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 …
In which climate science’s Wizard of Wikipedia gets his work published in Science, and then gets to blog about it. (The story: balloon data shows it’s getting warm up there down there – “down there” being Antarctica and “up there” being where the balloons fly.)
Scot Key with a hilarious look at New Mexico’s drought tourism future (can drought be funny?): Look at the Rio Grande, now a continuous strip of dry bed running the length of the state. Tourism, working with other State and Federal agencies, is clearing the burned bosque as fast as it can and establishing a …
I’ve been digging into the relationship between climate and the early history of water development of the Colorado River, and I’ve run into a bit of a conflict between the conventional history and the climate record (or as much of the climate record as I’ve been able to easily sort out). (Click through if you’ve …
Continue reading ‘What Really Happened on the Lower Colorado in 1905?’ »
One cannot help but be amused by the irony in this paper, in which Diego Rybski and others (one of the others being Hans von Storch) use Steve McIntyre’s paleoclimate reconstruction as one of a suite of six in a detection study, using the Hockey Stick Slayer’s work as evidence for human-caused warming: Accordingly, the …
Continue reading ‘McIntyre and McKitrick Help Confirm Greenhouse Hypothesis’ »
A few weeks back Steve Bloom asked in the comments about drought in the United States in the 1950s. This is the big drought we talk about in New Mexico – more significant here than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. I ran across these maps today: