Economists sometimes get a bad rap – the unfair belief that they worship at the alter of markets above all else, ignoring real problems as a result. In fact, a great deal of contemporary economics is focused on the opposite – understanding the places where markets fail, and helping craft policies that can make up …
A reader familiar with my longstanding interest in how one defines “drought” sent along this interesting story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Federal Government-selected experts want people to start using the word “dryness” to describe Australia’s worst drought in a century. The word “drought” makes farmers feel bad, says the Government’s hand-picked Drought Policy Review …
An AP story a couple of days ago is a reminder of why I’m so pessimistic about the possibility of effective climate change mitigation. People want energy, and they want it cheap. The story opens with a young Welsh man, whose father and grandfather worked the mines: “I couldn’t believe it when I heard there …
Fascinating paper out this week in GRL on the “leap year bias” in temperature records: The addition of one extra day in February normally every fourth year produces a significant seasonal drift in the monthly values of that year in four major temperature datasets used in climate change analysis. The addition of a ‘leap year …
Mickey Glantz, a scholar whose work on societal-climate interactions has informed much of my thinking on these issues, has landed at the University of Colorado after his unfortunate departure from NCAR. Details on Prometheus.
The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then. But you already knew that, right?
Props to Andy Revkin, whose NYTimes work is the gold standard in climate coverage: A staff writer for The New Yorker and a science reporter from The New York Times have won the 2008 John Chancellor Awards for Excellence in Journalism, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced today. Jane Mayer won the award for …
Remember both tails: Make of climate models what you may, there is lots of evidence that a) biodiversity is being hammered, and b) climate change will bring desertification, drought, and possibly coastal flooding to many parts of the world, among other dilemmas. I don’t have a lot of faith in the exact predictive powers of …
Southwest is Drier Already
On drought, climate change and the arid southwest. (Kinda feels like old times.)