I ran across an old paper this morning by Vörösmarty and colleagues about the relative importance of increasing water demand vs. climate change over the next quarter century. Their conclusion is that human population growth etc. swamps any possible climate change effect. I’ve blogged about this before, but I was struck by this wonderful sentence …
USGS streamflow data
Reuters reports famine in Afghanistan because of drought: Some 2.5 million drought-stricken Afghans across much of the country have lost their crops and are facing acute food shortages, international aid group Christian Aid warned on Wednesday in the capital, Kabul. An assessment carried out by the aid group in 66 villages in the provinces of …
Google Earth Snotel Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. As winter progresses, snowpack is one of the key western U.S. drought variables to monitor. Snowpack is an important leading indicator of hydrologic drought (see here for a discussion of various drought definitions and measures) in the coming year. Snow that builds up in the mountains during the …
In a New York Times interview, Peter A. Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric in California, makes the business case for getting on board with his state’s greenhouse gas reduction initiative: Rather than sitting there and denying that global warming is a problem and climate change is a problem, my reaction was to accept …
Sir John Houghton argues that drought is the biggest climate change threat in the developing world: “It’s the extremes of water which are going to provide the biggest threat to the developing world from climate change,” he said. “Without being able to be too specific about exactly where, droughts will tend to be longer, and …
I am nothing if not diverse. From this morning’s newspaper: On U.S. nuclear weapons policy: Thursday’s announcement is driven by the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review. The 2002 report concludes that nuclear weapons will be with us for the foreseeable future “to deter a wide range of threats, including (weapons of mass destruction) and large-scale conventional …
In his ongoing drought series, Daniel Collins had a nice post last week on a trio of studies about the relationship between climate variability and both recruitment and death of piñon, the scraggly little arid pine tree provides our landscape’s signature here (when drought or global warming isn’t killing it). I’d like to extend the …
Continue reading ‘Piñon and drought: some interesting details’ »
Today’s word of the day: paleotempestology
Chihuahua Plaza – Flight Originally uploaded by Miguel Navrot. From Miguel, circa 2000