With the Whitewater-Baldy fire pushing 260,000 acres (New Mexico’s largest by a wide margin), I spent some time talking with the forest-climate community about climate change, forest health and the role of natural variability in creating the conditions for the southwest’s recent megafires: Global warming is playing a role in the conditions in the Gila …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I wrote elsewhere: climate change and megafires’ »
Let us stipulate that my home weather records are subject to what Tversky and Kahneman would likely call “the law of small numbers“. Which is to say that, when I tell you May is the driest month of the year around here, you should suspect my statistical reasoning. That said, it is factually correct to …
Dan Kahan, the Yale “cultural cognition” guy, has a new paper highlighting the problem with the argument that a more scientifically literate public will solve all our scientized problems, things like climate change, GMOs and nuclear stuff where the scientific argument has become intractably embedded in a political context. (The paper’s actually targeted at climate …
Continue reading ‘Science literacy, numeracy and science policy challenges’ »
A: When April 1 falls on a Monday. That’s the conclusion of a clever bit of work by Tom Pagano, former NRCS forecaster who used to do the Rio Grande forecasts before he went on to bigger and better things. “Bigger and better” has included a stint in Australia and a current world tour of …
Continue reading ‘Q: When is an April 1 snow survey not an April 1 snow survey?’ »
Much has been made of the analogy that climate change is like steroids for our weather. But what if we’ve got the thing backwards? Here’s baseball sage Tim McCarver: It has not been proven, but I think ultimately it will be proven that the air is thinner now, there has been climactic changes over the …
Continue reading ‘The climate change-steroids analogy in reverse?’ »
I’ve long been suspicious of ski area snow reports, preferring to go with Snotel data when writing about storms. It turns out my skepticism was warranted. From Zinman and Zitzewitz (pdf): Ski resorts self-report substantially more natural snowfall on weekends. Resorts that plausibly reap greater benefits from exaggerating do it more.
Revkin: …it will be economic pressures, not scientific findings, that largely determine what the world’s nations do, or don’t do, to limit the flow of heat-trapping carbon dioxide from fuel burning.
At 0.38 inch (0.97 cm), January 2012 was the second consecutive month at my house with above average precipitation. Here’s a map of New Mexico right now: I live in that brown bit in the middle.
Climate scientist Tamsin Edwards triggered a fascinating discussion when she chose the famous George Box quote – “all models are wrong, but some are useful” – as the name for her new blog. In a delightful exchange on Twitter (which I followed in real time and which Edwards quotes extensively in the blog post linked …
Continue reading ‘Colorado River models: wrong but useful’ »
The Lamont-Doherty group that has done so much to help our understanding of the factors that drive multi-decadal droughts has added a nice piece to our understanding of the issues. In a paper in review (for which they’ve done a nice accessible writeup), Ben Cook and colleagues looked at a number of drivers for long-duration …