A great comment from James Annan on the meta-issues about yesterday’s Nature paper on the possibility that the thermohaline circulation may be slowing: Their(Nature’s) deliberate policy to select only the most “exciting” results, which are then picked up and amplified by the press, pretty much guarantees that the outliers are given a prominence that substantially …
I’m not sure I quite understand what the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is, but here’s a new paper suggesting it’s sort of nothing at all. Or, more precisely, that it’s really a combination of other things, not a thing in and of itself. (climate and drought wonks go ahead and click through – the rest of …
From the CLIMAS folks at the University of Arizona: Drought – Moderate drought to abnormally dry conditions persist in southeastern and northeastern Arizona, and have expanded eastward to include most of New Mexico. * Pasture and range land conditions continue to degrade in Arizona and improve slightly in New Mexico. * Drought conditions are much …
I finally got around to reading the Pielke Sr. et al. paper on drought in Colorado in 2002 (paper here and Roger blogged it here). The data’s Colorado-specific, but the New Mexico data doesn’t look that much different, and the message here is pretty much the same. What we viewed as an “exceptionally severe drought,” …
More on global warming winners and losers: For regions producing high-quality grapes at the margins of their climatic limits, these results suggest that future climate change will exceed a climatic threshold such that the ripening of balanced fruit required for existing varieties and wine styles will become progressively more difficult. In other regions, historical and …
This whole blog-to-blog comment conversation thing can get a bit maddening. What we really need is to all sit down in a room together. I think a lot of the misunderstandings that turn into arguments would instead play out as useful conversations. Plus we could drink beer*. Today’s disjointed conversation has Mark Hadfield raising good …
Continue reading ‘More on Globally Averaged Surface Temperature’ »
Down near the end of a long and ultimately tedious* comment thread over on Prometheus, Gavin Schmidt offered an incredibly useful little gem today. As I’ve written before, “paleoclimate and future projections on a regional scale are critical.” This is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in the argument Roger Pielke Sr. makes …
Continue reading ‘Another Vote Against Average Global Temperature – Sorta’ »
In a convergence of two topics near and dear to my journalistic heart, the Independent reports “Blair to give his blessing to new nuclear reactors as only way to cut emissions” Tony Blair is ready to give a new generation of nuclear power stations the go-ahead, Downing Street hinted last night. His expert on the …
An amusing comment today from Roger Pielke Jr. about his experience as ringmaster of an on line debate over the relevance of the hockey stick climate reconstruction, placing himself squarely between warring tribes as he tried (with some success, I thought) to spark a useful discussion. I found it amusing to find myself being attacked …
Continue reading ‘Stuck in the Middle, Attacked by Both Sides’ »
A new paper by Jian Lu and Thomas Delworth argues tentatively for a link between greenhouse warming and drought in the Sahel.(Lu and Delworth, 2005) This matters, of course, far more than my usual hobbyhorse of drought in the southwestern U.S. Here when our water supplies run low because of drought, we suffer economic dislocation. …