In this morning’s newspaper, on the hard-nosed national security types looking at ecosystem services as a core issue (sub/ad req): Environmental problems, from water shortages, pollution and climate change to disease and food scarcity, are at the core of national security, Passell argues. “They’re all related to the same set of problems,” Passell said in …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: The Ecology of National Security’ »
The failure of the Colorado River to reach the sea, Jonathan Foley argues, is evidence of dramatic challenges facing humanity that go beyond climate change. From an essay at Environment 360: Across the globe, we already use a staggering 4,000 cubic kilometers of water per year, withdrawn from our streams, rivers, lakes and aquifers. Of …
A look at the science and financing behind the “CO2 is Green” ads running in New Mexico (ad/sub req): It is hard to square Leighton Steward’s cheery message with the vast swaths of dead trees across the mountains of northern New Mexico. “Fall of ’02 is when they started to die,” biologist Craig Allen told …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: A Look at CO2 is Green’ »
Michael Tobis believes the prevalence of bunk on the issue of climate change is “one of the principal characteristics of our time,” and that the media’s failure to effectively counter said bunk is a fundamental failing that stands in the way of action on climate change. As I said in a previous discussion of this …
Two of my favorite climate scientist-communicators recently posted on the risks of overstating. First is Simon Donner on Ketsana, the tropical storm that devastated the Philippines: The climate policy talks in “nearby” Thailand have led to a number of sloppy media reports and climate activist statements about the role of climate change in Ketsana. For …
In early 2008, I did some inquiries on the data underlying Albuquerque’s “green” claims and we published what I found in the newspaper. With a mayoral election underway and the city pushing forward on a “Climate Action Plan”, it seemed like a good time to revisit the issue. The results: When Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chávez …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: ABQ Greenhouse Update’ »
Tom Beal has a story in the Arizona Daily Star that captures a couple of related realities one finds these days in the western water community. One is that climate change is the real deal. It’s easy to go on quibbling about the attribution problem, but the Colorado River is mostly drier these days than …
Continue reading ‘Stationarity Really, Most Sincerely Dead’ »
JPL climate scientist Bill Patzert wrote a nice op ed in the San Gabriel Valley Tribune about weather, climate and fire that got me thinking about my old home turf of Southern California yesterday: What set us up for these fires? Rain has been scarce. A large-scale drought has strangled the American Southwest for almost …
In thinking about the effects of climate change on our arid landscape, it’s easy to get distracted by precipitation numbers. Will it go up or down? How much? What’s the error bar look like? But in recent years, the research community that looks at the Southwestern U.S. has been banging away on “P minus E”. …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: It’s All About the Evaporation’ »
I’m in the midst of a story for the newspaper about drought and climate change that looks at the importance of temperature. It is not simply whether more or less rain falls, but also how much evaporation there is. This is the critical message from Richard Seager’s 2007 paper about the permanent Dust Bowl. That …