Black Carbon on Snow
One of our regular commenters has been asking about the effect of soot on snow. It’s an issue I don’t know much about, but Roger Pielke Sr. this morning blogs a new paper discussing the issue.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Drought Links
Some links for tracking drought conditions in New Mexico.
Climate Change in N.M.
The report on climate change in New Mexico is now posted.
Drought
A couple of drought- and climate-related things in this morning’s Journal worthy of note. First, the near-term outlook from Tania Soussan: Two meteorological forecasts out Friday confirmed what anyone who’s been outside lately already knows— New Mexico is dry as a bone. The facts and figures in the federal reports are dire. New Mexico received …
Sea Level Rise
I don’t know much about sea level and climate change (what with New Mexico being landlocked, and all….), so I’m not clear on the significance of this from John Church and Neil White at CSIRO Marine and Atmospheric Research in Australia. They seem to be saying they’ve found heretofore undetected acceleration in sea level rise: …
Lilacs, Honeysuckle and Phenology
One of my favorite experiences as a science writer is asking a scientist to explain what I have assumed is a fundamental underlying bit of background, only to get the answer, “We don’t know.” I’m reminded of that by an article in the latest Eos by Julio Betancourt about the efforts to create a national …
Surf the Global Warming Wave
David Fields of the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute has a paper in tomorrow’s Science (press release here) suggesting an interesting anthropogenic warming fingerprint: plankton in varves on the ocean floor. Both warm- and cold-water forams can be found, and the relative abundances of the various types works as a climate proxy. Fields sees the …
Climate News I Wrote Elsewhere
Of no great climate wars import, just a fun story about the people who collect the data: DOE Climate Study Spans the Planet This is climate science at its most basic— understanding how energy moves through the atmosphere, making the warm spots warm, the cold spots cold, some places wet and some places dry.
Gleick on “consensus science”
Peter Gleick’s year-ender includes a discussion of one of my favorite topics: the misrepresentation of “consensus science”: One such doughnut hole is what climate change skeptics call “consensus science.” They argue that just because the vast majority of serious climate scientists believe in the greenhouse effect – that humans are causing the earth’s climate to …
More Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
Last Link in the Chain: Dam Will Help Wean ABQ From Its Dependence On Aquifer Water. But you really ought to check it out in the paper copy of the newspaper if you have a chance, for maximum benefit of Carol Cooperrider’s lovely graphic explaining how the city’s new Alameda dam works, and for Jim …