Drought is a real problem. But this just pisses me off: Each night before going to bed, cattle rancher Barrett Broadie prays for rain. More such prayers follow on Sunday mornings, when he and his neighbors meet for church services in Ashland, a town of about 1,000 in southwestern Kansas. It’s been eight years since …
Fears of a drought in Australia are pushing up wheat prices: Wheat prices in Chicago rose to a nine-year high on speculation that drought will cut production by as much as half in Australia, the third-largest exporter of the grain behind the U.S. and Canada.
If media coverage is your measure, climate Scientist James Hansen scored big today with his paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy. Earth Headed for Warmest Temps in a Million Years was the ABC news headline. I love it that they called him “the U.S. government’s top climatologist.” And you’ve got to love a …
While we’ve all been palavering about whether there’s a legitimate hurricane-global warming link, we’ve apparently missed the real story about the way humans are causing more powerful hurricanes (this is from last October – my humble apologies for missing this vital story for so long): That, despite what experts tell us, the technlogy currently exists …
Another reminder that, while we all try to furiously explain that the hockey stick doesn’t matter all that much, or that solar variability isn’t really a deal killer, or that we shouldn’t be too concerned that the ocean is actually cooling, out beyong the science skirmishes where people have ignored the climate wars, accepted the …
This has already been hashed out in some detail over on Roger Pielke Sr.’s blog, but the Lyman et al. paper on ocean heat content is out: We observe a net loss of 3.2 (±1.1) × 1022 J of heat from the upper ocean between 2003 and 2005. Using a broad array of in situ …
A pair of papers on the relationship between solar variability and climate have been all the rage in the media and climate wars blogosphere over the last week or so. One, by Foukal et al., got the big headlines: “Study acquits sun of climate change.” Blame the humans! And it was in Nature! The other, …
I’ve been a bit of a slug about rounding up my rainfall data, but I finally got around to totalling things up from The Amazing Monsoon. Here are the numbers: Month Avg. NWS My house June 0.61 1.14 0.99 July 1.38 3.55 3.76 August 1.42 3.74 5.80 (Avg. is the National Weather Service’s long term …
Zhuang and colleagues, in GRL, publish a new analysis of high-latitude carbon source/sink behavior. Their conclusion, considering among other issues CO2 fertilization and the contribution of fire to the system (see here for a discussion of the fire CO2 source/sink issue) that the region’s CO2 contributions will go up as things warm over the century, …
If you look at the National Hurricane Center’s latest track for Lane, it looks like the moisture is headed our way here in New Mexico by some time next week. So far, though, the forecasters at the local National Weather Service office don’t think it’ll get here: CONDITIONS WILL REMAIN DRY UNDER A RIDGE OF …