ocean and wrong point source. The islands of North and South Novaya Zemlya in the Kara Sea, north of…
The Anchorage Daily News, without any sense of irony, ran two stories in its October 8 edition that are a fine demonstration of Alaska working at cross-purposes to itself. First there was the Washington Post story on the recalculation of the rate of climate change. The report makes clear that the truly catastrophic changes from man-caused climate…
A 100-Year Flood, of course, is an extreme flooding event that happens, on average, only once every 100 years. A hydrologist would describe it as a “recurrence interval” or talk about an “annual exceedance probability (AEP).” The recurrence interval can change. If the stream basin is altered, say by urbanization or wildfire, then less rain…
While much of climate science is pretty firmly established, whatever Donald Trump may think, climatologists are still puzzling out some of the details. And some of those details are turning out to be very important. Feedback is one such critical detail. Feedback occurs when outputs of a system are routed back as inputs as part of…
