Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.

Climate change and California water: a bad situation likely to get worse

Posted by on

If you think California’s water problems look bad now, just wait. That seems to be the message of a new study by a team from the USGS, Scripps, Berkeley and elsewhere who ran detailed simulations of climate change scenarios on the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta/San Francisco Bay system. The project provides a useful exercise, not in …

Continue reading ‘Climate change and California water: a bad situation likely to get worse’ »

Piers Corbyn, Twitter Spammer?

Posted by on

The following appeared in my twitter feed last night: Could it be that the legendary “forecaster” is resorting to twitter spamming to drum up business? (I have suggested the good folks at Twitter look into that possibility.) I counted 115 identical messages that went out at the same time last night in his twitter feed. …

Continue reading ‘Piers Corbyn, Twitter Spammer?’ »

Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians

Posted by on

While I’ve been writing about fire history in the southwest, the issue is coming up all over. As in this last week, from Texas A&M, on using tree rings to tease out fire history in the Appalachians: By piecing together the fire-scar record from numerous trees, he and his students and collaborators learned that fires …

Continue reading ‘Tree rings and fire history in the Appalachians’ »

On the relevance of paleoclimate studies

Posted by on

As Irene prepares to drop by and visit our eastern neighbors, Kevin Anchukaitis points to this: Evidence of historical landfalling hurricanes and prehistoric storms has been recovered from backbarrier environments in the New York City area. Overwash deposits correlate with landfalls of the most intense documented hurricanes in the area, including the hurricanes of 1893, …

Continue reading ‘On the relevance of paleoclimate studies’ »

Declining Colorado

Posted by on

Paul Miller and Tom Piechota have assembled a new set of data suggesting a decline in precipitation in the West, and more particularly in the basin that feeds the Colorado River. For this work, they looked at SNOTEL stations, the network of snow measurement sites run by NRCS that feed data into streamflow forecasts. For …

Continue reading ‘Declining Colorado’ »

No Living With Me Now

Posted by on

  Maggie Koerth-Baker in BoingBoing yesterday: In reality, global cooling was never a broadly accepted Theory. It’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of Americans never heard about it at all. And global cooling never had the support of most climate scientists, let alone scientists in other disciplines, like biology and public health, which …

Continue reading ‘No Living With Me Now’ »

Worst since the Dust Bowl?

Posted by on

In this epic dry year, we’ve heard a lot of “worst since the Dust Bowl” comparisons. I’ve been arguing that it’s a bogus comparison – one horribly dry year against a decadal scale phenomenon. But there’s a second reason, nicely captured by Kevin Welch today in the Amarillo Globe-News: Farming practices imported from the Midwest …

Continue reading ‘Worst since the Dust Bowl?’ »