John Quiggin threw down the gauntlet last week: Although both global warming denialists and moon landing denialists routinely accuse NASA scientists of fraud, the two groups appear not to have made common cause as yet (Please correct me if I’m wrong). Were that it were so, John. From someone called “gren” over at something called …
There’s been a great discussion over at Prometheus about a story last week in the New York Times by Bill Broad about atmospheric CO2 and paleoclimate. Given that it’s unlikely that very many people actually get 42 comments into a thread, I’ve pulled out my comment here so all three of Inkstain’s readers (hi Mom!) …
Albuquerque had its first “official” freeze of the year this morning, with a low of somewhere around 29 at the airport this morning. At my house in town, we’ve dropped below freezing a bunch of times already (apparently I live in an urban cold island), but the airport is the place with a long and …
The latest ENSO forecast is out. More of the same, expect El Niño to keep ramping up at least into early spring, odds favor season ski passes here where I live, but some bad shit elsewhere” Global effects that can be expected during November-March include drier-than-average conditions over most of Malaysia, Indonesia, some of the …
Now folks in Australia are talking (sort of) about a once-in-thousand-year drought: AUSTRALIA may be experiencing a one-in-a-1000-years drought, Prime Minister John Howard and the premiers were warned at the national water summit. The half-day meeting accelerated water trading plans and ordered emergency work to protect town and city supplies. The dire assessment of the …
A couple of things that crossed my virtual desktop recently highlight the difficulty of thinking well about the impacts of and responses to climate change and climate variability. The first is a story by Scott Baldauf from the Christian Science Monitor this morning: Is Darfur the first climate-change conflict? The second is a paper by …
Continue reading ‘Climate Change, Variability, and Darfur’ »
Agricultural practices are a key variable in whether we see an Australian dust bowl this year, according to a story this morning in The Age: Better farming practices and widespread de-stocking are likely to save Australia’s parched agricultural land from turning into a dust bowl, research suggests. But the drought – shaping as one of …
From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a piece on Marty Hoerling’s new work using the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report climate models to generate Palmer Drought Severity Index numbers for Western U.S. climate divisions over the next century: Global warming is driving the Southwest toward “a new era for drought,” according to a top federal climate researcher. …
A few years back, the U.S. Forest Service funded historian Dan Scurlock to prepare an environmental history of the middle Rio Grande basin. It’s a treasure, referred to lovingly by researchers and folks in the climate/water/environmental policy community here. But it’s very hard to come by a copy. I recently discovered that the Forest Service …
Continue reading ‘Environmental History of the Rio Grande’ »
Here’s a fascinating bit of business in GRL (I’ve only seen the abstract, haven’t read the paper): Summer soil moisture increased significantly from 1958 to the mid 1990s in Ukraine and Russia. This trend cannot be explained by changes in precipitation and temperature alone. To investigate the possible contribution from solar dimming and upward CO2 …