Lookin’ stupid
This morning in my rain gauge: 0.26 inch (0.66 cm) rain. This morning in my newspaper: Receding El Niño Leaving West Dry
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Another Hockey Stick
We haven’t done hockey sticks here in a while, but there’s a paper in the new Journal of Climate worth noting in this regard: High variability in reconstructions does not hamper the detection of greenhouse gas–induced climate change, since a substantial fraction of the variance in these reconstructions from the beginning of the analysis in …
More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
My first serious exposure to Roger Pielke Jr.’s work was at an American Meteorological Society meeting in Albuquerque in 2001. He gave a talk laying out the basic thrust of his hurricane vulnerability argument: that societal changes (essentially building stuff on the beach) are the dominant variable in the societal hurricane risk equation. It’s an …
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
On paleoclimate in caves: In most parts of the world, New Mexico included, there have only been rain gauges and thermometers to record the weather for a little more than a century. To figure out what happened before, scientists are exploiting a growing arsenal of tricks, from layers of ice in Antarctica to corals that …
Kids Today
Much interesting discussion today about the issue of “framing” in the politics of global climate change – see, for example, Ellen Goodman’s column in the Boston Globe, along with useful discussion by Matthew Nisbet and Tom Yulsman. Useful stuff, but ignores the “sleeveless tops in February” frame. 🙂 From the Fix: What’s with the weather …
Adios, El Niño
This’ll probably come as good news to my drought-plagued Australian friends. El Niño’s just about done. For us here in the U.S., the precipitation pattern – dry in Arizona, wet in Seattle – suggests that no teleconnection really got engaged in any sort of a big way, reflective of either how weak it was, or …
Water in the Desert
Alameda DamOriginally uploaded by heinemanfleck. John Wesley Powell would be proud. From his 1878 “Report on the Arid Lands“: There are two methods of storing the waste waters. Reservoirs may be constructed near the sources of the streams and the waters held in the upper valleys, or the water may be run from the canals …
Hayduke Returns
If you want to understand the contradictions of life in 21st century west, there are two books you must read: John Wesley Powell’s Report on the Arid Lands, and Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang. You also must understand that both were deeply insightful, and that both were also full of crap, and thinking through …
IPCC Precipitation Map
IPCC Precipitation Map Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. By what seems like a series of coincidences (or not?), I’ve been reading and writing and trying to write lately about maps – the information in them, the things cartographers leave out of them, their implications for understanding things about the world around us, and also the choices …
Skiing in Bolivia
Who knew there was skiing in Bolivia? Not any more, apparently: Their pride in the ski resort here, the only one in Bolivia, soon gives way to a grim acceptance that the glacier that once surrounded the lodge with copious amounts of snow and ice is melting fast. Attributing the melting to the growing emission …