reading 1: Donald Wilhite’s “Drought: A Global Assessment”. Wilhite, in his introduction, clearly lays out the climate-societal vulnerability link: “Thus the incidence of drought could increase because of a change in the frequency of the physical event, a change in societal vulnerability to water shortages, or both.”

reading 2: Via Roger Pielke the Younger, a paper by Reiner Grundman on Scientific Consensus and Leadership. Grundman seems to argue that a relative lack of scientific activism on climate change is part of the reason climate/greenhouse policy hasn’t moved off the dime. More blogging on this after I reread the paper, as I was a bit sleepy last night plowing through it.

stuff I wrote elsewhere: Local folks get one of the first peeks at stardust (sub. req.): “`It’s kind of humbling to think that this planet— and all the planets— (are) made up of that dust,’ Rietmeijer said.”

word of the day: pissant – This seems rooted in a Scandinavian word describing the the urine-like stench of formic acid from an anthill. “Pismire,” an old English term for an ant, is one of its ancestors.