Dr. Water goes to the place that has none: Copiapo is one of the Atacama’s “wetter” places, as they told me they last had rainfall in 1997 – a whopping 60 mm (2.4 inches) in one day that year. The long-term annual average (meaningless, really) is 10 mm or 0.4 inches.
From the BBC: Two Somali journalists have been killed in the capital Mogadishu in separate attacks within hours of each other. The owner of HornAfrik radio and television, Ali Iman Sharmake, died when his car exploded after apparently running over a landmine. He had just been to the funeral of one of his leading radio …
Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis: This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 …
Added Laura Paskus’s High Desert Reports to my blogroll and feed reader. She’s a freelance journalist here in New Mexico who does a good job of paying a lot of attention to issues I’m trying to keep better track of. I’m a bit slow on the uptake, but I reached the point where I said …
The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to …
According to this story, they’ve got the water in Zimbabwe, but they don’t have the electricity to pump it to the fields: Rensen Gasela, a farmer in Midlands Province and former chief executive for cereals at the state-run Grain Marketing Board, told IRIN, “We have enough water in the dams but we do not have …
From one of those high-minded British publications: Walking does more than driving to cause global warming, a leading environmentalist has calculated. Food production is now so energy-intensive that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance. The climate could …
squirrelOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Some random notes arising from cleaning off my desk and related spaces in my brain. Not sure this hangs together, but I need to put it somewhere so I can get on with my afternoon: Walking this morning with Lissa and Sadie along Embudo Arroyo, a concrete arroyo in Albuquerque’s Northeast …
Jim Belshaw recently linked to Strange Maps, a blog that is what it says. My interest in maps involves the intersection of the aesthetic with the cognitive, and the way the decisions about what you put in and what you leave out goes a long way both toward communicating and circumscribing. Today, a map of …
Pumping crap into the air to cool things off has been suggested as a way of countering global warming. A new paper by Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai at NCAR makes this look like a bad idea. They used actual volcanic eruptions as an analog and looked at their effect on the hydrologic cycle: Following …