Matthew Nisbet points to some new Gallup data that I believe supports an argument I have made in the past: that lack of public understanding of climate change is not a problem the news media can fix. From the Gallup report: While the percentage of Democrats who view the news about global warming as being …
There has been a great deal of discussion lately about an apparent global cooling trend that conventional climate science is at loss to explain. Most recently, for example, Anthony Watts made much of the latest satellite data out of Huntsville: Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of …
Today’s Climate Prediction Center monthly ENSO forecast discussion bids a fond farewell to La Niña, and illustrates the difficulty of figuring out what will happen next: A majority of the recent dynamical and statistical SST forecasts for the Niño 3.4 region indicate a transition to ENSO-neutral conditions during June – August 2008 (Fig. 5). During …
My friend Al Zelicoff is a maestro of energy conservation. It seems like a no-brainer to Al, because of the money he saves. What he has long puzzled over is why everyone doesn’t do it. The answer, I think: information. So I was delighted when my editor, Charlie, suggested recently that we have Al do …
As if things weren’t bad enough, this from NASA’s Earth Observatory: One of the worst droughts in the past decade settled heavily over the Fertile Crescent region of Iraq and Syria in the winter of 2007-2008. Under normal conditions, winter rain and rivers flowing from the mountains of Turkey sustain the rich agricultural land that …
The New York Times’ Jad Mouawad had a story yesterday that neatly illustrates how hard it will be to come up with a workable climate policy in the United States. It describes the efforts of the members of the Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of businesses and environmental groups trying to sit down at the …
(oops, typo in headline corrected) Andrew Solow and Andrew Beet out of Woods Hole have a new paper in GRL offering up the latest version of the argument that undercounting may be responsible for a spurious imputation of a trend in hurricanes (and therefore an assertion about the effect of global warming on hurricanes): [T]his …
I am concerned that summer will never come here in Albuquerque. We hit a high of 94F (34C) May 20, and it has been cooler since. It’s increasingly clear that this “summer warming” thing is a myth.
Lissa made a startling discovery yesterday at Costco. There were no women’s tennis shoes in stock. It was not just that they have become more expensive. There were none available at any price. This raises an interesting question: have we reached peak women’s tennis shoes? Will women have to start going barefoot? Or will they …
I don’t understand the numbers well enough to know how significant news like this is, but it’s clear that we’re only going to see more of this in the five-to-ten year horizon as conventional oil stays expensive: South Africa’s Sasol (SOLJ.J: Quote, Profile, Research), the world’s biggest maker of motor fuel from coal, said on …