ENSO Forecast
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.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
The Nature Problem
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 …
Bad Drought Reporting: A Visual Aid
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 …
Cigarettes and Global Warming
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 …
Daybook
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 …
More Bad Drought Reporting
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 …
El Niño’s Bite Already Being Felt
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.
Hansen Scores
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 …
The Hurricane Story We All Missed
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 …
Kyoto Doesn’t Seem to Help
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 …