reading: Preparing for a talk at UNM in a couple of weeks, I’m rereading a couple of old sciency favorites: Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions and The Golem, by Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch. paper of the day: Abrupt changes in rainfall during the twentieth century, by some UW-Madison folks, offering a new and …
Bettina Boxall writes in the LA Times about “the perfect drought”: Nature is pulling a triple whammy on Southern California this year. Whether it’s the Sierra, the Southland or the Colorado River Basin, every place that provides water to the region is dry. It’s a rare and troubling pattern, and if it persists it could …
Felix W. Landerer and colleagues at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg say global warming will slow down speed up Earth’s rotation by changing ocean bottom pressure, in the process shifting mass around: We find a net transfer of mass from the Southern to the Northern Hemisphere, and a net movement of mass …
Continue reading ‘Global Warming to Speed Earth’s Rotation’ »
Andrew Dessler and Chris Reddy had an op-ed in the Newport Daily News March 16 (the text is in a blog entry by Andrew here) that took a very interesting approach to the scientization problem. It was in response to an op-ed that resurrected the hoary old “water vapor is the most powerful greenhouse gas …
Continue reading ‘An Interesting Response to Scientization’ »
I just got around to reading Wally Broecker’s interesting piece in the March 9 Science about “the carbon pie.” One of Broecker’s arguments is that market carbon emissions trading will be insufficient to meet atmospheric carbon goals, and that carbon capture will inevitably be required: Because CO2 sales would serve only as a temporary stopgap, …
We’re seeing some extraordinary snowmelt right now. Coming a month early, it’s setting this-date-in-history records up in the Rio Grande Gorge: Never, in more than a century of record keeping, have we seen a March snowmelt like that flowing down the Rio Grande Gorge in northern New Mexico right now. Record warmth across the mountains …
This is a fascinating harbinger of things to come on the Colorado River, as the dry side of the natural range of variability collides with rapidly growing water demands: A plant built to remove salt from highly saline irrigation runoff has sat idle in this southwestern Arizona community for more than 14 years after only …
Australia’s drought means no palms for Palm Sunday in New South Wales: Up to 300 NSW churches could have no palms for Palm Sunday with suppliers blaming the drought and logging for the shortage. Instead, churches will be supplied with paper replicas for the religious day, observed on April 1 this year as precursor to …
A new paper by David Lobell and his colleagues at Lawrence Livermore illustrates one of the problems with the whole “average temperature” notion ensconced in our discussions of climate change. The researchers compared outputs from 12 climate models, looking at the differences between daytime highs and overnight lows. The lows went up a little bit …
Rio Grande at Alameda Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. We’ve had a burst of warm weather over the last two weeks, and you can see it in the river. Up at Alameda, it’s running at about 1,700 cubic feet per second (cfs) well above the average of 1,100 for this time of year. I realize for …