Via the magic of technology of some sort, I listened this morning to Harry Shearer’s interview with Ivor van Heerden from Louisiana State University’s Hurricane Center, more commonly known as “the man who saw it coming“. Fascinating conversation. Download it here.

We’ve had rain here the last few days (half an inch in the gauge at my house, much more elsewhere, much less other elsewhere). To wet climate denizens, that might seem like no big deal, but such is our drought that some residents of our community have literally never seen rain before. Coco explains:

You’ve been in a storm before? Well, my tomato and pepper plants never had been. It was their first rain ever! Come to think of it, it was the Boy Pup’s first big storm too. For here, and in these days, it was a real deluge.

Such was the novelty that for two nights in a row, everyone at my house stopped what they were doing and watched it rain. We went out on the porch, we stood in the front window, we angled the view to the north to see the lightning show, some of us (well, honestly, just one of us) stared at our little electronic weather gizmos like they were one of those overtime shootouts in the World Cup final. We even had to rescue a neighbor out for a walk and caught in said deluge.

Via James Hrynyshyn, word of possible budget cuts at the National Climatic Data Center:

The center holds the world’s largest collection of climate data and information, which often is used for monitoring long-term trends that might harm lives and property and the nation’s environmental, national, homeland and economic security.

A House budget proposal gives the data center $13.3 million, which is $3.9 million less than was requested and $1.2 million less than its budget from the previous fiscal year.

Without changes, the center would be forced to lay off some of its 100 contract scientists and workers and limit hours in which they can help 50,000 clients with questions, said Tom Karl, the center’s director.

From Andy Borowitz:

In an attempt to counteract the impact of former Vice President Al Gore’s cautionary film about global warming, “An Inconvenient Truth,” Vice President Dick Cheney is starring in a new film advocating global warming, Mr. Cheney confirmed today.

The Cheney film, entitled “A Really Convenient Truth,” will open in theaters nationwide in time for the fall 2006 midterm elections.

“I saw the Al Gore movie, and quite frankly, the whole thing was a downer from the word go,” Mr. Cheney said at a White House press briefing. “I thought it was time to tell the American people the good news about global warming.”

(Hat tip Benny Peiser.)

David Parker has published a new, more detailed analysis in the latest Journal of Climate arguing that the urban heat island effect is not responsible for the measured global warming trend. As in his earlier work on this, Parker compared windy to non-windy days:

The trends in temperature are almost unaffected by this subsampling, indicating that urban development and other local or instrumental influences have contributed little overall to the observed warming trends.

(Roger Pielke Sr. has thoughtfully disagreed with Parker on this question in the past, so I look forward to his comments on the new Journal of Climate paper.)

* With a respectful tip of the Le Blog chapeau to Harry Shearer, who has added a new “News of the Warm” feature to his weekly radio show.

The news media coverage last week of the NRC “hockey stick” report provides a stark reminder of the point Dan Sarewitz made in his How science makes environmental controversies worse. While everyone prattled on about whether the hockey stick is now really broken, or the handle has been properly taped back together, or whatever, last week’s paper in Science about warming-induced threats to Andean water supplies seems to have been completely ignored by the news media (at least the English-language news media).

One, the hockey stick, seems to have essentially no effect on the decisions we might make about climate policy, but got huge attention. It’s the high ground that everyone in the scientized debate is trying to win. The other is of profound importance, has real policy relevance, and seems to have been ignored.

Today’s word of the day is febrifacient: a thing that produces fever. In his 1845 “Emigrants Guide to Oregon and California”, Lansford Hastings noted the obvious of the Great Basin and Rocky Mountain Region: it doesn’t rain much here, while in the winter “snow falls very frequently, though not to a great depth.” Sounds like a bad place to live, but not to worry! In the classic enthusiasm of westward expansion, Hastings found the silver lining: in the desert there are no swamps!

There are few portions of the world, if any, which are so entirely exempt from all febrifacient causes. There being no low, marshy regions, the noxious miasmatic effluvia, so common in such regions, is here, nowhere found.