One of the points that Mickey Glantz makes is that drought, as a societal rather than a meteorological event, requires not just the rain to fail, but also a society’s institutions. So what’s happening in South America right now, in particular the political fallout from a reduction in precipitation, is intriguing. From Ecuador: A drought …
From this morning’s newspaper: Here in the Southwest, the question of whether we can trust climate science — not the few scientists involved in the e-mails, but the enterprise as a whole — matters a great deal because of what the science’s leading practitioners have been telling us in recent years. Tucked away in a …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: E-Mails Don’t Put Water in the Colorado River’ »
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 …