Great letter from Tom Swiler in today’s ABQJournal: I propose that carbon dioxide should also be known by the name “carba.” Other oxides are known as the elemental root followed by an “a.” For example, aluminum oxide is known as alumina and silicon dioxide is known as silica. Like the name “water,” “carba” is not …
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 …
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 …
I am concerned that summer will never come here in Albuquerque. We hit a high of 94F (34C) May 20, and it has been cooler since. It’s increasingly clear that this “summer warming” thing is a myth.
Carolyn Enquist and Dave Gori at The Nature Conservancy have done a nice analysis of climate change’s impact on New Mexico ecosystems. My ABQJournal story.
Those in my profession like to argue that the due diligence associated with journalism’s formalisms is what sets our work apart, gives it its credibility and substance. Which is why I reserve special outrage for what George Will did this week. In a column published Thursday, Will repeated a theme he has touched on before …
CBO’s Peter Orszag on the economics of putting a safety valve in a cap-and-trade bill: One option for allowing firms flexibility in determining when to reduce emissions while also achieving compliance with a cumulative emissions target would be through setting both a ceiling—typically referred to as a safety valve—and a floor on the allowance prices …