Is India’s Monsoon Declining?

From K. V. Ramesh and P. Goswami last week in Geophysical Research Letters, evidence that India’s monsoon, bringer of the rains to feed the farmers who feed the residents of one of the world’s largest nations, may be in decline: We show here, based on an analysis of daily gridded observed rainfall data for the …

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Climate Change As Seen From Nairobi

Per capita income in Kenya is $1,200. Climate change does not currently rank high on the list of pressing concerns of the residents of Nairobi, according to a new study by Meleckidzedeck Khayesi and Chris Shisanya in the journal Climatic Change. The global concern about climate change appeared like a mere drop in the oceanic …

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The Colorado River: Dwindling Under Climate Change

One of the disconnects between science as it’s practiced and science as it’s understood by the public is “the results of the latest study”. When we report on “the results of the latest study,” the public is likely to be left shouting: “But last week I though they told me coffee was good for me!” …

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Adaptation and Mitigation

There’s an exchange over at Prometheus that nicely illustrates the fundamentally linear face of the public climate debate, as so eloquently characterized by Andrew Revkin’s “pushmi-pullyu” metaphor. The example at hand is the Prins and Rayner paper in Nature last month laying out, in part, the argument for a fuller integration of adapation to climate …

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Some Good News Out of Georgia

Drought conditions have been good for Georgia’s pecan crop: The record drought gripping the Southeast isn’t all bad news: It’s meant nearly perfect weather for growing pecans in Georgia. The state is on pace to be the nation’s top pecan producer this year, with shellers predicting more than 125 million pounds harvested, said pecan horticulturist …

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“Doing nothing is not an option.”

The Imperial Valley of southeastern California is a remarkable creation of a modern industrial-hydraulic society. One might argue that the story of the modern western United States begins there. It was ambitious Imperial Valley land speculators shortly after the last turn of the century who, as much as anyone else, drove the development of what …

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