Sir John Houghton argues that drought is the biggest climate change threat in the developing world: “It’s the extremes of water which are going to provide the biggest threat to the developing world from climate change,” he said. “Without being able to be too specific about exactly where, droughts will tend to be longer, and …
In his ongoing drought series, Daniel Collins had a nice post last week on a trio of studies about the relationship between climate variability and both recruitment and death of piñon, the scraggly little arid pine tree provides our landscape’s signature here (when drought or global warming isn’t killing it). I’d like to extend the …
Continue reading ‘Piñon and drought: some interesting details’ »
Today’s word of the day: paleotempestology
paper of the day: When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows?: “Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable. Rather than an excuse for inaction, such insights should inform more …
ethio drought 15 Originally uploaded by aheavens. While we’re on the subject of drought, I stumbled on this, by Andrew Heavens, on Flickr. Heavens is a journalist in Ethiopia.
Andrew Dessler hauls out the old dice metaphor for a helpful discussion of why one might take long term climate forecasts seriously even if those silly meteorologists can’t get tomorrow’s weather forecast right: One simple way to think about the difference in predicting weather and climate is to think about rolling a six-sided die. Predicting …
Continue reading ‘Climate Forecasts vs. Weather Forecasts’ »
Following on Daniel Collins’ discussion of the different measures and definitions of drought, here are a few useful web pages that pull together various indices. One of the problems Daniel pointed out about my use of the Standardized Precipitation Index is that it only captures precipitation anomalies, which misses the temperature side of the equation. …
NASA has put up a nice sea surface temperature page, for tracking El Niño in the Pacific and hurricane conditions in the Atlantic. You can see the El Niño warming.
Drought concerns (Australia, El Niño) continue to drive up the price of wheat: Wheat prices rose to a 10-year high on concern that drought will reduce supply from Australia, the third-largest exporter of the grain. Prices earlier soared by their daily limit for a second day and reached the highest since June, 1996, in Chicago. …
Great piece by Daniel Collins today on Pinus edulis (our beloved piñon) and decadal-scale climate variability. [T]his episodicity was driven not by natural population processes but by the progression of strong decadal wet and dry regimes, as evidenced by the tree ring data. During pluvial events (pluvial is the opposite of drought), abundant soil moisture …