Back in the day, I loved to write about supercomputers – the fastest this, the latest that. Eventually it got old. How many stories can you do about another computer being faster than the last one? But I brought the old tool kit out of retirement yesterday to mark Roadrunner breaking the petaflop barrier. Because …
stuff I wrote elsewhere
This week’s Economist food price index is at 252.1, essentially unchanged from last week, flat now over the last month, up 50 percent from a year ago.
Matthew Nisbet points to some new Gallup data that I believe supports an argument I have made in the past: that lack of public understanding of climate change is not a problem the news media can fix. From the Gallup report: While the percentage of Democrats who view the news about global warming as being …
There has been a great deal of discussion lately about an apparent global cooling trend that conventional climate science is at loss to explain. Most recently, for example, Anthony Watts made much of the latest satellite data out of Huntsville: Confirming what many of us have already noted from the anecdotal evidence coming in of …
Today’s Climate Prediction Center monthly ENSO forecast discussion bids a fond farewell to La Niña, and illustrates the difficulty of figuring out what will happen next: A majority of the recent dynamical and statistical SST forecasts for the Niño 3.4 region indicate a transition to ENSO-neutral conditions during June – August 2008 (Fig. 5). During …
My friend Al Zelicoff is a maestro of energy conservation. It seems like a no-brainer to Al, because of the money he saves. What he has long puzzled over is why everyone doesn’t do it. The answer, I think: information. So I was delighted when my editor, Charlie, suggested recently that we have Al do …
As if things weren’t bad enough, this from NASA’s Earth Observatory: One of the worst droughts in the past decade settled heavily over the Fertile Crescent region of Iraq and Syria in the winter of 2007-2008. Under normal conditions, winter rain and rivers flowing from the mountains of Turkey sustain the rich agricultural land that …
The New York Times’ Jad Mouawad had a story yesterday that neatly illustrates how hard it will be to come up with a workable climate policy in the United States. It describes the efforts of the members of the Climate Action Partnership, a coalition of businesses and environmental groups trying to sit down at the …
(oops, typo in headline corrected) Andrew Solow and Andrew Beet out of Woods Hole have a new paper in GRL offering up the latest version of the argument that undercounting may be responsible for a spurious imputation of a trend in hurricanes (and therefore an assertion about the effect of global warming on hurricanes): [T]his …