Sir John Houghton argues that drought is the biggest climate change threat in the developing world: “It’s the extremes of water which are going to provide the biggest threat to the developing world from climate change,” he said. “Without being able to be too specific about exactly where, droughts will tend to be longer, and …
I am nothing if not diverse. From this morning’s newspaper: On U.S. nuclear weapons policy: Thursday’s announcement is driven by the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review. The 2002 report concludes that nuclear weapons will be with us for the foreseeable future “to deter a wide range of threats, including (weapons of mass destruction) and large-scale conventional …
In his ongoing drought series, Daniel Collins had a nice post last week on a trio of studies about the relationship between climate variability and both recruitment and death of piñon, the scraggly little arid pine tree provides our landscape’s signature here (when drought or global warming isn’t killing it). I’d like to extend the …
Continue reading ‘Piñon and drought: some interesting details’ »
Today’s word of the day: paleotempestology
Chihuahua Plaza – Flight Originally uploaded by Miguel Navrot. From Miguel, circa 2000
There is much to recommend the nuclear proliferation piece in this morning’s New York Times by Bill Broad and David Sanger. It’s an excellent overview of the situation – how we got here and what can usefully be said about what happens next. I single out the following not because I think it’s the most …
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 …
ethio drought 15 Originally uploaded by aheavens. While we’re on the subject of drought, I stumbled on this, by Andrew Heavens, on Flickr. Heavens is a journalist in Ethiopia.
Andrew Dessler hauls out the old dice metaphor for a helpful discussion of why one might take long term climate forecasts seriously even if those silly meteorologists can’t get tomorrow’s weather forecast right: One simple way to think about the difference in predicting weather and climate is to think about rolling a six-sided die. Predicting …
Continue reading ‘Climate Forecasts vs. Weather Forecasts’ »
Following on Daniel Collins’ discussion of the different measures and definitions of drought, here are a few useful web pages that pull together various indices. One of the problems Daniel pointed out about my use of the Standardized Precipitation Index is that it only captures precipitation anomalies, which misses the temperature side of the equation. …