A week ago, I wrote a snarky post in which I implied that the criticism of Michael Mann and his hockey stick had gone beyond a debate about the science to become a personal attack. A thoughtful commenter suggested that perhaps I’d gone too far: “There has been little in there which is ad hominem, …
In another life, I wrote about California water policy. So it was with some nostalgia that I saw this LA Times story come across a local water policy email list: The cost of dismantling the dam that created Yosemite’s Hetch Hetchy Reservoir and restoring the glacial gorge that John Muir considered one of the national …
The AP’s Douglas Pizac reports this week that Lake Powell is seeing less water than expected: Lake Powell is barely half full and taking a quarter less runoff than expected this year — a sign the Colorado River basin remains in the grip of a multiyear drought, according to a new report from government hydrologists. …
Hahn_Arroyo_Under_Repair Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I did another water ride this morning, up the Hahn Arroyo bike trail to see the bits that washed out in last Saturday’s downpour. Water in a sense defines landscape (or at least contributes strongly to its definition), and the concrete of the Hahn is a great illustration of one …
Yet another report on the hockey stick is out, (see here and here and here) and it says…. OK, can we just stipulate that Mike Mann’s 1998 and 1999 papers were really totally completely wrong and that one time he wore a tie that didn’t really match his shirt and looked really bad on television …
Interesting paper in GRL by Lobell et al. suggesting that temperature under doubled CO2 could be cooler in irrigated regions than the climate models suggest. Because of the relatively small area of the planet under irrigation, the overall effect is small, but the potential effect on food-production seems worthy of better understanding: The reduction of …
One of my frustrations with the climate blogging world is the relative abundance of climate wars-type discussion and the relative dearth of discussion of climate science. Sean Davis has started a new blog that looks promising in this regard: Head in a Cloud. Great early discussion, including a nice piece by Andrew Dessler on work …
Fascinating paper in GRL suggesting that the massive Three Gorges Dam in China is making rain more in the mountains to the west, and rain less in the area of the dam itself: The independent satellite data sets and numerical simulation clearly indicate that the land use change associated with the TGD construction has increased …
I didn’t have a chance to do a story for the newspaper on the new Science paper by Westerling et al.[1] on wildfires and climate change, so I just got around to reading it this evening. In a sense, it seems like a bit of a no-brainer. Common sense would suggest that when temperatures are …
Interesting El Niño forecast out today from the Climate Prediction Center: Most of the statistical and coupled models predict slightly positive SST anomalies (ENSO-neutral to weak El Niño) in the Niño 3.4 region through the end of 2006. These forecasts are consistent with the recent build up in upper-ocean heat content along the equator. I …