For grins, I just checked the latest climate data for Baton Rouge, which is in the grip of a fierce drought. July’s been a decent month for them. Still below normal, but better than it has been. From July 12-14, they got 2.84 inches of rain. It’s the last day of the month, so I …
Maggie Koerth-Baker in BoingBoing yesterday: In reality, global cooling was never a broadly accepted Theory. It’s reasonable to assume that a good chunk of Americans never heard about it at all. And global cooling never had the support of most climate scientists, let alone scientists in other disciplines, like biology and public health, which …
In this epic dry year, we’ve heard a lot of “worst since the Dust Bowl” comparisons. I’ve been arguing that it’s a bogus comparison – one horribly dry year against a decadal scale phenomenon. But there’s a second reason, nicely captured by Kevin Welch today in the Amarillo Globe-News: Farming practices imported from the Midwest …
Over at the work blog today, I shared some comments from Julio Betancourt, a USGS ecologist who knows his way around arid climate, about our recent fires and their connection to climate change. It’s something he wrote a month ago, before Las Conchas, but seems relevant, and I share here with his permission: I think …
From the Sunday paper (sub/ad req.*), my attempt to make sense of the issues I was fumbling around about yesterday: The factors that set up trouble in the Southwest’s forests are complex – a warming climate and forest management practices over the 20th century that allowed a terrifying buildup of fuel. There was simply too …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: the big dry, newspaper edition’ »
Been a busy week (what with New Mexico burning down) with little to show for it other than an overactive Twitter feed, but I caught my breath this morning and threw together some thoughts on weather, climate, forest management, drought, and the unnerving fact that I had to cut my morning bike ride short because …
Continue reading ‘Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Weather, Climate, Forest Management, Fire, Drought’ »
A group at the University of Arizona is using new tree ring techniques to try to crack one of the interesting outstanding paleoclimate questions in the Southwest – the summer monsoon. Tree rings have long been used to reconstruct winter precipitation records (fat rings = wet years, thin rings = dry years), but the summer …
Part of my standard schtick when I talk about water management in the arid southwest is an explanation of the problem of variability as it relates to aridity. It is so obvious that it almost goes without saying that life in an arid climate poses climate problems because it’s dry. But the more subtle problem, …
Continue reading ‘California and the Problem of Variability in Water Management’ »
There’s a myth that has firmly taken hold of a busted La Niña forecast on the Colorado River this year. It shows up this morning in a Las Vegas Review-Journal editorial. No. This issue came up last September, as we were heading into the La Niña season. It was a common misapprehension back then, and …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: The Myth of a Busted La Niña Forecast’ »
Digging through some old files, I ran across this fascinating discussion of climate adaptation in a 2009 Las Vegas Sun interview with Pat Mulroy, head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority: [W]here we have finally begun to look at how to mitigate climate change and what we have to do in terms of changing our …