Intriguing paper by Pierson and colleagues, looking at a big demographic survey of the great saguaro cactus: Averaged across the region, saguaro regeneration rates were highest from 1780 to 1860, coincident with wet conditions and high Pinus ponderosa recruitment in the highlands. Milder and wetter winters and protection from livestock grazing likely promoted late 20th …
Continue reading ‘Saguaro, Ponderosa and regional climate’ »
Lauren Morello at E&E has a fascinating piece about research into the views of US farmers regarding climate change: “Most of the farmers will admit that climate change is happening,” he said of the growers he advises in western Kentucky, on the Corn Belt’s eastern fringe. “What they don’t want to hear is that it’s …
When do you not want your forecaster telling you everything she knows? Tom Pagano, who used to do our Rio Grande forecasts for the NRCS and now is a sort of global wandering river forecaster without portfolio, explains from the vantage point of a passenger sitting at Gatwick: Imagine a parallel universe without bias on …
Tom Stienstra at SFGate recently wrote that California can expect an early, wet winter. How do we know this? There’s a saying, “Birds never lie.” If so, the best weather forecaster in the West, the migratory sandhill crane, is predicting an early winter with plenty of rain and snow. Over the years, the timing of …
Continue reading ‘Sandhill cranes as seasonal forecasters – is this just bullshit?’ »
I’ve long thought “drought” is a troublesome word, implying abnormal when we’re really talking about dry part of the normal range of variability. My colleague Rene Romo has a marvelous quote that sidles up to that point in an excellent story today about the problems of southeastern New Mexico farmers and ranchers: Woods Houghton, the …
I don’t think we’ll recognize this: One upshot will be the emergence of whole new ecologies. The landscape changes brought on by climate change are affecting areas so vast that many previous tenants of the land—ponderosa pines, for instance—cannot be expected to recolonize their former territory. Their seeds don’t normally spread far from the parent …
Continue reading ‘deBuys on the climatology of the New West’ »
Nancy Gardner at the Omaha World-Herald has done a nice job of placing the current US drought into context: [W]hile a federal report released earlier this week ranks this as the largest drought in the lower 48 states since 1956, Fuchs cautions against making too many comparisons to the droughts of the 1950s and 1930s. …
Hillary Rosner, writing at the New York Times, talked to Craig Allen and captured the essence of the angst as the west burns: “These forests did not evolve with this type of fire,” said Dr. Allen. “Fire was a big deal in New Mexico, but it was a different kind of fire.” The result, he …
Over at the work blog, I’ve been having fun with the onset of the North American Monsoon (or lack thereof). My smartypants idea Tuesday, to crowdsource the problem of predicting the onset of our summer rains, turned out in retrospect to be lousy. I made a spreadsheet and everything. So far just four entires, what …
When I posted a couple of weeks back on the fact that land in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta is subsiding faster than sea level is rising, a smart reader asked privately, “Yeah, so what’s the point?” My reader’s observation was, in essence, that it doesn’t really matter much in terms of policy response whether the …