Breakfast with Beethoven this morning while reading an excellent article by my colleague Tania Soussan on the last decade’s history of water struggles on the middle Rio Grande. For readers outside the newspaper’s circulation area, the problem of climate variability hammered us in the mid to late 1990s when a two-decade pluvial switched off and …
All four regular readers of this blog (Hi Mom!) are no doubt aware of my occasional consternation with Benny Peiser and his bollocksed-up reading of climate science. But despite that, I’ve been an enthusiastic consumer of Benny’s CCNet for years. I started reading it when I was writing a lot about near-earth objects – asteroids …
Some doofus at the local rag wrote a story yesterday about how we were on the brink of setting a record for the driest six months in Albuquerque history. Hah! I slipped in and out of sleep a couple of times early this morning to the gentle patterings of rain on the roof, and awoke …
Lissa picked up an Ocotillo last fall at the going-out-of-business sale at Rowland’s Nursery. We’re well beyond its natural range, but it’s always been one of our favorite plants, and we see people have some success here with them. Today, Lissa noticed it had leafed out. Also, L shot a picture of the Harison’s rose …
Chris de Freitas, quoted in the Calgary Sun: “The fear-mongering about more droughts and more floods is pure hype and pure speculation and is not based on science.” (Hat tip Benny Peiser for the link.) Dai et al., Journal of Hydrometeorology: Vol. 5, No. 6, pp. 1117–1130 Together, the global land areas in either very …
Following a trail of Googlecrumbs, I stumbled across this today, which may be the first climate story I ever wrote. It’s on Henri Grissino-Mayer’s tree ring work out at El Malpais, one of the best and longest southwest climate reconstructions available: This may be a desert, but new research suggests the past two centuries have …
Sitting in the backyard this morning eating second breakfast after my bike ride, I noticed that the first yellow blossom on the Harrison’s rose has emerged. April 26. Could have happened yesterday (April 25), but they for sure weren’t out the evening of the 24th. In honor, I’ve started a new “phenology” category.
Last month, I mentioned the flood of climate news out of NASA. Well, it appears the logjam in poor George Deutsch‘s inbox was truly enormous. A couple of new ones that landed this week: Earth’s big heat bucket Northern forest affected by global warming (this one must have been in Deutsch’s inbox for a while …
Drought is almost surely the most important piece of climate change/variability in terms of its impacts on human society (sorry, hurricane fans – I’ll defend this if needed). And sub-Saharan Africa is ground zero, the Gulf Coast of drought risk. So this should give pause – evidence that the models aren’t getting African drought right: …
A riff on the counterintuitive problem of black holes.