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 …
U.N. rights advocate sees more malnutrition Jean Ziegler, a U.N. expert on food rights, said that some 852 million people were “gravely, permanently undernourished on this planet” at the end of 2005, an increase of 11 million from the year earlier. Much of that increase came in Africa, where drought, climate change and poor farming …
Some interesting discussion in today’s drought monitor about the way the early water year is shaping up in the Pacific Northwest: [T]he 2006-07 wet season is off to a slow start in parts of the Northwest. From October 1 to October 24, Washington rainfall totaled just 2.48 inches (36% of normal) in Quillayute and 1.00 …
art: Apropos of nothing except that I happened to have just listened to it, a marvelous old NPR piece from a few years back on Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks”. paper of the day: Multi-Century Tree-Ring Reconstructions of Colorado Streamflow for Water Resource Planning, by Connie Woodhouse and Jeffrey Lukas. The tree ring people have …
From the Inkstain Australia desk, word that folks Down Under are turning to crime in response to drought: Rainwater tanks around Canberra have been drained and farm ponds have been pumped dry. Police say stealing water is often the perfect crime because evidence disappears without trace.
With drought in Australia, snakes are on the move: Although snakes don’t need water because they don’t sweat, Mr Neindorf said they rely on food to keep their fluids at a reasonable level, meaning more of them were on the ground in search of a meal. “Because conditions have been so dry for such a …