Jim Giles has a story in last week’s Nature (sub. req.) pointing to some preliminary work linking warm Atlantic temperatures to last year’s devastating Amazon drought: The drought first caught scientists’ interest because its cause was unusual. Dry spells in the Amazon usually occur in El Niño years, when warm water off the Pacific coast …
The latest drought monitor, out this morning, pretty much wipes out drought conditions completely across much of New Mexico: In New Mexico, D1 and D0 conditions were reduced over much of the state. A large area free of drought designation exists in central New Mexico and a new drought-free area was introduced in northeast New …
Summer rains usually don’t do much good at Elephant Butte, New Mexico’s major storage reservoir. (I touched on this a bit last week in my on line Journal chat.) But this summer’s been extraordinary. So how’s the Butte doing? One of my water geek contacts sent me this link, to daily numbers from the Bureau …
So I’m now fully prepared to look stupid. This morning’s front page of the newspaper included a short story by me about the rains finally shutting down. Umm. Hold that thought. Hurricane Ileana is changing the picture in a hurry, with the possibility of a big slug of moisture come the weekend: AT LEAST SOME …
One of my arguments against Chris Mooney’s thesis (“The Republican War on Science“) is that all disputants in scientized political debates cherrypick. Chris has argued from the specific – Well-documented examples in which conservatives have done this. – to the general – The problem is that conservatives do this. My view is that we have …
jones_arroyo Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. Another sight from Saturday’s bike ride: This is the Jones arroyo (and by “arroyo,” I mean “concrete channel”) that Coco wrote about last week. If you click through to the big version of the picture, you can see where they whacked out the bridge’s concrete sidewalls to let the water …
On our summer monsoon Winter droughts apparently bring summer rains in New Mexico. That, dumb luck and a bit of mystery are scientists’ best explanations for this year’s prodigious monsoon, which looks like one for the record books. “We’re on track for our wettest summer ever,” said Charlie Liles, head of the National Weather Service’s …
The New Mexico Office of State Engineer (the water people) issued a report last week looking at climate change impacts and vulnerabilities. From the story by Tania Soussan and myself: Global warming is likely to increase the risk of drought in New Mexico over the next century, and mountain snowpacks anywhere south of Santa Fe …
Andrew Dessler adds a helpful coda to his comments in my newspaper story of a couple of weeks back: I agree with Pielke Sr. that assessments have to include the range of opinions held by the majority of the scientific community. If half of the community says one thing and the other half says something …
Over where they pay me, I’ll be doing an on line chat tomorrow at 1:30 p.m. MDT on the science of the monsoon. If needed, I’m fully prepared to defend the ill-defined term.