art: Apropos of nothing except that I happened to have just listened to it, a marvelous old NPR piece from a few years back on Edward Hopper’s 1942 painting “Nighthawks”. paper of the day: Multi-Century Tree-Ring Reconstructions of Colorado Streamflow for Water Resource Planning, by Connie Woodhouse and Jeffrey Lukas. The tree ring people have …
From the Inkstain Australia desk, word that folks Down Under are turning to crime in response to drought: Rainwater tanks around Canberra have been drained and farm ponds have been pumped dry. Police say stealing water is often the perfect crime because evidence disappears without trace.
Marmaduke explained (hat tip Miguel)
Al Zelicoff, on the Department of Energy’s decision to back away from screening polygraphs: First proposed in 1999 by Gov. Bill Richardson — then secretary of energy — during the uproar over alleged spying at the national labs, the lie detector policy elicited the derision of scientists everywhere. The American Psychological Association, the Federation of …
With drought in Australia, snakes are on the move: Although snakes don’t need water because they don’t sweat, Mr Neindorf said they rely on food to keep their fluids at a reasonable level, meaning more of them were on the ground in search of a meal. “Because conditions have been so dry for such a …
I ran across an old paper this morning by Vörösmarty and colleagues about the relative importance of increasing water demand vs. climate change over the next quarter century. Their conclusion is that human population growth etc. swamps any possible climate change effect. I’ve blogged about this before, but I was struck by this wonderful sentence …
USGS streamflow data
Reuters reports famine in Afghanistan because of drought: Some 2.5 million drought-stricken Afghans across much of the country have lost their crops and are facing acute food shortages, international aid group Christian Aid warned on Wednesday in the capital, Kabul. An assessment carried out by the aid group in 66 villages in the provinces of …
Google Earth Snotel Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. As winter progresses, snowpack is one of the key western U.S. drought variables to monitor. Snowpack is an important leading indicator of hydrologic drought (see here for a discussion of various drought definitions and measures) in the coming year. Snow that builds up in the mountains during the …
In a New York Times interview, Peter A. Darbee, CEO of Pacific Gas and Electric in California, makes the business case for getting on board with his state’s greenhouse gas reduction initiative: Rather than sitting there and denying that global warming is a problem and climate change is a problem, my reaction was to accept …