It Gets Worse

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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”.

Climate Change, Variability, and Darfur

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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:
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39-16

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I heard a story once about John Coltrane that I’ve always loved. I don’t remember where it’s from, so take this with a grain of salt, but the story was that Coltrane spent his whole life looking for the right saxophone mouthpiece. He had this sound in his head, and he was always looking for the mouthpiece that would make it.

I’m probably stretching the metaphor to the breaking point when I compare Coltrane to my riding buddy Jaime and his endless search for the perfect bicycle wheels. But it is a point of endless fascination. We have been riding together for five years, and during that time Jaime has never stopped buying, selling, shopping, trading up, talking to wheel makers. Yeah, Jaime really seeks out and talks to people who make bicycle wheels. Jaime can tell you, for example, about the guy who makes racing disk wheels out of kevlar, and is having a hard time getting the raw materials because of the military demand for kevlar body armor.

To a non-cyclist, this might sound bizarre, but wheels really matter when you’re trying to go fast on a bicycle. At high speeds, most of the workload is spent to overcome wind resistance, and spoked wheels cutting through air are like egg beaters. Weight matters too, because you’ve got to get all that mass turning, and keep it turning. But the wind resistance is the biggest issue with wheels.

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Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Sacramento Peak solar observatory

Kind of a sad day yesterday, with the announcement of a recommendation to close the National Solar Observatory’s Sacramento Peak site. Sac Peak is a delight – a little community of astronmers at the end of a winding mountain road where folks gather every day to study the sun. But it’s getting old, and the shiny new toy is going elsewhere, and the astronomy community, god love ’em, has a much more rational approach for prioritizing limited federal spending than most (at least within the National Science Foundation’s astronomy budget – don’t get me started on NASA), so it looks like there’ s a good chance we’ll see the end of one of New Mexico’s and the nation’s great old observatories.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere

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Problems with the National Nuclear Security Administration’s nuclear stockpile surveillance program:

Critical tests on eight of the nine weapons in the U.S. stockpile were not done in 2005, the investigators found.

As a result, the nation’s military leadership “lacks vital information about the reliability of the stockpile,” the investigators found.

“I begin to worry,” said Ralph Levine, a retired federal official who until recently worked on the program. “If we ever had to use these things, would they in fact work?”

The investigation, released Thursday, is the latest from the Department of Energy’s Office of Inspector General, an independent oversight team within the agency that has repeatedly criticized the test program.

It echoes concerns Levine raised internally in a series of reports and memoranda beginning in 2002. Levine, who was based at the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Albuquerque office, retired in January.

Odd v. Even Numbers

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If I had full academic library privileges, I’d be dropping everything I had planned this afternoon to read A Study of Odd- and Even-Number Cultures:

Japanese prefer odd numbers, whereas Westerners emphasize even numbers, an observation that is clear from the distribution of number-related words in Japanese and English dictionaries. In this article, the author explains why these two cultures differ by surveying the history of numbers, including yin-yang thought from ancient China, ancient Greek philosophy, and modern European mathematics. The author also mentions that oddness and evenness are only mathematical concepts, but understanding the cultures and histories of individual countries contributes to world peace.

I’m all for world peace.

Save the Land

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Agricultural practices are a key variable in whether we see an Australian dust bowl this year, according to a story this morning in The Age:

Better farming practices and widespread de-stocking are likely to save Australia’s parched agricultural land from turning into a dust bowl, research suggests.

But the drought – shaping as one of the worst on record – still could result in large amounts of soil being swept off the continent and major population centres hit by rolling dust storms.