Quote of the Day

But the question “Has man inadvertently changed the global climate, or is he about to do so?” is quite legitimate. It has been widely discussed publicly – unfortunately with more zeal than insight. Like so many technical questions fought out in the forum of popular magazines and the daily press, the debate has been characterized …

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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

Been said before, but bears repeating: Tom Swetnam’s Senate testimony Monday: Global warming is making Western wildfires worse, a top fire expert told members of the U.S. Senate on Monday. Combined with a century of firefighting that has left some forests choked and overgrown, along with people building more and more communities at the forests’ …

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Disappearing Tundra

The highest mountain “tundra” terrains of the Western United States are disappearing because of warming temperatures, according to a new paper by Henry Diaz and Jon Eischeid: In the last 20 years (1987–2006), rising temperatures have caused a significant fraction of these areas to exceed the 10°C threshold for alpine tundra classification. The result has …

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The Arctic and Drought

Robert Krier has a fascinating piece in this morning’s San Diego Union Tribune suggesting a linkage between arctic melting and drought in the Southwest: Three years ago, computer forecast models predicted that in 2050, the reduced ice mass would cause climate shifts that would result in a drought in the western United States. But the …

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Fall

I’ve been incredibly busy lately, with a couple of fun but time-consuming outside projects going on, so I secretly harbored a fantasy this year: that the New York Yankees (my chosen baseball organization) would not make the playoffs. That likely labels me as not a true fan. Maybe that’s so. Being a Yankee fan takes …

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