A letter in Science last week from William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute lays out a piece of the argument I’d not heard regarding the extent to which ethanol as fuel reduces, or doesn’t reduce, carbon emissions. The ethanol push in this country is causing U.S. farmers to shift from soy to corn. …
Snowpack may be looking just dandy here in the Southwest for a La Nina winter, but Klaus Wolter’s latest experimental forecast suggests it would be unwise for us to get all cocky about our decisions to buy those full-season ski passes: My experimental forecast guidance for the late winter season (January-March 2008) continues to show …
Joseph Kahn, Mark Landler and others had the latest yesterday in the New York Times series on the problems enveloping China’s rapid growth. The story uses the journalistic trope of moving from the illustrative particular to the more significant general issue underlying it. The particular in this case is the shift of steel production from …
This just in: NORTH POLE — Kris Kringle announced today that he has dropped the centuries-old tradition of stuffing coal into the stockings of naughty boys and girls. The decision comes at a time when record warm temperatures and thinning sea ice are threatening the very existence of Kringle’s North Pole toy-making and distribution center. …
Between David Roberts and James Hansen, I think we’re well past invoking Godwin’s law, but a friend sent along a new example this morning of climate change-Nazi rhetoric that I found particularly, um, amusing: One of the great ironies of 2007 was Al Gore’s sharing the Nobel Peace Prize. I argue below that Gore’s climate …
Via David Appell, a fascinating paper about El Nino and the U.S. economy: While ENSO may briefly influence the performance of particular sectors of the economy in particular regions, as documented by the previous literature, such locally-important effects vanish into the noise surrounding macroeconomic trends in an economy as large and complex as that of …
Lee’s Ferry, on the Colorado Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Sitting at home working on a chilly Saturday, this photo from a trip in 2005 reminds me that I’d rather be at Lee’s Ferry than sitting home writing about it. But it’s a pretty interesting place, so writing about Lee’s Ferry is a good close second. …
From North Carolina, word that residents are not really all that altruistic and require some sort of pricing structure to help them understand that they’re in a frickin’ drought: Less than two months ago, Gov. Mike Easley urged all North Carolina communities to reduce water consumption by 50 percent. After showing marked declines in the …
I recently discovered the USGS’s wonderful photo archive, which (among many other things) has a huge collection of the photography from the second John Wesley Powell survey of the Grand Canyon. Powell quote of the day: Many droughts will occur. Many seasons in a long series will be fruitless.
From K. V. Ramesh and P. Goswami last week in Geophysical Research Letters, evidence that India’s monsoon, bringer of the rains to feed the farmers who feed the residents of one of the world’s largest nations, may be in decline: We show here, based on an analysis of daily gridded observed rainfall data for the …