Stuff I Helped Write Elsewhere
The global cooling mole.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Spring in Switzerland
This Rutishauser and colleagues have been tracking the blooming of flowers in Switzerland (can you think of a more delightful job as a scientist?). In a paper just published in GRL, they concluded that 2007 was a remarkable spring: Anomalously high temperatures led to a very early onset of plant phenological spring phases, including 98 …
Expanding Deserts
Andrew Revkin writes this morning about a paper in Nature Geoscience showing an expansion of barren desert-like regions of ocean.
Don’t Blame the Sun
A lovely bit of amateur climate science from Tim Haab: Follow the bouncing ball of logic. C02 concentrations and temperatures are correlated. Sunspot activity and temperatures are not and neither are CO2 concentrations and sunspot activity. Therefore, sunspots activities are not a causal factor in determining long-term temperature trends. Don’t worry. His work is easily …
Water in the Desert: Tempe Edition
We’ve got a standard joke around the office when it starts raining: “Drought’s over.” You’ve gotta love the picture on Arizona Republic water guy Shaun McKinnon’s blog today of water spilling over the dam in the middle of Tempe. To non-southwestern desert types: that’s a place where you don’t usually see water. But Shaun bids …
Boykoff Revisited
Max and Jules Boykoff wrote a widely quoted paper back in 2004 that has been used as a cudgel to bludgeon the news media for providing a sort of false balance in coverage of climate change that amounts to a hidden bias. The argument is that mainstream U.S. media, in its instinctive search for “balance,” …
Drought in Chile
While I’m at it, another global drought report (I’m really just catching up on some news stories I set aside over the last week to read). This time Chile: Farmers in small towns in south-central Chile have lost crops and livestock in the drought blamed on the weather phenomenon La Nina. Rainfall records show the …
Drought in China
While we’ve been seeing news of extraordinary snows in China, folks in the north are in the grip of what sounds like serious drought: The drought has led to loss of arable land, livestock and drinking water, according to the State Flood Control and Drought Relief Headquarters, the official Xinhua News Agency said late Sunday. …
Global Cooling: The Underlying Problem
Let us assume, for purpose of argument, that you are deeply concerned about the potential for humans’ impact on climate, but that you have some uncertainties about the reliability of the science that lies at the foundation of that concern. Today, you note, scientists tell us the planet is warming. But did they not argue …
Truffles
First Burmese pythons, now this: At the Aups market, the black truffle’s price has more than doubled over the past five years, to about €850 per kilo ($560 a pound). Farmers say production is down by 50-75 percent this winter season and they blame global warming, warning that if thermometers keep rising — as many …