weather: Looks like we’re on the El Niño one-storm-a-week track here, with another wet patch headed for New Mexico through the weekend. This’ll be the fourth in a row.
book1: Andrew Revkin’s The North Pole Was Here. Don’t be fooled by the whole “children’s book” thing. It’s a ripping good read, and Revkin has clearly taken both his subject matter and his audience seriously. Grownups who read climate books written for grownups are likely to already be interested in climate, so really, what’s the point? This audience, on the other hand, matters a great deal.
book2: Late Victorian Holocausts, Mike Davis’s account of the interplay between Victorian empire and our friend El Niño in the making of some really ugly global famine. Eek! Is it environmental determinism?
paper of the day:Is there any climate scientist working today more dramatically entertaining than Lonnie Thompson? I mean, really, you latte-sipping modelers with your fancy computers and your parameterizations and your heated offices. In this week’s episode, the swashbuckling Team Thompson returns from the foreboding Dasuopu glacier in the Himalayas to reveal the dramatic influence of industrializing Asia: “Unlike the Greenland ice core-derived sulfate concentrations that have declined since the 1970s, sulfate concentrations deposited on the Himalayan ice fields continue to increase, having nearly doubled since 1970.”
word of the day: pelf: money, from the old French word pelfre (the spoils)
