Drought and Climate Change in Australia
From AFP: Prime Minister John Howard warned against linking Australia’s worst drought on record to doomsday forecasts about climate change Wednesday, saying “a sense of proportion” was needed.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
More Melting
New NASA data in Eos today shows remarkable melting in Greenland: A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that …
The Horror of Drought
The price of Australian wine is predicted to soar as the country’s crippling drought threatens to halve next year’s grape harvest.
The Soybean Problem
Today’s paper of the day is Regional climate change over eastern Amazonia caused by pasture and soybean cropland expansion: Field observations and numerical studies revealed that large scale deforestation in Amazonia could alter the regional climate significantly, projecting a warmer and somewhat drier post-deforestation climate. Sampaio, G., C. Nobre, M. H. Costa, P. Satyamurty, B. …
Water in the Desert: Base Flow Edition
Rio Grande Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Looking south down the Rio Grande from the Paseo del Norte Bridge in Albuquerque Sunday, Sept. 23, 2007. That’s maybe 450 cubic feet per second of flow, which is getting down toward what they call “base flow“. That’s the minimum flow in a desert river, the point at which …
The Problem With Meat
The problem with meat is that it’s yummy. But it’s also probably the lowest hanging greenhouse gas reduction fruit in the developed world. Simon Donner has more: In order to achieve the twin goals of reducing poverty and fighting climate change, we will need to decrease the GHG emissions required to produce a gram of …
Dude!
Via Stoat comes word that the fight against global warming does not come without a price: The British Surfing Association (BSA) and the environmental campaign group Surfers Against Sewage (SAS) back the principle of wave power and the Wave Hub project. But they remain worried that if the size of the project is increased or …
Antarctic Snowmelt
From NASA Goddard: NASA researchers using data collected from 1987 to 2006 found snow melting in unlikely places in 2005: as far inland as 500 miles away from the Antarctic coast and as high as 1.2 miles above sea level in the Transantarctic Mountains. The 20-year data record was three times longer than previous studies …
More Bad News From Down Under
The drought thing’s back in the news: Scarce winter rain across much of drought-parched Australia led a key government forecaster Tuesday to slash its harvest predictions for wheat and barley. The wheat harvest, one of Australia’s major agricultural exports, was estimated at 15.5 million metric tons (17 million U.S. tons), down 31 percent from the …
Drought Map Mashup
Some smart person at NOAA’s climate prediction center has done a lovely mashup of two maps I regularly look at to track drought: the weekly drought monitor and the USGS streamflow map.