From today’s New York Times, a story about a Marine patrol, occupying an Iraqi home as an observation outpost, and getting news of the election fallout from their “host”: Now they were being told by an Iraqi whose house they occupied that Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, one of the principal architects of the policies …
The latest ENSO forecast is out. More of the same, expect El Niño to keep ramping up at least into early spring, odds favor season ski passes here where I live, but some bad shit elsewhere” Global effects that can be expected during November-March include drier-than-average conditions over most of Malaysia, Indonesia, some of the …
Now folks in Australia are talking (sort of) about a once-in-thousand-year drought: AUSTRALIA may be experiencing a one-in-a-1000-years drought, Prime Minister John Howard and the premiers were warned at the national water summit. The half-day meeting accelerated water trading plans and ordered emergency work to protect town and city supplies. The dire assessment of the …
A couple of things that crossed my virtual desktop recently highlight the difficulty of thinking well about the impacts of and responses to climate change and climate variability. The first is a story by Scott Baldauf from the Christian Science Monitor this morning: Is Darfur the first climate-change conflict? The second is a paper by …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change, Variability, and Darfur’ »
A comment worth pulling out and highlighting: Indeed, perish it was. Although before that it was “paper” for over 100 years 🙂 . From the Allied Paper mill site.
Sunshine and death on the streets of Albuquerque, via the lens of Miguel. (And apropos of nothing except an odd coincidence, as I’m penning this post, I’m listening to Bela Lugosi’s Dead. Which Miguel gave me. Wooooo….)
I heard a story once about John Coltrane that I’ve always loved. I don’t remember where it’s from, so take this with a grain of salt, but the story was that Coltrane spent his whole life looking for the right saxophone mouthpiece. He had this sound in his head, and he was always looking for …
Benny the Ice Pick has some great advice for staying warm on the bike come winter.
Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the …
Problems with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear stockpile surveillance program: Critical tests on eight of the nine weapons in the U.S. stockpile were not done in 2005, the investigators found. As a result, the nation’s military leadership “lacks vital information about the reliability of the stockpile,” the investigators found. “I begin to worry,” said …