California’s snowpack is collapsing, according to the LA Times: California communities face a strong possibility of water shortages and even mandatory rationing this summer because of record dry weather in March and April, a fast-shrinking snowpack and below-normal reservoir levels, state officials said Thursday. (via Aquafornia)
More on climate science in the New Mexico Republican Senate race, this time printed on pieces of paper and thrown in people’s driveways, old school style. (the Intertubes version is here): In taking those positions, Wilson and Pearce are out of step with the vast majority of climate scientists, who agree that Earth is warming …
Enough already with the global numbers. I get it. What I need from you smarty-pants climate scientists is better regional-scale modeling. Which is the point of this piece by Fred Pearce: “POLITICIANS seem to think that the science is a done deal,” says Tim Palmer. “I don’t want to undermine the IPCC, but the forecasts, …
IPCC and New Mexico Republican Senate candidates: compare and contrast
Australians seem to want to confront the inevitable conflict between ag and urban water use by buying out the farmers: Australia’s government promised Tuesday to spend about $2.9 billion to buy river water from farmers in a bid to address the country’s worst drought in a century…. But a mayor in the farming district targeted …
Roger Pielke Jr., my favorite thrower of inconvenient hand grenades, wrote a provocative post this week about the linkage between malaria and global warming. Malaria, Jeffrey Sachs writes, causes poverty. (( The End of Poverty, p. 197)) It does this by reducing economic productivity, creating a vicious cycle in which people get sick, can’t work, …
For those of you who insist that of course every right thinking person agrees that the need to adapt to climate change shares equal importance with greenhouse gas reductions, Roger Pielke Jr. has another example worthy of your attention. The quote is from ClimateWire: Environmental and humanitarian activist groups plan to formally ask the World …
Drought in northern India has led to a ban on hair dye: At least 11 farmers have died from swallowing the hair dye in a drought-hit region of Uttar Pradesh state in the past three months, said Rajiv Agarwal, a senior state official. Two-thirds of India’s 1.1 billion people depend on agriculture, and most have …
cycling: Been sick for a week, happy just to get on the bike for 40 minutes this morning. paper of the day: Barnes and Roy quantify the radiative forcing due to land use changes in the United States reading: Jeffrey Sachs’ The End of Poverty factoid of the day: The average resident of Chad uses …
More evidence that getting this whole climate mitigation thing right is going to be hard: Early analysis of data out today from the European Commission shows that emissions rose about 1.1% last year to 1.9 billion metric tons. That’s after similar increases in 2005 and 2006.