The various analyses of global surface temperature are up for 2005. Realclimate has a rundown. The map from the NASA GISS folks is instructive: By the GISS measure, 2005 is the warmest year since reliable temperature measurements have been available. By the measurement of the World Meteorological Organization and Climatic Research Unit group in the …
Riding down New Mexico 313 through Sandia Pueblo this afternoon, I was reminded of how beautiful New Mexico is. I was riding with a woman who’d just moved here from Tucson (no slouch of a city in terms of its desert beauty), and she kept noticing things I took for granted – a trio of …
Scribblista notes our tumbleweed snowman, which makes an annual appearance beside the freeway near my house. Your science fact of the day: tumbleweed, also known as Russian thistle, is not native to North America, having originated in a batch of flax seed from the Ukraine. (Then shouldn’t it be “Ukrainian thistle”?)
reading: Sedentism and Mobility in a Social Landscape: Mesa Verde and Beyond, by Mark Varien. Varien proposes a model for understanding mobility in archaeological studies at the household level, which makes a lot of intuitive sense to me. Thinking of my Northeast Heights neighborhood as having been “continuously occupied” since its post-World War II construction …
Steve McIntyre, fresh from AGU, has noticed Jonathan Overpeck talking about drought and sea level rise, inferring some newly minted marketing message: It’s hard not to conclude that Overpeck was attuned to the market and giving them what they wanted. You want sea level – Overpeck had sea level. You want drought – Overpeck had …
Read a good article this morning in Science News by Janet Raloff about science in the courts – how the 1993 Daubert decision has changed the way courts handle scientific evidence in controversies. At the heart of the piece is the different views of the two cultures – science and the law: Scientists question, test, …
Dave Thomas points to an argument that is largely evidence-free but nevertheless alluring: Doug Kern at Tech Central Station on how the Internet killed off enthusiasm for UFOs: The Internet processes all truth and falsehood in just this fashion. Wild rumors and dubious pieces of evidence are quick to circulate, but quickly debunked. The Internet …
OK, here’s something I don’t get: a new paper in GRL by Russell Vose at the National Climatic Data Center suggesting the decrease in the diurnal temperature range slowed dramatically from 1979-2004. Maybe some of you climate types can ‘splain this? (Backstory for non-climate wonks: The “diurnal temperature range” is the difference between the daytime …
Kevin Vranes on the reality of Kyoto and Montreal: The real consensus we need to reach here is whether slowing GHG increases is worth it or not. Kyoto has always been close to irrelevant climatologically and while I feel the pain of those making the “it’s a start, a necessary first step” argument, I have …
I did not know that the bottle gourd was the first domesticated plant in the Americas, 10,000 years ago. (If you’d asked me, I would have guessed maize. Wrong.) It’s what archaeologists call a “utility species” – domesticated not for food but for non-edible usefulness. (Dogs also qualify as a “utility species.”) Bottle gourd was …