The central premise of my book project is that, despite the enormous western water problems I regularly chronicle here and in the various other places I publish, I expect that we’ll do OK in the long run. My optimism comes from the way communities, when they approach the edge of the water supply cliff, show …
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …
Academia’s institutional culture fails to reward the critical work of tailoring climate science to the people who most need to understand its implications, according to a fascinating new paper by Kristen Averyt, in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Averyt is deputy director of the Western Water Assessment, a University of Colorado-based …
Continue reading ‘Toward a More “Patient-Centered” Climate Science’ »
More blathering from the morning paper, this the tale of the fascinating work of Blair Wolf (sub/ad yada yada) a University of New Mexico biologist who studies the water consumption of desert birds: The smaller a desert creature, the more water loss matters, and little birds like verdin are especially vulnerable, Wolf said. Sometimes, that …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere II: Birds, warming and the desert’ »
In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
Interesting bit of work in today’s Science arguing that heat, rather than drought, may be the most significant determinant of declining food production as a result of climate change: It will be extremely difficult to balance food deficits in one part of the world with food surpluses in another, unless major adaptation investments are made …
Continue reading ‘Heat, Not Drought, May Pose Biggest Food Threat Under Climate Change’ »
From the BBC: Great tits cope well with warming: Researchers found that great tits are laying eggs earlier in the spring than they used to, keeping step with the earlier emergence of caterpillars. (via Belshaw)
Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming. Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, …
For those of you who insist that of course every right thinking person agrees that the need to adapt to climate change shares equal importance with greenhouse gas reductions, Roger Pielke Jr. has another example worthy of your attention. The quote is from ClimateWire: Environmental and humanitarian activist groups plan to formally ask the World …
Given David Roberts’ apparent conversion to the view that simply everyone who matters in the climate change community agrees that the need to adjust to the problems being caused by climate change (“adapt”, in the lingo) shares equal importance with the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (“mitigate”), I thought a scorecard of Gristmill’s coverage …