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 …
Cool paper out today in GRL by Edmund Chang and Yanjuan Guo about the hurricane record. To try to estimate the number we might have missed when we had to depend on ship-board observations rather than satellites, Chang and Guo fed storm tracks from the satellite era into a simulation that included old-timey ship tracks …
Others at my work (I had nothing to do with this) offer their take on the Bingaman climate bill: What does it take to ratchet back an energy-hungry nation’s contributions to global warming? In the Senate, at least 60 votes. Among proposals now on the table, the one with the best chance of clearing that …
Continue reading ‘The Albuquerque Journal on the Bingaman Climate Bill’ »
Continuing our down-under theme, word that despite the Aussies’ astonishingly bad day in the Tour de France Sunday, things in the south are looking up: Families could pay less for their Christmas dinner this year as the drought eases throughout NSW, state Primary Industries Minister Ian Macdonald says. Announcing the best drought figures since May …
Bingaman’s bill is in the hopper: New Mexico Democratic Sen. Jeff Bingaman will introduce sweeping legislation today aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The bill, being introduced with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., would impose costs on industries that emit greenhouse gases, including coal, petroleum and natural gas. By reaching across the entire U.S. economy, the …
This is serious: Careers at stake with each swing, baseball players leave little to sport when it comes to their bats. They weigh them. They count their grains. They talk to them. But in towns like this one, in the heart of the mountain forests that supply the nation’s finest baseball bats, the future of …
Simon Donner observes the hurricane-wildfire link: Has the epidemic of wildfires reached the point that we need to talk about the summer fire season the way we talk about the hurricane season? Should we be as concerned, or maybe even more concerned, about the migration to the edge of the national forests as the migration …
Last night’s spectacular thunderstorm over Albuquerque is a great example of the spatial variability of the summer thunderstorm season. Lissa and I were out for a wander around sunset and saw it coming from the north, great flashes of lightning against the sunset sky. We had to stop at the market to get some breakfast …