Rick Piltz, the guy who left the U.S. Climate Change Science Program in a highly visible way last summer, has a piece in the Dec. 27 issue of the American Geophysical Union’s Eos, calling for a “Second U.S. National Climate Change Assessment.” Piltz argues that the National Assessment, completed in 2000, was “a pioneering experiment …
Interesting interview with hurricane guy Kerry Emanuel in today’s New York Times. Q. There are scientists who say of fossil fuel consumption and global warming, We may not have all the evidence yet, but we ought to be acting as if the worst could happen. Do you agree? A. It’s always struck me as odd …
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.
Some links for tracking drought conditions in New Mexico.
The report on climate change in New Mexico is now posted.
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 …
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: …
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 …
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 …
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.