An inch of snow when I measured this morning at my house – 0.14 inches of precip when melted. 0.12 at the airport. That’s a total of 0.18 total at the airport this month, as compared to an average of 0.5. It’s been wetter at my house – 0.49 inches. But it shows that a perception that its being incredibly wet here is biased by that huge late December storm, not by what’s actually been happening in January.
Government Interference in Climate Science
The folks at the Government Accountability Project have released a report, done in conjunction with the Union of Concerned Scientists, about government interference in climate science:
• Nearly half of all respondents (46 percent of all respondents to the question) perceived or
personally experienced pressure to eliminate the words “climate change,” “global warming,”
or other similar terms from a variety of communications.
• Two in five (43 percent) perceived or personally experienced changes or edits during
review that changed the meaning of scientific findings.
• Nearly half (46 percent) perceived or personally experienced new or unusual administrative requirements that impair climaterelated work.
• One-quarter (25 percent) perceived or personally experienced situations in which
scientists have actively objected to, resigned from, or removed themselves from a project
because of pressure to change scientific findings.
• Asked to quantify the number of incidents of interference of all types, 150 scientists
(58 percent) said they had personally experienced one or more such incidents within
the past five years, for a total of at least 435 incidents of political interference.
Given that this is based on a self-selected sample (those who chose to respond) I’d shy away from arguing that the numbers are representative, but the scope of the examples is suggestive.
Cool New Climate Book
I recently picked up Bob Henson’s Rough Guide to Climate Change, and I must say it fills a great niche. I’m a fan of Andrew Dessler’s book, which is a great primer. But (sorry, Dr. D) it’s a bit on the wonkish side. Henson’s book has a Rough Guide snap to it that makes it a great alternative for a general audience – solid on the science, easy on the eyes with lots of sidebars and graphics that make it exquisitely accessible.
(Full disclosure: I’m happy and humbled to report that Bob included Inkstain in his list of climate blogs worth reading, along with a number of the folks whose names you see mentioned in the rail on the right.)
drinkin’ pee
One of the padres in New Mexico sent a letter home back in the 1600s expressing amazement that the residents of Gran Quivira, one of the pueblos near Albuquerque, saved their urine for use in the muds they used in building. It’s a dry place, you do stuff:
Residents in tropical Queensland state will soon be forced to drink recycled sewage to help Australia cope with its worst drought for a century.
Australia’s third most populous state, which attracts vast numbers of tourists drawn to its tropical weather, will be the first to introduce the measures and the rest of the nation could reasonably be expected to follow, according to John Howard, the Prime Minister.
The Wisdom of Mac Fans
Nora sends along this Oct. 23, 2001 Macforum discussion of Apple’s big announcement:
All that hype for an MP3 player? Break-thru digital device? The Reality Distiortion Field™ is starting to warp Steve’s mind if he thinks for one second that this thing is gonna take off.
Quote of the Week
Let us not gird science to our loins as the warrior buckles on his sword. Let us raise science aloft as the olive branch of peace and the emblem of hope.
John Wesley Powell, in an 1882 talk, “Darwin’s contributions to philosophy”
update: It’s worth pointing out here that Powell was full of extraordinary amounts of crap when he said this. He was about as combative in his use of science as they came in the 19th century, a true bureaucratic warrior.
Drought in South Dakota
Western South Dakota is one of those classic drought cases. It was extraordinarily wet there during the 1990s, well above the long term mean. Of the 10 wettest years in a century of records in northwest South Dakota, four came during the 1990s. An astonishing six years during the 1990s were greater than one standard deviation wetter than the long term mean in the southwest South Dakota climate division.
Andrea Cook at the Rapid City Journal gets points for trying to explain this to folks:
South Dakota benefited from relatively wet periods through most of the 1990s and in 2001, Todey said.
But her story reflects what seems to be an inevitable mistake in thinking about drought in this country (not her mistake, but the mistake of the people she’s talking to). Variation around the mean is normal. When we’re on the wet side of the mean – even way on the wet side of the mean – agriculturalists in the United States treat it as “normal,” expanding herds, planting, etc. (See my previous discussion of the fact that we don’t really have a word for the opposite of “drought”.) When we slip to the dry side of the mean, that’s a “drought”. There’s no question that western South Dakota has been on the dry side of the mean for the last five years. But within the ups and downs, the Standardized Precipitation Index for the region shows “near normal” conditions.
Famine Response
Drought-induced famine is largely a political rather than climatological disaster, as this account by Teshome Erkineh of response to drought conditions in Ethiopia demonstrates. It happens when societies, for whatever reason, fail to cope with climate variability. A million people died in 1983-84 because of drought. In 2003, under what was a more severe drought in meteorological terms, societal mechanisms put in place following the 1980s drought were sufficient to avoid severe famine, according to Erkineh:
Twenty years on, Ethiopia is much better prepared for drought. The country has developed an early warning system, coupled to response mechanisms, that has been shown to be effective: in 2003 more than 13 million Ethiopians were affected by drought, but a major famine was avoided.
Erkineh’s piece is part of a package papers on Climate Risk Management in Africa: Learning from Practice, published by the folks at IRI.
Ionospheric Plasma Blobs
I have absolutely no earthly idea what ionospheric plasma blobs are, but I’m pretty sure they’re a serious threat to life as we know it, or possibly they’re associated with the villain in a 1950s science fiction film, or else I read about them in Zippy the Pinhead. Whatever, I’m pretty excited that Pimenta and colleagues have not only seen them for the first time, but measured their zonal drift velocities! Science can save us!
Increasing Greenland Melt
Marco Tedesco at the University of Maryland suggests a new technique for remote sensing of snowmelt atop the Greenland ice sheet. When he uses it, he reports:
Long-term results show that snowmelt extent has been increasing at a rate of ?40,000 Km2 per year for the past 14 years.
Snowmelt detection over the Greenland ice sheet from SSM/I brightness temperature daily variations, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 34, L02504, doi:10.1029/2006GL028466, 2007