Drought is almost surely the most important piece of climate change/variability in terms of its impacts on human society (sorry, hurricane fans – I’ll defend this if needed). And sub-Saharan Africa is ground zero, the Gulf Coast of drought risk. So this should give pause – evidence that the models aren’t getting African drought right: …
Robert Lee Hotz had a great piece over the weekend in the LA Times about phenology as a climate change detector: By analyzing decades of records kept by regional maple sugar producers, climate researchers are finding clear evidence here of what Rex Marsh can feel in his bones. The weather just isn’t what it used …
Via James Annan, a BBC piece on the “cry wolf” problem: Hardly a day goes by without a new dire warning about climate change. But some claims are more extreme than others, giving rise to fears that the problem is being oversold and damaging the issue. I’ve written narrowly about this problem before from a …
Continue reading ‘BBC on the Overselling of Climate Science’ »
David comments on how wet it’s been in Oregon, prompting me to find a national map: (From the Western Regional Climate Center’s excellent Standardized Precipitation Index page, where you can pick your starting point and the most useful way to display the data.) Wet up north, dry down south. To first order, a classic La …
I’d been meaning to look at this a while ago, because all climate change is ultimately local, but just got around to it today. The last time we had a freeze in Albuquerque was March 23, and it’s reasonable to think that’ll stand as the last freeze of spring. We won’t know for sure for …
A comment worth pulling out and highlighting (even if it is somewhat critical of me). Mickey Glantz, whose ideas about climate science and policy and politics I greatly respect, takes me to task for airing Jim Hansen’s draft ENSO paper: You know that Hansen’s paper was just a draft…. Anyone could (and some did) jump …
Via Roger Pielke Jr., reference to a new draft from Jim Hansen that usefully clarifies the El Nino discussion of last week: Present version should make clear that what we are saying is: Global warming has increased the east-west equatorial temperature gradient and that should increase the probability of a super El Nino. It is …
Steve McIntyre approvingly cites a piece in the Daily Telegraph by Bob Carter arguing that the planet has not warmed in the last eight years. And if you pick the El Nino year of 1998 as your starting point, that’s true, making this a rhetorically powerful argument. But there’s a problem. Given the variability in …
On Hansen on El Niño (sub. req.)
I blogged earlier today at work about the latest ENSO assessment from the Climate Prediction Center, and said this: We’re at the point in the year where forecasting is hard, so the computer models used to try to get a handle on where this is headed are all over the map. It’s the conventional wisdom …