Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis: This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 …
The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to …
Pumping crap into the air to cool things off has been suggested as a way of countering global warming. A new paper by Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai at NCAR makes this look like a bad idea. They used actual volcanic eruptions as an analog and looked at their effect on the hydrologic cycle: Following …
Watercrunch points out the significant expansion of drought conditions in Alabama in this week’s drought monitor: The Southeast: With scattered rain last week in the Southeast, drought conditions did not improve, but instead expanded in some areas. Even with recent rains, many recording stations were below normal for July. Mississippi is a good example of …
It seems increasingly a waste of blog time to point out papers that show the planet’s warming. We already know that, right? So apologies for wasting your time, nothing really new to see here, move along. Today’s paper of the day comes from Paul Della-Marta and the University of Bern and colleagues: [O]ver the period …
birds: For the first time I can remember, two hummingbirds in an uncomfortable detente, sharing our front porch feeder. A third hovered in the distance, out by the daylilies. Why can’t we all just get along? paper of the day: For reasons that will eventually become clear – Holocene Vegetation in Chaco Canyon, by a …
It was pouring rain when I left the office this evening, so I took surface streets rather than the messy freeway. The concrete arroyo by my work was running high as I passed, so I started slowing and watching every time I went over one. They were raging and roiling and doing their best to …
I got a note last week from a California resident thinking about moving to New Mexico. She had a lot of great questions, including wanting to know more about this “monsoon” thing. I tried to explain that it’s not a big massive raining all the time in all the places sort of thing. Here’s the …
More drought: Farmers have threatened to protest unless they receive more government help in coping with a prolonged drought that has destroyed millions of hectares (acres) of crops. The drought has cost Romania €1.5 billion (US$2 billion) in damages and has affected more than a third of the country’s arable land, an agriculture official said …
A NASA group has come up with a new model that incorporates both remote sensing data and food prices to try to help anticipate food shortages: Brown, the lead author of a study to be published early next year in the journal Land Economics, said that until now officials have primarily studied the after effects …