Albuquerque had its first “official” freeze of the year this morning, with a low of somewhere around 29 at the airport this morning. At my house in town, we’ve dropped below freezing a bunch of times already (apparently I live in an urban cold island), but the airport is the place with a long and consistent record, so it’s reasonable to compare Nov. 10 with the long term numbers.

The long term average is Oct. 31, but the recent trend, not surprisingly, has been toward later dates. This is a local manifestation of what is known in the scientific community as “global frickin’ warming.”

The latest ENSO forecast is out. More of the same, expect El Niño to keep ramping up at least into early spring, odds favor season ski passes here where I live, but some bad shit elsewhere”

Global effects that can be expected during November-March include drier-than-average conditions over most of Malaysia, Indonesia, some of the U.S.-affiliated islands in the tropical North Pacific, northern South America and southeastern Africa, and wetter-than-average conditions over equatorial East Africa, central South America (Uruguay, northeastern Argentina, and southern Brazil) and along the coasts of Ecuador and northern Peru.

Now folks in Australia are talking (sort of) about a once-in-thousand-year drought:

AUSTRALIA may be experiencing a one-in-a-1000-years drought, Prime Minister John Howard and the premiers were warned at the national water summit.

The half-day meeting accelerated water trading plans and ordered emergency work to protect town and city supplies.

The dire assessment of the drought came from Murray Darling Basin Commission official David Dreverman.

But Mr Howard was wary of endorsing such a dramatic judgement, instead saying it was “the worst drought in living memory”.

A couple of things that crossed my virtual desktop recently highlight the difficulty of thinking well about the impacts of and responses to climate change and climate variability. The first is a story by Scott Baldauf from the Christian Science Monitor this morning: Is Darfur the first climate-change conflict? The second is a paper by Richard Washington and colleagues in the latest Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.

Baldauf’s theme is the possibility of a link between climate change and crisis in Africa:

As delegates gather Monday in Kenya for a United Nations conference to set new targets to reduce fossil-fuel emissions after 2012, climate change is a present reality for many Africans.

In Kenya, Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Chad, people are already seeing the repercussions – including war. The conflict between herders and farmers in Sudan’s Darfur region, where farm and grazing lands are being lost to desert, may be a harbinger of the future conflicts.

But what sort of a “change” are we talking about here? Are we talking about the sort of permanent nonstationarity implied by greenhouse-induced climate change? That’s the clear implication of Baldauf’s piece:

[C]limate change is already hurting people here in Africa, according to a report issued last month by a coalition of British aid groups. The number of food emergencies encountered each year in Africa have tripled since the mid-1980s, the report says. This year alone, more than 25 million Africans faced a food crisis.

Even though temperatures in Africa have only warmed by an average of 0.5 degree C. over the past 100 years, desert lands are advancing into once arable rain-fed areas, and wetter equatorial parts of Africa are getting wetter, often leading to devastating floods.

But there is an obvious unstated confusion here. What do we mean by “change”? Baldauf clearly seems to be implying the classic media/public discourse definition – “climate change” = “anthropogenic change.” This is where the Washington paper offers some extremely useful clarification:
Continue reading ‘Climate Change, Variability, and Darfur’ »