A New Hockey Stick
Timothy Osborn and Keith Briffa have a new paleoclimate reconstruction coming out in tomorrow’s Science with a familiar shape but an interesting new twist:
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Global Cooling
The usual caveats apply: just a single number, more to understanding climate change than surface temp., etc. NASA’s GISS team has posted its global January number, with fodder for everyone to misinterpret. On one side, you could argue it’s cooling. (You’ve got to be careful in picking your starting year to make that case, but …
Answering Roger’s Question
Roger Pielke Sr., in a post about the climate models’ difficulties in getting clouds right, poses this question: How can international climate protocols, such as Kyoto, be established when the climate response to human climate forcings (and even natural forcings) is not adequately understood? The short answer is that we make decisions all the time, …
More Floods, More Droughts
Gao et al. in a study this week in GRL modelling precipitation in Europe under increased greenhouse gases: Changes in extreme precipitation events and dry spells suggest not only shifts, but also a broadening, of the precipitation distribution, with an increased probability of occurrence of events conducive to both floods and droughts.
Land Use and Climate
Some old literature I was reading the other night carried shades of Roger Pielke Sr.’s argument that land use changes are important to climate change: Notwithstanding the apparent uncertainty of the seasons, it is found that the mean temperature of particular localities is very constant, provided we compare observations made at different periods for a …
Monthly Report
Everybody’s yammering about the warm January in the U.S., with the entire country seeing positive temperature anomalies (hat tip Mike Mann for graphic and discussion of global climate change implications of all this) If you look at the map linked above, you’ll see that Albuquerque, at 3.8 degrees F above average, is in a region …
Schwarzenegger, California and Climate
There’s an op-ed in the 21 January New Scientist from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger laying out his case for action on greenhouse gas reductions: In California, we are already seeing potentially severe impacts: shrinking of our snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which reduces our annual water supplies; erosion of our coastline; flooding of …
Drought Numbers
Not much chance of rain over the next week, which means we’ll end the month with 0.04 inch in Albuquerque for January. With 0.10 in December, that puts us (by my quick back of the envelope calculation) at the fifth-driest Dec.-Jan. in history. 1966-67 was the worst, with 0.02 inch. The Palmer Drought Index says …
More on 2005
Good discussion on Island of Doubt about the significance of the 2005 temperatures.
Trying to Shut up Hansen
Andrew Revkin has a story on the New York Times web site about restrictions NASA is trying to place on outspoken climate scientist James Hansen: The scientist, James E. Hansen, longtime director of the agency’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, said in an interview that officials at NASA headquarters had ordered the public affairs staff …