El Nino “dissipated”
I like the Climate Prediction Center’s language in formally announcing the end of El Niño in this month’s forecast discussion: El Niño dissipated during May 2010…
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
River Beat: It Could Be Worse
I guess the best you can say about the updated forecast for Colorado River flows for the rest of the 2010 water year is that it could have been worse. A wet April in the northern reaches of the Colorado River basin has pushed the Lake Powell inflow forecast, out today from the Kevin Werner …
G.K. Gilbert and the changing Great Salt Lake
One of my favorite stories of early western water science is the clever way geologist G.K. Gilbert, in the 19th century, used the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake as a proxy for decadal-scale climate variability. Here’s how I told the story in my book: The lake has no outlent, and so the only …
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River Beat: Colorado River Forecasts Continue to Drop
Update: Tom Pagano points out in the comments, I think correctly, that I’m incorrectly interpreting the data because the most recent data points cover a shorter period of time. So take this with a grain of salt…. ******* At the risk of overanalyzing a single short term data point, the weekly model runs from the …
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’70s Cooling Myth Paper Grows Legs
I am happy to report that a paper I helped write, The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, has been included in McGraw Hill Annual Editions Environment 10/11, a collection used as an undergraduate environmental and earth science reader. (Full disclosure: the series editor, Zach Sharp, is a friend.)
Confusing metaphorical warfare with policy substance
Matthew Nisbet, in Slate today, gives thoughtful voice to my growing frustration with the way my friends in the science community have been approaching the climate politics and policy discussion of late: The problems begin when scientists overestimate the influence of climate skeptics and their corporate backers. When legislation and international treaties fail, and polls …
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Energy, Meet Climate
Emily Pierce has a story in Roll Call that illustrates the dilemma facing those who advocate greenhouse gas reductions. Action on climate change has become politically toxic, while action on energy legislation has not: Dorgan was upset that the so-far failed efforts of Kerry and Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to craft …
Much Ado About Not Much?
Dan Vergano* has an important piece in USA Today that tries to step out of the climate wars echo chamber (apologies for metaphor butchery) to look at the data on the effect the whole CRUKerfuffleGate thing is having on the body politics. He bases his argument on data from Jon Krosnick, a leading academic pollster …
Climate Coverage: A Cheap Media Case Study
Science magazine has two very interesting papers in Friday’s issue related to climate and energy. One looks at a potentially significant climate change problem, and the second looks at a potentially significant energy system solution. The first, by Natalia Shakova and colleagues, looks at the possibility that methane is venting faster than expected from the …
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Low Bad
As Emily Green likes to point out, low is bad when it comes to flow and water storage on the Colorado, and it’s increasingly clear that low is what we’ll get this year: According to the forecast out today, flow into Lake Powell on the Upper Colorado, which is the key point on the western …