End Times in New Mexico

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Mayan calendar

The whole Planet X pole shift calamity turned out to be a bust. Sorry, life and civilization as we know it were not destroyed. But not to worry! 2012 is just around the corner. As prophesied by the Mayan calendrical thingamajigs, we’re all pretty much screwed in just six short years.

Not to worry, though, there are folks aligning to bring us “ascension”, which apparently means more than climbing a ladder. As is fitting, apparently, New Mexico is at the center of things, according to James Randi. (Hat tip Dave.)

Global Dimming and Soil Moisture

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Here’s a fascinating bit of business in GRL (I’ve only seen the abstract, haven’t read the paper):

Summer soil moisture increased significantly from 1958 to the mid 1990s in Ukraine and Russia. This trend cannot be explained by changes in precipitation and temperature alone. To investigate the possible contribution from solar dimming and upward CO2 trends, we conducted experiments with a sophisticated land surface model. We demonstrate, by imposing a downward trend in incoming shortwave radiation forcing to mimic the observed dimming, that the observed soil moisture pattern can be well reproduced. On the other hand, the effects of upward CO2 trends were relatively small for the study period. Our results suggest tropospheric air pollution plays an important role in land water storage at the regional scale, and needs to be addressed accurately to study the effects of global warming on water resources.

Solar dimming and CO2 effects on soil moisture trends, by Robock and Li, Geophysical Research Letters, Vol. 33, L20708, doi:10.1029/2006GL027585, 2006

Going Hungry

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U.N. rights advocate sees more malnutrition

Jean Ziegler, a U.N. expert on food rights, said that some 852 million people were “gravely, permanently undernourished on this planet” at the end of 2005, an increase of 11 million from the year earlier.

Much of that increase came in Africa, where drought, climate change and poor farming practices are spreading the Sahara Desert farther southward into once-fertile lands, Ziegler told a news conference.

He also charged that unfair trade practices by rich nations hurt food production in Africa, where excess food from rich nations can be dumped in local markets, undercutting local producers.

Drought Update

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Some interesting discussion in today’s drought monitor about the way the early water year is shaping up in the Pacific Northwest:

[T]he 2006-07 wet season is off to a slow start in parts of the Northwest. From October 1 to October 24, Washington rainfall totaled just 2.48 inches (36% of normal) in Quillayute and 1.00 inch (46%) in Seattle. Farther south, abnormal dryness has not yet been introduced in northern and central California and the western Great Basin. However, those areas are being carefully monitored as a result of several factors, including a slow start to the wet season, unusually poor pasture and rangeland conditions, and the threat of late-year wildfire activity.

Similar picture in the University of Washington’s soil moisture model.

Daybook

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art: Apropos of nothing except that I happened to have just listened to it, a marvelous old NPR piece from a few years back on Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks”.

paper of the day: Multi-Century Tree-Ring Reconstructions of Colorado Streamflow for Water Resource Planning, by Connie Woodhouse and Jeffrey Lukas. The tree ring people have a story to tell of greater variability than the limited historical record suggests.

weather: Crap. Looks like rain tonight. (Not here, in St. Louis. The only place left with baseball to be played.)

word of the day: profiterole – It’s a pastry, and I love the word’s origin. From the WikiPeople: “Profiterole comes from the French diminutive of profit and originally meant a small gratuity.”