Interesting work presented at AGU by a University of Alabama/NASA/etc. group suggesting the the possibility that Mayan deforestation may have brought on the drought conditions that some blame for the collapse of classic Maya culture. I have thought that the Maya might make a good case study for a society done in by drought, expanding …
Jeff Bingaman, fresh from Montreal, talks about U.S. greenhouse gas policies: Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., thinks now is the time for the United States to act on climate change. But Bingaman, who has emerged as a congressional leader on the issue, acknowledges he has his work cut out for him in persuading the Bush administration. …
Johannes J. Feddema and colleagues have a paper in Science today(Feddema et al. 2005) on the importance of land use in climate change. (And the suddenly ubiquitous Roger Pielke Sr. has an accompanying Perspective piece(Pielke Sr. 2005), and Roger also blogs it here.) What Feddema and company did was run a global climate model with …
Continue reading ‘Climate, Land Use and Spatial Variability’ »
On our October trip, Lissa and I visited the Anasazi Heritage Center outside Cortez in southeastern Colorado. It’s a neat museum, built to record, preserve and provide public access to excavations done before the nearby McPhee Reservoir was filled. Adjacent to the museum, there’s a small pueblo room block that’s been excavated and then stabilized …
It’s an odd day when I find myself agreeing with Benny Peiser on a climate change question, but his post Thursday to his CCNet list, in which he blasted media of coverage of the Nature paper on possible changes in the thermohaline circulation, seems on point. In fact, as I’ll point out below, there’s been …
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 …