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.
The latest ENSO forecast came out Thursday. No big surprises here: El Niño is strengthening, as expected, expected to continue into northern hemisphere spring 2007.
James Annan has had several posts that were spot on over the past year (see here and here) about what I call “the Nature problem” – scientific results that get hyped all out of proportion because they appear in Nature. My favorite case in point is the paper in Nature last year by Bryden et …
More on the bad drought story I wrote about yesterday, an AP piece with heart-rending stories about drought in Kansas. Standardized precipitation index data showing that, since December, conditions in the area in question have been “near normal”: It’s not like there hasn’t been drought in the United States, just not in Kansas in any …
There’s a fascinating meme echoing around the Internet in recent days suggesting Al Gore said something idiotic. The source is a NewsMax story about a talk Al Gore apparently gave last week at the United Nations. The NewsMax article suggests Gore claimed that ” Cigarette smoking is a ‘significant’ contributor to global warming”. It’s obviously …
reading: Famine. A symposium dealing with Nutrition and relief operations in times of disaster, the proceedings of a 1970 meeting on the issue. I’m trying to understand what actually happens to humans, both physiologically and culturally, in famine-causing drought. reading 2: I was fascinated by the whole Hugo Chavez-Chomsky thing, and I’d not read Hegemony …