Cynthia Barnett reviews The Tree Rings’ Tale: Fleck has an eye for the detail that will grab a young person’s attention. My son was interested to learn that scientists in these different fields get to shoot down rapids, launch giant weather balloons and climb rocks. He also loved Fleck’s details about some of the makeshift …
At the work blog, cobbling together a bunch of folks I agree with in an attempt to assemble a coherent thought about the CRU mails. Comments open over there.
That was a pun. It’s a story about dead trees (ad/sub req.). Printed on paper, which is made of dead trees. The dead piñon trees stretching across northern New Mexico’s Pajarito Plateau stand out, stubborn clumps of gray still standing six years after they died. They were not alone. Craig Allen, the scientist who chronicled …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere, Dead Tree Edition’ »
If we can all avert our eyes for a moment from the CRU emails, the inexorable momentum of climate science hurtles down the track with a new paper in today’s Science using paleo records to suggest (among many interesting things) that a warming world is, for the southwestern US, a drier world. Mike Mann and …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change and Southwestern Drought’ »
It’s early days yet in terms of a forecast for 2009-10 flow on the Colorado River. Because it depends on the amount of snow that falls on the Colorado Basin’s mountains, there is great uncertainty this early in the year. But the map below can give us some hint about the probabilities: What you can …
I’m on vacation this week, with family converging, new binoculars in hand and birds to count, so posting will be light or (I hope) nonexistent other than my continued attempts to sell the book. But the whole climategate fiasco is one of those horrific-looking wrecks that you can’t avoid looking at and wondering if anyone …
When I was a little kid, I thought John Wesley Powell was the coolest, the one-armed adventurer daring the unknown as he ran the rapids of the Grand Canyon – the “Great Unknown” – for the first time. Standing on the Grand Canyon’s south rim, I would stare down at those little glimpses you get …
Daniel Collins (via haiku!) notes the important point that water folks are increasingly raising about climate change: it’s not just whether rainfall goes up or down. Increased evaporation and transpiration as the climate warms is the critical water supply variable. From Cai and others in GRL – since 1950, nearly half the reduction in soil …
I’ve not been posting on climate change much here at Inkstain recently for a couple of reasons. Most importantly, I’m trying to marshal all of my spare time (and Inkstain is a spare time gig) to think about western water. Second, the whole climate blogothing has seemed to be increasingly less than helpful, where all …
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’ »