Update: The paper is up, and Seager and his colleagues have put up an excellent web page explaining the results. Story’s up over at the work site on Richard Seager’s paper being published on line by Science today: Global warming is turning the Southwest into a permanent Dust Bowl, where the dry conditions of our …
Speaking of southwestern drought (weren’t we just talking about this?), the monthly ENSO update shows more signs of creeping toward La Niña. Hurricanes, droughts, plagues of locusts, as well as some weak but suggestive evidence that the Yankees do better during La Niña years.
Cattails Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. By request, a picture of the cattails coming up in the backyard “pond”. If you look close, you can orange fish. And apparently cattails – Typha – are edible. Who knew?
DitchOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I’m stretching the point a bit, but standing at the edge of an alfalfa field in Albuquerque’s South Valley this afternoon, I was reminded of Bruce Smith’s description in last Friday’s Science of the co-evolution of humans, dogs and the bottle gourd: In Asia, for example, the domestication of two utilitarian …
Japanese Garden Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. On the bike ride today, I spied the new Japanese Garden, under construction at the botanical gardens. I’m not sure about the opening date, but if you can’t wait, walk (ride?) up the bike trail north of Central a little less than half a mile and peek through the …
Andrew Revkin on the First World-Third World adaptation dichotomy: our robust First World economic engines are both causing climate change and providing us the resources to adapt to the damage it causes. The Third World? Not so much: Michael H. Glantz, an expert on climate hazards at the National Center for Atmospheric Research who has …
The NASA GISTEMP March numbers are out. You can pretty clearly see the drop in temperatures as a result of the collapse of El Niño. They’ve also changed the way they’re calculating the adjustments for time-of-day bias and station history. (The change is explained here.) As you can see in the graph I linked above, …
reading: Preparing for a talk at UNM in a couple of weeks, I’m rereading a couple of old sciency favorites: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Golem, by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. paper of the day: Abrupt changes in rainfall during the twentieth century, by some UW-Madison folks, offering a new and …
Bettina Boxall writes in the LA Times about “the perfect drought”: Nature is pulling a triple whammy on Southern California this year. Whether it’s the Sierra, the Southland or the Colorado River Basin, every place that provides water to the region is dry. It’s a rare and troubling pattern, and if it persists it could …
Drought conditions continue to worsen across the Western U.S., according to the latest edition of the drought monitor, out this morning: Temperatures fell from the previous week’s lofty levels but remained above normal for the 7-day (March 20-26) period. Late in the period, favorably cooler, wetter weather arrived in the West in conjunction with a …