C’s Palindrome
Ave Marie Avenue Originally uploaded by c_foster. Not exactly a palindrome, but in spirit, very much so.
Archive of entries posted by jfleck
Another Hockey Stick
We haven’t done hockey sticks here in a while, but there’s a paper in the new Journal of Climate worth noting in this regard: High variability in reconstructions does not hamper the detection of greenhouse gas–induced climate change, since a substantial fraction of the variance in these reconstructions from the beginning of the analysis in …
More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
My first serious exposure to Roger Pielke Jr.’s work was at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Albuquerque in 2001. He gave a talk laying out the basic thrust of his hurricane vulnerability argument: that societal changes (essentially building stuff on the beach) are the dominant variable in the societal hurricane risk equation. It’s an …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On paleoclimate in caves: In most parts of the world, New Mexico included, there have only been rain gauges and thermometers to record the weather for a little more than a century. To figure out what happened before, scientists are exploiting a growing arsenal of tricks, from layers of ice in Antarctica to corals that …
No Doubt a Coincidence
Roger Pielke Jr. notes a remarkable coincidence between the text written by Bjorn Lomborg in the Guardian earlier this week and something Roger wrote last month. First Pielke: Imagine, by contrast, if the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, another organization with an agenda to be “policy neutral,” were reported in the media to …
Kids Today
Much interesting discussion today about the issue of “framing” in the politics of global climate change – see, for example, Ellen Goodman’s column in the Boston Globe, along with useful discussion by Matthew Nisbet and Tom Yulsman. Useful stuff, but ignores the “sleeveless tops in February” frame. 🙂 From the Fix: What’s with the weather …
Fun With Science
For the last six months or so, Journal photographer Marla Brose and I have been hanging out with University of New Mexico grad student Mel Strong, watching him do science: To the lay outsider, science can look like an edifice of fixed knowledge— the facts in textbooks. The day-to-day business of science is different, a …
Adios, El Niño
This’ll probably come as good news to my drought-plagued Australian friends. El Niño’s just about done. For us here in the U.S., the precipitation pattern – dry in Arizona, wet in Seattle – suggests that no teleconnection really got engaged in any sort of a big way, reflective of either how weak it was, or …
Famous Rock in New Mexico
Famous Rock in New MexicoOriginally uploaded by scithdekaffa. “The land here is crappy, it is hot and nothing grows. ” – scithdekaffa (hat tip Chantal)
Northern Flicker
Our most spectacular neighborhood bird, the Northern Flicker, paid a visit to the backyard pond this morning. The pond is really a stock tank whose purpose, in addition to the entertainment provided by its undirected ecosystem, is to serve as a watering hole for neighborhood birds. Last weekend, Lissa banged through the ice and within …