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.

Last fall, Lissa and I spent a couple of days in and around Lee’s Ferry. As the linchpin between the upper and lower Colorado basins, it’s central to storytelling about water, drought and the west, which is part of my attraction to the place. But it’s also magnificent country in a stark and powerful way. Making a life in Utah was a tough go for the Mormons who immigrated in the mid-19th century, but nowhere was it tougher than the dry canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona. It’s beautiful country, unless you’ve got to grow your own food to make your own life there.

I’m no Wallace Stegner, so I’ll defer to this description, which I ran across last night in his Mormon Country:

The tiny oases huddle in their pockets in the rock, surround on all sides by as terrible and beautiful wasteland as the world can show, colored every color of the spectrum even to blue and green, sculptured by sandblast sinds, fretted by meandering lines of cliffs hundreds of miles long and often several thousand feet high, carved and broken and split by canyons so deep and narrow that the rivers run in sunless depths and cannot be approached for miles. Man is an interloper in that country, not merely because he maintains a toehold only on sufferance, depending on the precarious and sometimes disastrous flow of desert rivers, but because everyting he sees is aprophecy of his inconsequent destiny.

It is a big place, and we are small.

Naomi “Don’t Call Me Nancy” Oreskes responded yesterday in the Los Angeles Times to Richard Lindzen’s Wall Street Journal claim that her Science magazine review of the climate change literature had been refuted:

My study demonstrated that there is no significant disagreement within the scientific community that the Earth is warming and that human activities are the principal cause.

Papers that continue to rehash arguments that have already been addressed and questions that have already been answered will, of course, be rejected by scientific journals, and this explains my findings. Not a single paper in a large sample of peer-reviewed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 refuted the consensus position, summarized by the National Academy of Sciences, that “most of the observed warming of the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”

(Hat tip Ken.)