If I had full academic library privileges, I’d be dropping everything I had planned this afternoon to read A Study of Odd- and Even-Number Cultures: Japanese prefer odd numbers, whereas Westerners emphasize even numbers, an observation that is clear from the distribution of number-related words in Japanese and English dictionaries. In this article, the author …
Agricultural practices are a key variable in whether we see an Australian dust bowl this year, according to a story this morning in The Age: Better farming practices and widespread de-stocking are likely to save Australia’s parched agricultural land from turning into a dust bowl, research suggests. But the drought – shaping as one of …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece on Marty Hoerling’s new work using the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report climate models to generate Palmer Drought Severity Index numbers for Western U.S. climate divisions over the next century: Global warming is driving the Southwest toward “a new era for drought,” according to a top federal climate researcher. …
Check out Mark Justice Hinton’s very cool Househenge.
A few years back, the U.S. Forest Service funded historian Dan Scurlock to prepare an environmental history of the middle Rio Grande basin. It’s a treasure, referred to lovingly by researchers and folks in the climate/water/environmental policy community here. But it’s very hard to come by a copy. I recently discovered that the Forest Service …
Continue reading ‘Environmental History of the Rio Grande’ »
The whole Planet X pole shift calamity turned out to be a bust. Sorry, life and civilization as we know it were not destroyed. But not to worry! 2012 is just around the corner. As prophesied by the Mayan calendrical thingamajigs, we’re all pretty much screwed in just six short years. Not to worry, though, …
Here’s a fascinating bit of business in GRL (I’ve only seen the abstract, haven’t read the paper): Summer soil moisture increased significantly from 1958 to the mid 1990s in Ukraine and Russia. This trend cannot be explained by changes in precipitation and temperature alone. To investigate the possible contribution from solar dimming and upward CO2 …
A great public radio interview with Kurt Vonnegut on the firebombing of Dresden and the place of humor in the darkest times.
U.N. rights advocate sees more malnutrition Jean Ziegler, a U.N. expert on food rights, said that some 852 million people were “gravely, permanently undernourished on this planet” at the end of 2005, an increase of 11 million from the year earlier. Much of that increase came in Africa, where drought, climate change and poor farming …
Some interesting discussion in today’s drought monitor about the way the early water year is shaping up in the Pacific Northwest: [T]he 2006-07 wet season is off to a slow start in parts of the Northwest. From October 1 to October 24, Washington rainfall totaled just 2.48 inches (36% of normal) in Quillayute and 1.00 …