From Andy Borowitz: In an attempt to counteract the impact of former Vice President Al Gore’s cautionary film about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Vice President Dick Cheney is starring in a new film advocating global warming, Mr. Cheney confirmed today. The Cheney film, entitled “A Really Convenient Truth,” will open in theaters nationwide in …
David Parker has published a new, more detailed analysis in the latest Journal of Climate arguing that the urban heat island effect is not responsible for the measured global warming trend. As in his earlier work on this, Parker compared windy to non-windy days: The trends in temperature are almost unaffected by this subsampling, indicating …
The news media coverage last week of the NRC “hockey stick” report provides a stark reminder of the point Dan Sarewitz made in his How science makes environmental controversies worse. While everyone prattled on about whether the hockey stick is now really broken, or the handle has been properly taped back together, or whatever, last …
Today’s word of the day is febrifacient: a thing that produces fever. In his 1845 “Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California”, Lansford Hastings noted the obvious of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain Region: it doesn’t rain much here, while in the winter “snow falls very frequently, though not to a great depth.” Sounds like …
I use the Spam Karma WordPress plugin to protect myself from people trying to boost their Google rankings by leaving comments on my blog. It pretty much runs itself, so I never pay it much attention. So I was astonished when today’s SK Simple Digest Report landed in my inbox. SK has caught 5,214 attemped …
A friend points to one of the great baseball names, Twins’ rookie picture pitcher Boof Bonser. According to the MLB web site, the former Florida high school star had his name legally changed in 2001 from “John”. (Thanks to copy editor Malcolm.)
cotton_region_shelter Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Lissa finished a nice sturdy stand for the cotton region shelter in the backyard. It’s the standard National Weather Service Coop setup. Of course my backyard would be a terrible place for a genuine Coop station – too close to buildings, etc. But this gives me a feel for how …
I don’t know how to tell for sure, but I’ll hazard a guess that this is the first time Donald Rumsfeld has been quoted in the climate literature. It’s a discussion of the latest version of the Hadley global temperature data set, and the team has gone to significant effort to quantify the uncertainties: A …
A new paper (actually came out last month, so not quite “snap snap” new) by Kostas Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier[1] looks at trends in drought severity and duration over the 20th century in the continental U.S. In much of the country, drought is getting less severe, but unfortunately not in the places that matter most …
In which Nora samples our zeitgeist via the bumpers of our cars.