Coyote Crossing

This is a really frustrating bit of recursive scientific illiteracy.

The issue was kicked off by a post which you can find at “friedcranes.org” though due to the cumbersome layout of this page by the time you read this you may have to search a bit. Look for the October 7th editorial on “Tonapah [sic], Nevada.”

The authors of the editorial are concerned about concentrating solar stations that incorporate thermal storage by using molten salts. The idea behind the technology is that solar power doesn’t work so well when the sun goes down, so if you use the sun to heat something that stays hot for a while after sunset, you can use that stored heat to turn a turbine and generate power. It’s a very common idea, and one often touted by people claiming that centralized solar is better than PV — though Solar Done Right’s Bill Powers has shown persuasively that solar thermal storage is a really frigging expensive way of generating electricity. It’s probably a technology worth developing further, in that there will likely be a few ways in which CSP proves to be useful, as in powering desalination plants, where you could use the concentrated brine as your source of molten salt, or something like that. But as a way of making electricity in the desert, it’s more a talking point than an economically feasible technology.

The molten salts generally used in this kind of tech are nitrates of potassium and sodium, commonly referred to as saltpeter and Chilean saltpeter, respectively. They’re cheap and abundant, and there are certain health hazards involved with their use: ingesting too much of either in preserved meats is thought to increase your risk of colon cancer, for one. They can be irritating to sensitive tissues. They have been known to start wars. If you heat it up to somewhere around 350°C and then accidentally spill it into the environment, it can cause nasty fires. In fact, these salts give off oxygen when heated, so they’re really good at starting fires under certain circumstances. Mix them finely with something quite flammable and apply a small spark, and they allow that flammable substance to burn far faster than it would without the saltpeter there, which is pretty much what those Ninth Century Chinese chemists found out when they discovered gunpowder, which is a mixture of potassium nitrate, powdered charcoal, and sulfur.

It’s a misunderstanding of that last property that the folks at friedcranes.org are worried about, as they say in their editorial:

We have been copying the Tonapah [sic], Nevada media with our editorials for months about the infamous Crescent Dunes Bomb being proposed to be built by SolarReserve in their soon-to-be-eradicated town in Nevada.
    Are they interested? Nah!

    Not one reporter has had the gumption to take five seconds to Google “sodium nitrate” and “potassium nitrate” and learn to their everlasting dismay that these chemicals are the highly explosive saltpeter and Chilean saltpeter, respectively—exactly the benign “molten salts” for energy storage that SolarReserve enthusiastically drones on and on about in their unending press releases.

    Not one reporter in Tonapah [sic] has bothered to observe from SolarReserve’s own documents that 12 million gallons of these highly explosive chemicals will be stored in two tanks adjacent to 12,000 gallons of diesel fuel at the Tonapah [sic] site.

    Not one reporter in Tonapah [sic] is the least bit dismayed that SolarReserve claims that they will keep these explosives at temperatures from 500°F to 1050°F despite the fact that both chemicals start boiling at about 750°F—presumably to begin venting “harmlessly” into Tonapah’s pristine air.

    Not one reporter in Tonapah [sic] has had the guts to report that the 91,000 tons (compare that amount to just 2-½ tons of explosive and diesel fuel used by Timothy McVeigh to destroy the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City) of high explosive SolarReserve® is so cavalierly planning to plop next to town has the equivalent explosive force of three atomic bombs the size of those we dropped on Japan at the end of the Second World War, albeit without the accompanying radiation.

    Not one reporter in Tonapah [sic] has had the temerity to criticize the slip-shod engineering foisted off on the citizens of their Nevada town, nor to at least warn their friends and neighbors that an incendiary bullet fired into those massive tanks from a mile or two away (outside their purported secure perimeter fence patrolled by an alert security guard) would be sufficient to trigger the tragic explosions.

Etc.

There’s a small problem with the Friedcranes folks’ argument: neither potassium nitrate nor sodium nitrate is explosive. In order to be explosive, something needs to be flammable, and both salts are in fact non-flammable. If you had a vat of boiling saltpeter and a lit match, and you tossed the lit match into the vat, the match would explode, as it burned furiously in the extra oxygen the saltpeter would likely be giving off. But the saltpeter wouldn’t explode, nor catch fire, nor do anything, really, that a similar quantity of molten metal wouldn’t do.

This is obviously a finer point for people, like the friedcranes folks, for whom chemistry is an arcane art. So let me put it this way:

• Burning, whether slowly as in a banked campfire or quickly as in a gigantic explosion, takes place when a substance combines with oxygen and gives off heat.
• A substance is non-flammable when there is no place in its molecules for oxygen to latch onto easily.
• Sometimes this is because you’re not providing a high enough concentration of oxygen or heat to make the combining happen rapidly: pure iron, for instance, is flammable in an atmosphere of pure oxygen, but at normal O₂ concentrations and heat it combines with the oxygen far more slowly, rusting away over years.
• Sometimes, as in the case of water, a substance is non-flammable because it already contains as much oxygen as it can hold.
• Saltpeter has enough extra oxygen in it that it’s aching to give it away: heat it up a little and the oxygen comes streaming out.

Clearer? Saltpeter does not burn. Therefore it does not explode. It is safest kept away from highly flammable materials, and thus I do hope the TonOpah solar developers have their diesel tanks a discreet distance from their molten salt tanks. But if they don’t, what would happen in the worst possible accident is that the diesel would explode. It’s not pretty when big diesel tanks explode. People can get badly hurt and die. It happens. And if you have an exploded diesel tank, you’ve probably got flash temperatures high enough to vaporize some of the saltpeter, and thus you have a mild hazmat issue for first responders to deal with. In fact, Wikipedia’s page on potassium nitrate has this handy guide to firefighting around the stuff:

Fire Fighting Measures

Fire : Not combustible itself but substance is a strong oxidizer and its heat of reaction with reducing agents or combustibles may accelerate burning.
Explosion : No danger of explosion. KNO3 is an oxidising agent, so will accelerate combustion of combustibles.
Fire Extinguishing Media : Dry chemical, carbon dioxide, Halon, water spray, or fog. If water is used, apply from as far a distance as possible. Water spray may be used to keep fire exposed containers cool. Do not allow water runoff to enter sewers or waterways.
Special Information : Wear full protective clothing and breathing equipment for high-intensity fire or potential explosion conditions. This oxidizing material can increase the flammability of adjacent combustible materials.

So: no exploding saltpeter — despite the stuff having its own pesky cautions in dealing with it at high temperatures, none of which should be taken lightly — and thus no need for alarmist talk of 40-mile “blast zones” from accumulating even “millions of gallons” of it onsite, as the map taken under Fair Use provisions from the September 29 Friedcranes.org editorial would lead you to believe. That map is meant to express alarm over a larger solar thermal storage proposal in Colorado, significantly larger than the Tonopah Crescent Dunes project.

As for devastation in “Tonapah” from a saltpeter-enhanced explosion on the Crescent Dunes site, said site is just under 15 miles from town. It’s possible that some folks could badly injure themselves after being startled by the blast from 12,000 gallons of diesel fuel combining with oxygen in a fraction of a second: spilling hot coffee on themselves or falling off ladders or something. A north-facing window or two might even break. And workers at the plant itself will be in significant danger. But odds are the town will still be there afterward.

So a couple of enviros get their science badly wrong. It happens far more frequently than I am comfortable with — you can google “chemtrails” for jaw-dropping examples of same. The friedcranes folks seem to be nice enough people, though clearly just a bit too non-discerning in their choice of trusted sources of information. But people in the green camp getting their science utterly wrong is nothing new. One of the first things I had to do after taking over the Earth Island Journal for the first time was apologize to every single subscribing healthcare professional for the previous guy’s reference to “tuberculosis viruses” in milk. Not to mention the few hours I put in trying to explain to him how half-lives actually worked. A lot of this stuff has become background noise for me due to overexposure, and in most cases I’d have left the people at Friedcranes.org alone. They seem like perfectly nice people otherwise and life is short.

But then I read this piece in the Pahrump Valley Times.

SolarReserve refuted concerns circulated over the Internet by a Colorado environmental group that evoked fears of a catastrophe from an explosion from the molten salts used in a future solar power plant at Crescent Dunes.

Emails from FriedCranes.org state sodium nitrate and potassium nitrate are highly explosive saltpeter, not benign molten salts as SolarReserve touts in its company press releases.

After repeating FriedCranes’ statements about “highly explosive” nitrate salts of potassium and sodium, the article continues:

At the suggestion of the environmental group, an online check by the Pahrump Valley Times found sodium nitrate is used as an ingredient in fertilizer and pyrotechnics. Potassium nitrate is used as a fertilizer and a main component in stump removal; it’s also an oxidizing component in gunpowder.

SolarReserve had a ready answer to the group’s argument: The project is “fully permitted and completely safe.”

SolarReserve spokesman Andi Plocek said the questions over molten salt were put to rest in the environmental impact statement. She said other solar projects use molten salt storage, though most don’t have the solar tower that will be constructed at Crescent Dunes.

And this got me angry.

I’m not going to blame the reporter for this crappy story, because I don’t know what he actually turned in. Editors can take a perfectly good story and ruin it. But the Pahrump Valley Times should be ashamed of itself.

It is an objective fact that neither potassium nitrate nor sodium nitrate is explosive. A responsible article should have said so. Instead, the article turned objective fact into a he-said, she-said View from Nowhere piece, to borrow a phrase from media observer Jay Rosen.

I recognize that this isn’t the first example of scientific fact that’s been subject to this treatment. Anthropogenic global warming and evolution by natural selection are scientific facts, and they get covered this way all the time. Same goes for the spurious alleged link between vaccination and autism, and a lot of other such needless controversies.

But as far as I know, no one is seriously proposing we reexamine saltpeter’s flammability. One side of this story just has it unquestionably wrong, it’s a trivial matter to find out that they have it wrong, and that fact should have been in the first or second sentence of the piece. Which should have been framed differently anyway.  “Local High School Student With B+ Average In Chemistry Refutes Fears of Saltpeter Explosion” might have been a good headline.

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These are by Jim Stanger, unless otherwise noted. I don’t identify people in photos unless they tell me it’s cool, so that’s why I’m not doing so here. feel free to ID yourself in comments if you like.

I will, however, ID Louie — the blond puppeh in the background, and Stella, the black one in foreground gazing adoringly at him. This was in the meetup’s “living room,” underneath Florian’s awning.

A Datura, a.k.a. Jimson weed. Night-blooming disturbed soil colonizer, pollinated by hawkmoths.

Zebra-tailed lizard. These buggers can run fast, like 25 mph.

Taking advantage of a moment of shade on a hike.

A carpet of yellow Monoptilon bdelloides in front of an outcrop.

The first night’s sunset.

The first night’s sunset being photobombed by Yours Truly.

Aaaaaaahhhhhhhh.

And one by me, with the cameraphone and Instagram:

3 comments on "Meetup photos"

tl;dr version: we had a great time and we’re doing it again, so be prepared to visit the desert on the weekend of April 21, 2012. We should have warm days and cool nights around then, and very dark skies.

Friday was a bit of a mess. I’d planned on spending the morning making some last minute preparations for the campout, and ended up instead spending it getting a new battery for Annette’s car, which took up basically the entire morning. She was sick, and it was bad enough I was ditching my sick girlfriend for a weekend, I certainly wasn’t going to leave her without a car. But I found a mechanic that works on Minis two blocks from our house who was able to swap the battery out, and change the oil and airfilter besides, in a couple hours. I got out to the site only half an hour later than I said I would, and even late I was still the first person there. So, win.

One other note about the morning: a few minutes of it was spent greeting my neighbor Florian Boyd, who dropped off a shade awning, a rollup camping kitchen table and about five gallons of water in a handy jug. He couldn’t make it to the meetup, but between giving us shade and that extra water he made it far more comfortable — though not as fun as if he’d been able to make it. Thanks, Florian.

But when I got to the site, there was an appealing ironwood tree not far from where I parked, and it was casting a nice patch of shade, so I postponed setting up the awning and dragged a chair out into that shade. After about half an hour of decompressing, letting the road noise ebb from my ears and the auto repair stress seep out of my shoulders, Jim Stanger pulled into camp. We had just enough time to chat a little and then a sedan crunched over the low berm and into the campsite. Out came James Goebel, his partner Pamela Chui, and their friends Philip Anselmo and Sonia Mineo, all from the environs of Irvine California. We six sat and chatted beneath the ironwood until the sun started angling toward the west, around 5:30, at which point we all went for a walk in the cooler air. High points of that walk: coyote burrows, cryptobiotic soil crusts, ocotillos still covered in green from the storms of September, desert pavement and washes and lotsa little holes in the soil.

We turned back and got to camp just as John Helms and Hope Tracey arrived bearing nodules they’d rockhounded a few miles south, like geodes only without a hollow center. I started a fire, Pamela started cooking up some lentil soup on a cartridge stove, and Philip went for a walk in camp and made a new friend:

That photo’s by Jim Stanger. The other highlight of the twilight was John and Hope finding a sidewinder down the road a bit.

The rest of the evening, and on into the neighborhood of 3 am, was spent sitting around the fire eating, talking desert politics, drinking wine, and enjoying each others’ company. Midway through this part of the festivities Ruth Nolan showed up, bearing good cheer, more wine, and a few delicious snacks. There were some meteors. One by one people drifted away to sleep, the coyotes sang off toward Desert Center, and then it was…

Day Two.

We woke slowly at 7-8, puttering and making coffee and various shared breakfasts. I’m going to have to do the polenta again: that worked well.

Seen in the photo above, someone lounging in the shade of Florian’s awning while Jim S., at far left, makes yet more breakfast.

After a while, Hope and John took off to go see an art show in Joshua Tree. Ruth volunteered to lead everyone on a trip up to a canyon she knew, where she thought there might be petroglyphs. Someone who went on that trip will have to provide some details: I stayed in camp to greet Saturday arrivals. Of whom there was one: Janeen Armstrong, longtime reader of this blog and the one that was here before it, and a good friend. Janeen traveled to the meetup from Port Townsend, WA, and thus deserves some sort of prize even ignoring the fact that she brought Northwestern coffee and blended Scotch with her. We had about twenty minutes of catching up and then the canyon trip returned, with people not having found petroglyphs but reporting that they all had great fun nonetheless. Then the Irvine folks took off, and a couple hours later so did Ruth. Jim, Janeen and I took a slow saunter through a gorgeous wash filled with ironwoods and palo verdes, came out on Eagle Mountain Road, then walked back up to camp accompanied by about two dozen Gambels quail.

Another fire, another dinner mainly cooked by Jim, some of the delicious whisky thoughtfully provided by Neen, several hours of great conversation, and our vows to get to sleep earlier than we had on Friday night were technically kept, but not by much.

In the morning the three of us drank aero pot coffee Janeen kindly made from a batch of Guatemalan beans, which she hand-ground on site. It was good. Breakfast quesdaillas, more coffee of the less labor-intensive sort, and we were all three of us just about to reluctantly mention the prospect of rolling up the tents when a note came in from the outside world that made us procrastinate. About an hour later the sender of that note, Lakey Kolb, showed up with her Beau Stephen Andrews and their pups Louie and Stella. More great conversation ensued for an hour or so. Then we all headed for home.

Along the way, there was a lot of great conversation and brainstorming and enthusiasm about new approaches to the save the desert thing. Among the things we all generally agreed on were that 1) this was a great way for people that didn’t know the desert at all (such as for example Janeen and a few of the Irvine Gang) to get to know and love the place, and 2) we needed to do it again.

So I’m looking for venues, thinking of balances between creature comforts for the not-particularly-hardcore and actual deserty desert so that we’re not camping in an irrigated park, and April 21 seems like a good target date. So mark your calendars and I’ll have more news soon. With seven months to plan, some folks from farther away who said they’d wished they could make this one might actually be able to make the next one.

And help me think of something to call this new series of get-togethers other than “meetup.” The first one to suggest the winning name gets to eat polenta at the Spring 2012 Coyote Crossing Whatchamacallit. Suggestions from the thesaurus: “affair, assemblage, assembly, assignation, audience, bunch, call, cattle call, company, competition, conclave, concourse, concursion, confab, conflict, confrontation, congregation, congress, contest, convention, convocation, date, encounter, engagement, gang, get-together, huddle, introduction, meet, one on one, parley, powwow, rally, rendezvous, reunion, session, showdown, talk, tryst, turnout.”

I kind of like Coyote Crossing Congress. And Coyote Crossing Rendezvous would allow us to reclaim that acronym from the obsolete rock band that’s still using it.

17 comments on "Coyote Crossing Meetup report"

After a bit of scouting around with Florian Boyd a couple weeks ago, we found a better location for the Coyote Crossing meetup this weekend than the one adjacent to the Cottonwood Entrance to Joshua Tree National Park.

That location is here.

For those of you without access to Google Maps, or who prefer step-by-step directions, here’s how to get there.

1) Get to Exit 189 on Interstate 10, the Eagle Mountain Road exit, which is about 45 miles east of Indio. Note: if you’re coming from the north, you won’t be able to get there through Joshua Tree National Park as that road is closed. Detours to the west and east of Joshua Tree are available.

2) Take exit 189. Turn north on Eagle Mountain Road. If you’re coming from Indio, that’s a left turn. From Phoenix/Blythe, that’s a right turn.

3) Drive past the “Not A Through Street” sign.

4) In just about two miles an excellent dirt road will angle off to your left. Turn onto this road.

5) Ignore the “Right to pass revocable at any time” sign.

6) Look for the finely-crafted touring vehicle displayed in the photo below:

We will be camping not too far from the road, which is little-traveled. There are options for side trips including the Edmund Jaeger Nature Reserve (which is a nice place to camp but not completely accessible to standard vehicles), sites of solar projects both proposed and under construction in the Chuckwalla Valley, a cafe in Desert Center that is sometimes open, and other such delights.

Cut and pasted from this earlier post on the meetup, with only slight emendations, are some logistics:

There will be:

- A newly green post-flood ironwood and palo verde forest (note to people arriving from the Pacific Northwest: yes, it is too a forest.)
- probable coyotes singing us to sleep or awake from sleep
- a freeway two miles away with noise level set to “whisper”
- plenty of private little places to lay out a sleeping bag or two, or a tent if you swing that way
- dramatic evidence of recent flash flooding
- a few trees that cast some shade
- campfire, especially if you bring a little firewood to pitch in
- NO running water nor toilet facilities closer than the convenience store at Chiriaco Summit, which is 16 miles west on I-10, but plenty of dispersed and scenic spots for you to drag a shovel and some toilet paper to

You Should Bring:

- Something to sit on, and something extra to sit on for others if you can
- food for yourself for as long as you plan to stay, though we’ll see if we can’t do some sort of potlucky thing, and I’ll take care of Sunday breakfast
- water, and lots of it: assume a gallon per person per day
- broad-brimmed hat, sunglasses, long-sleeved shirt/pants, and sunblock
- layers for after the sun goes down
- the usual other assorted camping equipment if you’re camping

You can also bring:

treats, drinks, jokes, binoculars, stories, hiking boots, cameras, and other such jollities.

Also, a corkscrew would be useful, I am thinking.

4 comments on "Final Location for the October 14-16 Coyote Crossing Meetup"

My computer is next to a window on the north side of our building. About five feet away is the flat roof of the building next-door. Beyond that are a few palm trees and some restaurants and banks, and beyond those is a flank of Mount San Jacinto. This gives me plenty to look at when I take my eyes off the screen. A week ago a roadrunner landed on the roof and trotted back and forth in front of my window for a bit. Earlier this spring a Costa’s hummingbird would come by, hover in front of the open window a bit, and ask if the cat could come play.

But until now, I hadn’t had any lizards walk past. One just did, using the concrete block wall’s protrusion above the roof surface as a shaded walkway. It trotted past with its tail held oddly, saw me through the window screen and glass and froze.

I went for the camera until I remembered it’s not working, then grabbed my small pair of binocs instead. Only about eight feet away, the lizard filled my view in the glasses. It was a Sceloporus magister a.k.a. desert spiny lizard, a nice fat one, and it peered at me through the layers of window and I peered back at it.

After a few seconds it started doing pushups at me: a dominance / territory display, and one in which I myself have some measure of expertise. The relevant section from that post, for those of you with the tl;dr reflex:

Driving slowly back down the canyon in Annette’s Little British Convertible as the sun passed behind the mountain, I slowed for another granite spiny lizard crossing the narrow road in front of me. It stopped to face me, did some pushups at the little car exposing his blue belly in a display of territorial dominance. A few years back in the Grand Canyon I was lying on my stomach in the shade of a cottonwood and saw the granite spiny’s cousin, the desert spiny lizard, a foot in front of my eyes on the tree trunk. He did the same lizard pushups at me. His belly was green, a shiny olive color. It occurred to me as I lay there that my shirt was the same color as his display patch, and I did a few pushups right back at him. His eyes seemed to get very wide, and he did a few extremely hurried head bobs at me before he ran away. The granite spiny today brought that to mind, and if Annette’s Blue Mini had low-rider hydraulics I might have tried for a repeat performance. But we merely stalemated there for a few seconds until he wandered off the other side of the road.

Today’s spiny lizard did those pushups at me for a moment, then lowered the base of its tail almost to the cinderblock and looked at me. It took a moment to realize what he was doing. He was taking a dump. Whether to accentuate his territorial claims, or just because he had to, or a little of each, there it was — a whitish wet spot on the wall just outside the window.

And then he* bent his tail up along his left flank so that the tip was near his nose, sat down on the wall and goddamn scooched along the wall like a doberman with an annoying post-prandial itch. He did this until he’d moved about a foot. Then he lifted his tail over his head and ran away.

* I just realized I’ve switched from neuter to male pronouns here, perhaps out of a stereotyping assumption that females don’t use balconies as toilets.

2 comments on "Lizard behavior, observed"

A fantastic video by the Sonoran Institute on their work with Pronatura to restore the Colorado River Delta.

I’ve been following the Colorado River Delta issue for about a decade, and I learned things from this video. It’s an exciting program.

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Insulting people by comparing them to animals is nothing new, but in the English language we don’t put much creativity into the practice. Most animal-name insults are short, one syllable, four letters or fewer: “Dog,” “pig,” “ass,” “cow.” And we’re taxonomically uncreative, too: with occasional exceptions such as “chicken” or “turkey,” most of our day-to-day insults generally just use mammal names.

And yet we live in a wild and varied world, with informal taxonomic diversity almost as great as the biological kind! Clearly this set of circumstances cannot long stand.

As a public service, then, I have compiled thirty actual common names of actual animals that are out-of-the-box ready, plug and play insults, each one linked to a citation to prove someone actually named an animal that. read the list and tell me that each name doesn’t bring to mind someone special you could have used it on.

Mammals

• Long-Nosed Potaroo
• Yellow-Bellied Marmot

Amphibians

• Bleeding Toad
• Large Odorous Frog

Reptiles

• Major Skink
• Hairy Bush Viper
• Red-Bellied Snake
• Giant Banded Anole
• Pipe Snake

Fish

• Sarcastic Fringehead
• Monkeyface Blenny
• Bonytail Chub
• California Smooth-tongue
• Collared Carpetshark
• Deepwater Flathead
• Longjaw Mudsucker

Birds

• Emu
• Jack Snipe
• Bar-Tailed Godwit
• Limpkin
• Ruffed Grouse
• Palm-Nut Vulture
• Squirrel Cuckoo
• Tawny Frogmouth
• Red-Bearded Bee Eater
• Long-Tailed Tyrant
• Common Babbler
• Crimson-Breasted Flowerpecker
• Dickcissel
• Little Bustard

12 comments on "Thirty Vertebrate Common Names Potentially Useful As Insults"