Two drought-related things crossed my desk today. The first was the CLIMAS southwest outlook, documenting growing drought conditions where I live. The second involves drought in Niger. Drought’s a complicated thing, and it’s worth remembering that climate is not the only driver. A society’s resiliency is key, and Niger clearly has just about no margin …
This critique of RealClimate by James Annan resonated with me: More recently, they have plucked a couple of fairly minor papers out of relative obscurity and thrust them into the limelight for no apparent purpose other than to tear into them …. The authors’ crimes? In each case, they included a throwaway phrase which appears …
It occurs to me that if I really believe that the regional-scale climate change question is relevant, I should offer up the Albuquerque temperature numbers. 2005, according to the GISS data (adjusted to try to remove an urban bias), is the seventh warmest in history. Seven of the ten warmest years here have come since …
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 …