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 …
The reason I’ve been tinkering with the Salton Sea story is its (potential?) centrality to the story of climate variability and the allocation of the Colorado River’s water. (I say I’m writing a book about “drought,” but I’m really trying to deal with questions of how people here in the West have responded over the …
A nice bit of business from Anjali Nayar’s NYTimes profile of Gavin Schmidt: “The climate is like the city,” he said as he gestured at the scene around him. The city is made up of millions of people making individual decisions: when to wake in the morning, what time to go to work, where to …
Climate model fidelity and projections of climate change: Relative entropy, which is a measure of the difference between two probability distributions, has been calculated for the simulations of the climate of the 20th century from 13 climate models and the observed surface air temperature during the past 100 years. This quantity is used as a …
N.M. Scientists Mimic Global Warming to Study Long-Term Effects (sub. req.): As if Earth isn’t warming fast enough, Jim Elliott wants to speed things up. To do it, Elliott has fashioned what look like 20 oversized bed frames on a remote patch of desert south of Belen to create an extra bit of global warming …
OK, it’s April 1, and this is no joke. The official runoff forecast, done by genuine professionals, will be out next week, but we can get a pretty complete picture from the Snotel data. These numbers are river basin snow water equivalent content, in percent of April 1 average: Upper Colorado River: 111 Upper Rio …