paper of the day: When and where might climate change be detectable in UK river flows?: “Even where climate driven changes may already be underway, losses in deployable resources will have to be factored into long-term water plans long before they are statistically detectable. Rather than an excuse for inaction, such insights should inform more sophisticated approaches to environmental monitoring, climate change detection and adaptation.”
word of the day: disgregate – to scatter (hat tip Anu Garg)
music: Joshua Redman’s debut album, which I scored in the used music rack at Natural Sound. A bunch of loving renditions of great classics.
book: Late Victorian Holocausts: El Nino Famines and the Making of the Third World. I don’t actually have the book. I’ve just been poking around in it on Google books. Davis draws some threads between climate variability and political systems that seem very suggestive of some themes I’m interested in, especially with respect to the late 19th century drought that killed so many people in India.
Do you know about “Climate and the Affairs of Men”, by Iben Browning and Nels Winkless? They looked at the connection between volcanos (which produced clouds of dust and cooling, resulting in low crop yields) and wars and revolutions. They used tree ring data to measure rainfall over hundreds of years. I think I still have it.