Lissa finished a nice sturdy stand for the cotton region shelter in the backyard. It’s the standard National Weather Service Coop setup. Of course my backyard would be a terrible place for a genuine Coop station – too close to buildings, etc. But this gives me a feel for how the temperatures at our house compare to the official NWS numbers – how big our “urban heat island effect” really is.
Known Unknowns
I don’t know how to tell for sure, but I’ll hazard a guess that this is the first time Donald Rumsfeld has been quoted in the climate literature.
It’s a discussion of the latest version of the Hadley global temperature data set, and the team has gone to significant effort to quantify the uncertainties:
A definitive assessment of uncertainties is impossible, because it is always possible that some unknown error has contaminated the data, and no quantitative allowance can be made for such unknowns. There are, however, several known limitations in the data, and estimates of the likely effects of these limitations can be made.
And then the authors cite Rumsfeld’s famous disquisition on the topic:
There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don’t know we don’t know.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere
A new paper (actually came out last month, so not quite “snap snap” new) by Kostas Andreadis and Dennis Lettenmaier[1] looks at trends in drought severity and duration over the 20th century in the continental U.S. In much of the country, drought is getting less severe, but unfortunately not in the places that matter most – the arid west, where we humans are living closest to the water margins.
My take in this morning’s Journal.
[1] Andreadis, K. M., and D. P. Lettenmaier (2006), Trends in 20th century drought over the continental United States, Geophys. Res. Lett., 33, L10403, doi:10.1029/2006GL025711.
Bumper Stickers
In which Nora samples our zeitgeist via the bumpers of our cars.
Threats to Water Supplies in the Tropical Andes
Raymond Bradley has a paper in tomorrow’s Science[1] laying out the significant threats to water supplies in the Andes as a result of global climate change. This is the sort of thing Roger Pielke Sr. wisely argues that we need – a better understanding of climate change effects on a regional scale “focused on regional and local societal and environmental resources of importance.”
Bradley and colleagues argue that melting glaciers threaten water supplies in places like Quito and La Paz, where water flowing off of glaciers serves as a critical dry season buffer:
Although an increase in glacier melting initially increases runoff, the disappearance of glaciers will cause very abrupt changes in stream-flow, because of the lack of a glacial buffer during the dry season. This will affect the availability of drinking water, and of water for agriculture and hydropower production.
Adaptation will be required, they say. Apparently no way to mitigate this on any reasonable time scale:
It is in the tropical Andes that climate change, glaciers, water resources, and a dense (largely poor) population meet in a critical nexus. Some glaciers have already reached the threshold at which they are destined to disappear completely; for many more, this threshold may be reached within the next 10 to 20 years. Therefore, governments must plan without delay to avoid large-scale disruption to the people and economy of those regions.
[1] Threats to Water Supplies in the Tropical Andes, Raymond S. Bradley, Mathias Vuille, Henry F. Diaz, Walter Vergara, Science 23 June 2006: Vol. 312. no. 5781, pp. 1755 – 1756, DOI: 10.1126/science.1128087
On Line Leadership
Luis reminded me the other day of one of the few smart insights I’ve ever had: the notion that in the free software world, a free-for-all of self-organizing social systems, “evolution” of a sort selects for nice people.
Commenters at the time (rightly, I think) complained that “nice” was a bit “self-patting.” Jeff Waugh worked out was going on more carefully, observing that “people who are cooperative, grateful, thoughtful and sharing are generally given more trust, responsibility and acceptance.” It’s worth noting that Jeff is cooperative, grateful, thoughtful and sharing.
There’s an article in the latest Science News that offers another layer to this. It describes a 1998 exercise in which a group at MIT worked with an online community of more than 3,000 youngsters brought together to discuss ways in which technology can help such young people.
The kids chose leaders from among their number, and the MIT folks found that the leaders thus selected showed very different characteristics from those selected in normal face-to-face groups:
Those who were later chosen as online leaders—regardless of age or sex—had referred to group goals rather than to themselves and synthesized others’ posts rather than offering only their own ideas.
Without in-person leadership cues such as height or attractiveness, online congregants looked for signs of collaborative and persuasive proficiency, the researchers say.
lesser goldfinch
The back garden’s at a really nice place right now, with a modest hollyhock show underway and the first early sunflowers blooming.
Last night, Lissa and I were sitting out at dusk enjoying it, and were treated to a visit by a pair of lesser goldfinches. They’re little birds, able to sit on the sunflower stalk without bending it. Last night they were picking some sort of bugs off the plant for their dinner. I’ve seen them do this before, though they also are nimble and light enough to sit atop the sunflower seedhead and reach around to eat the seeds.
I don’t know that there’s any seasonality to their arrival. Last visits that I blogged were Aug. 13 and May 10.
Drought Update
Nothing charismatic about this, but it’s what we’ve got:
The Southwest has been much drier than average since the start of the water year, with many locations experiencing the driest winter and spring on record.
That’s from the latest Southwest Outlook from the University of Arizona’s Climate Assessment for the Southwest project.
If you’re looking for some hope, check out the Climate Prediction Center’s Seasonal Drought Outlook, which is calling for some chance of improvement for parts of the Southwest. The map looks a lot like Klaus Wolter’s interesting experimental forecast, which is a bit more daring than the Climate Prediction Center’s official forecast.
An “Emerging Consensus”, part XVI
Interesting comment from Kevin Vranes that’s worth pulling out onto the front page. The question is whether there’s really an “emerging consensus” on the hurricane-global warming link. Kevin’s privy to discussion not visible to us plebes:
I still have to say that after watching the emails fly on the tropical cyclones email list over the past two weeks, a list that contains almost everybody of importance working on tropical cyclones in the world and to which Holland, Curry and Webster have also been posting in the past two weeks, anybody would be very hard pressed to say that an “emerging consensus” exists amongst that group of experts. Mostly what I’ve seen are very reasonable, very well-considered emails poking major holes in the data Webster used, among other aspects to the “debate.”
I’ll continue to maintain that while it is very reasonable to infer that increased global T –> stronger hurricanes, “reasonable” means nothing in systems that can be as counter-intuitive as climate/weather.
I continue to wonder what the hurry is. Science is hard, sometimes it takes a while to figure stuff out, and I’m at a bit of a loss to imagine what difference it makes, in terms of the actions we might take, whether we know the answer to this question now, or next year, or in 2011.
Overshadowed by Hurricanes
As a student of drought, I can’t help but feel a little sheepishly overshadowed by hurricanes – I think it was Steve Bloom who coined the description “charismatic megaweather.”So I was happy to see none other than Jeff Masters, the Weather Underground hurricane guy, recognize drought’s importance in his review of the Al Gore movie, calling drought and reduced water supplies “the most serious climate change issue our generation is likely to face.”
While we gnash our climate wars teeth over the hurricane question, it continues to puzzle me that this – Aiguo Dai’s evidence for expanding drought as the planet warms – has gotten such relatively little attention. Not charismatic enough, I guess.