The folks running the Climate Working Group summer retreat on drought were kind enough to invite me up to Santa Fe this week. I spent most of the time listening, but they also extended the huge kindness of inviting me to speak. I think they hoped I could explain the rituals of my somewhat mystifying media tribe, rituals that I know leave many scientists puzzled.

I don’t know if I was much help. My central point is that we can’t do what many scientists expect of us: make the public understand the science.
Continue reading ‘Word of the Day: Pluvial’ »

I’ve been much of the week up in Santa Fe at a workshop of drought scientists, and while we’ve been busy palavering, things have been changing on the ground here in the drought-stricken southwest. The greatest excitement was in Coronado National Memorial Park, near Bisbee in far southern Arizona, which got 12 inches of rain Sunday and Monday, and had to close. A National Park in the desert, closed because of rain.

Where the people live:

In Tucson, 3.83 inches of rain fell July 27-31, with 4-8 inches falling in the surrounding mountains (Mt. Lemmon had 7.71 inches)…. In New Mexico, a very active July monsoon continued, dumping another 1-3 inches of rain on most of the State. Although a number of water restrictions remained in place (with some precautionary), fire restrictions are basically gone except in Roosevelt County as topsoil moisture has greatly rebounded. Accordingly, a one-category improvement was made for much of New Mexico, except in the southeast. If August continues wet, New Mexico would enter autumn with only long-term (6+ years) drought lingering in the mountains.

This raises a number of interesting questions related to the value of summer monsoon rainfall versus winter snowpack in affecting drought conditions here. All precip is not the same.

Zippy’s concerned about global warming:

I’m concerned about global warming, but I’m even more concerned about Al Gore’s love affair with his Powerpoint program. On the one hand, I don’t want to be underwater in 30 years, but on the other, can Al Gore sweep into the oval office on a wave of animated carbon emission charts?

I think I’ll go home and isulate my roof, buy a Prius and prepare for another disputed national election.

(Note: the link above goes to the daily Zippy strip, so if you’re clicking after Aug. 2, you’ll get something else. But click anyway. Zippy always rewards.)

Andrew Dessler, one of my favorite climate science/politics/policy ‘splainers, has started a blog.

Interesting new bit of work by Dirmeyer and Brubaker in GRL about the effects of early spring on northern hemisphere water budgets:

Over most mid- and high-latitude areas, a strong annual cycle of recycling ratio exists; low during winter when storm tracks are active, tropospheric circulation strong, and surface evaporation rates low, high during summer when winds are light and evaporation is greater. Trends in recycling ratio have been found over large areas at high-latitudes that are consistent with an expansion into spring of the warm-season regime of water vapor recycling. These trends are consistent with observed vegetation-related changes often attributed to global climate change, and are most evident over northern Europe and North America where the density of meteorological data influencing the atmospheric analyses is high. Less extensive trends are found in other seasons.

Worth noting: their results are consistent with Aiguo Dai’s findings of increasing drought.

In which I describe the climate wars tribal labels being attached to me because of my Sunday story on climate change science.

There’s good reason to think the whole hurricane-global warming debate is a huge distraction, because of its relative lack of importance in understanding societal hurricane risk. (See Roger Pielke Jr.’s blog for the latest in many, many discussions of the data suggesting that building houses on the beach is the most important risk factor in having houses on the beach blown down by hurricanes.)

But given that we’re having the whole hurricanes and global warming debate with such vigor, a new paper in tomorrow’s Science by Chris Landsea et al. injects a new note of caution into the discussion. Landsea and colleagues discuss the shortcomings in hurricane datasets, explaining the details of how the various datasets were collected over the years, the resulting shortcomings and biases, etc. Their conclusion:

The pre-1990 tropical cyclone data for all basins are replete with large uncertainties, gaps and biases. Trend analyses for extreme tropical cyclones are unreliable due to operational changes that have artificially resulted in more intense tropical cyclones being recorded, casting severe doubts on any such trend linkages to global warming.

This is obviously not the last word on this, or the definitive answer to the question, but I think it provides support for a point I’ve tried to make previously: what’s the hurry? Why the rush to answer the question of whether there’s a global warming-hurricanes link? This is hard science. I say give ’em the time they need to sort this out.