From this morning’s Times: Enough fertile land could turn into desert within the next generation to create an “environmental crisis of global proportions,” large-scale migrations and political instability in parts of Africa and Central Asia unless current trends are quickly stemmed, a new United Nations report concludes.
The National Weather Service’s Tucson monsoon tracker. Tucson uses sustained dewpoint to answer the perennial question of when the monsoon starts. You can see we’re currently behind schedule there.
In a grand convergence of my two current hobbies (drought and Google maps), Malcolm points to a cool new product by the Australian ABC: a Google map of all of their drought coverage.
George Bush today reiterated his concerns about greenhouse gases: And therefore, I remind those who share my concern about greenhouse gases that nuclear energy produces no greenhouse gases. If you are interested in cleaning up the air, then you ought to be an advocate for nuclear power. (Applause.) Without nuclear power here in the United …
Since Ban Ki Moon’s Washington Post op-ed, drought and Darfur seems to be on the agenda. Today, AP moved this feature, which seems to be getting widespread play: Decades of drought helped trigger Darfur’s violence as rival groups fought over scarce water and arable land. Now, experts fear the war and its refugee crisis are …
On the heels of Europe’s remarkable summer of 2003, last autumn and winter were anomalously warm – as much as three standard deviations from normal, likely the warmest in 500 years, according to Luterbacher et. al in GRL. ((Exceptional European warmth of autumn 2006 and winter 2007: Historical context, the underlying dynamics, and its phenological …
A group of climate modelers at Lawrence Livermore and elsewhere has taken issue (in the peer-reviewed literature) with an argument made by Roger Pielke Sr. and others that the models cannot adequately explain variability in ocean temperatures: Using simulations of 20th century climate performed with 13 numerical models, we demonstrate that the apparent discrepancy between …
Conditions in Georgia are not the worst you’ll find in the southeast, but they look plenty bad – so bad that in this age of cool URL’s, someone down there had the foresight to register GeorgiaDrought.org. From last week’s drought monitor: In Alabama, 68 percent of the cotton crop, 48 percent of peanuts, and 78 …
The Audubon Society got a lot of media traction last week with its report on Birds in Decline. But Michael Tobis has sussed out a problem: The number of species increasing in abundance exceeds the number in decline!!! As Michael pointed out in a followup post: Reason requires fair attention to evidence. It is necessary …
From Zhengxin: In a problem that is pervasive in much of China, over-farming has drawn down the water table so low that desert is overtaking farmland. Authorities have ordered farmers here in Gansu province to vacate their properties over the next 3 1/2 years, and will replace 20 villages with newly planted grass in a …