Questions on the Gore Plan
Rich Sweeney may be an Al Gore enthusiast, but he’s got some good questions about the gritty details of Gore’s “renewable in 10 years” plan.
Archive of posts filed under the climate variability category.
Energy Subsidies
An interesting new working paper by Hall et al. looks at the role of energy subsidies in the developing world as a problem – and potential solution – in dealing with climate change: Many non-OECD countries currently subsidize energy, and particularly fossil fuels, thereby creating an opportunity for subsidy reform or elimination that would have …
Has Global Warming Stopped?
David Appell asks.
Albuquerque October Rainfall
Airport average: 0.88 inch (2.24 cm) Airport 2008: 1.38 inches (3.5 cm) My house: 1.64 inches (4.17 cm) Worth noting: that all came the first half of the month. It’s been dry since.
Climate Change in Albuquerque
Fans of hockey sticks and other related climatic time series will no doubt see a familiar shape if they squint and look at this graph from the Albuquerque Office of the National Weather Service:
Canadian Economists for a Carbon Tax
Economists sometimes get a bad rap – the unfair belief that they worship at the alter of markets above all else, ignoring real problems as a result. In fact, a great deal of contemporary economics is focused on the opposite – understanding the places where markets fail, and helping craft policies that can make up …
Don’t Call It “Drought”
A reader familiar with my longstanding interest in how one defines “drought” sent along this interesting story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation: Federal Government-selected experts want people to start using the word “dryness” to describe Australia’s worst drought in a century. The word “drought” makes farmers feel bad, says the Government’s hand-picked Drought Policy Review …
Coal’s Welsh Comeback
An AP story a couple of days ago is a reminder of why I’m so pessimistic about the possibility of effective climate change mitigation. People want energy, and they want it cheap. The story opens with a young Welsh man, whose father and grandfather worked the mines: “I couldn’t believe it when I heard there …
Leap Year Bias
Fascinating paper out this week in GRL on the “leap year bias” in temperature records: The addition of one extra day in February normally every fourth year produces a significant seasonal drift in the monthly values of that year in four major temperature datasets used in climate change analysis. The addition of a ‘leap year …
Glantz Lands at UC
Mickey Glantz, a scholar whose work on societal-climate interactions has informed much of my thinking on these issues, has landed at the University of Colorado after his unfortunate departure from NCAR. Details on Prometheus.