Some old literature I was reading the other night carried shades of Roger Pielke Sr.’s argument that land use changes are important to climate change:

Notwithstanding the apparent uncertainty of the seasons, it is found that the mean temperature of particular localities is very constant, provided we compare observations made at different periods for a series of years. Yet, there must be exceptions to this rule, and even the labours of man have, by the drainage of lakes and marshes, and the felling of extensive forests, caused such changes in the atmosphere as raise our conception of the important influence of those forces to which even the existence in certain latitudes of land or water, hill or valley, lake or sea, must be ascribed.

That’s from Charles Lyell’s “Principles of Geology,” published from 1830-1833. Lyell was a leader in the community of geologists trying to make sense of why there were fossilized sea creatures on the tops of mountains, and why there was fossilized jungle flora and fauna in places were no jungles today exist. He therefore spent a lot of time trying to understand how climates could change. He ascribed the changes in climate to changes in physical geography – sea basins pushed up to form mountain ranges, for example. That, he assumed, drove climate change, and did so on vast time scales. (Lyell, like Darwin, was part of that first generation of scientists who realized they had “deep time” to play with, and busied themselves making the most of the opportunity.) Anthropogenic land use changes notwithstanding, Lyell didn’t expect climate to change very quickly:

(H)owever great, in the lapse of ages, may be the vicissitudes of temperature in every zone, it accords with our theory that the general climate should not experience any sensible change in the course of a few thousand years, because that period is insufficient to affect the leading features of the physical geography of the globe.

Everybody’s yammering about the warm January in the U.S., with the entire country seeing positive temperature anomalies (hat tip Mike Mann for graphic and discussion of global climate change implications of all this)

If you look at the map linked above, you’ll see that Albuquerque, at 3.8 degrees F above average, is in a region that saw smaller anomalies than most of the nation. We tied for 14th in National Weather Service records going back to the 1880s. Seven of the warmer Januarys have come since 1990.

The map of January precip anomalies looks a bit different, but downright dire here. No single month matters completely, but a look at the 90-day map should be enough to startle you:

(Source: Climate Prediction Center, NOAA)

Expect more of the same. The CPC announced yesterday that we’ve officially crossed the La Niña threshold as a result of cooling in the equatorial Pacific. La Niña, which has really been lurking in the wings for a while, tips the odds toward the sort of map you see above – dry across the southern US and Mexico.

There’s an op-ed in the 21 January New Scientist from California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger laying out his case for action on greenhouse gas reductions:

In California, we are already seeing potentially severe impacts: shrinking of our snow pack in the Sierra Nevada mountains, which reduces our annual water supplies; erosion of our coastline; flooding of farmlands in the Central Valley; and a wide variety of health impacts related to changes in seasonal temperatures.

The snowpack/temperature piece of is being ably explored by Phil Mote and his various coauthors (see here for a bunch of Mote’s other work). But Schwarzenegger’s comments on flooding popped out because of a new paper in GRL by Edwin Maurer of Santa Clara University on the effect of warming on conditions in California during an El Niño.

Continue reading ‘Schwarzenegger, California and Climate’ »