This just in: NORTH POLE — Kris Kringle announced today that he has dropped the centuries-old tradition of stuffing coal into the stockings of naughty boys and girls. The decision comes at a time when record warm temperatures and thinning sea ice are threatening the very existence of Kringle’s North Pole toy-making and distribution center. …
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 …
Malcolm on the rains in Australia. The blessings of La Nina? Fortunately, things have definitely improved. The latest weekly report from the Catchmtent Authority shows that we have remained above 55% capacity for a couple months now and it is even ticking up slightly of late. The next mark of interest is 70%, which is …
Daniel Hall, drawing in part on the excellent reporting of Peter Spotts in the Christian Science Monitor, had a nice post today about pressure on the developed world to adapt to climate change, and on the mechanisms to pay for it: U.S. CO2 emissions are around 6 billion metric tons per year. If permit prices …
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 …
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!” …
Continue reading ‘The Colorado River: Dwindling Under Climate Change’ »
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 …
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 …
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 …