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 …
Talking about drought with Mom and Dad at dinner tonight (my poor family), I brought up the “Civil War Drought”, which hit the middle of North America in the late 1850s and ’60s. Dad wanted to know more about where it hit, and I wasn’t sure. I found out. I could just call and tell …
Nick Brooks kindly dropped by a few weeks back with a comment that’s worth pulling out and highlighting in its entirety. Brooks is assistant director of the University of East Anglia’s Saharan Studies Programme, and I’d commented on a paper of his on cultural response to climate change. Nick’s comment: Flattering that you guys are …
Continue reading ‘Brooks on Climate, Society and “Progress”’ »
This is a great example of the issue Daniel Collins raised a couple of days ago in a discussion of the definition of drought – the extent to which the demand side of the equation must be taken into consideration. It’s a Reuters story about Prince Edward’s visit to northwest Kenya, “where drought has decimated …
Heard on a local TV ad today: Skiers and snowboarders! El Niño is back, and it’s gonna be a great year!
Daniel Collins has a nice post on the problem of defining drought.