A story out of Jerusalem about drought in Israel reminds that the place labels change, but the themes remain: Israel’s water problem stems from population growth and an improvement in quality of life that brings a greater desire to water lawns and gardens, Schor said. This winter was the fourth that Israel got less than …
As Scot points out, there’s a crapload of snow all over the western U.S. right now. That’s probably the most interesting bit from a climatological perspective. You typically see wet up north and dry down south, or vice versa. But we’ve also hit a warm spell down here, which means you’re starting to see things …
reading:The Nature of Economies, by Jane Jacobs listening: Bongo Fury word of the day: fuggy – stuff or smelly paper of the day: lead in the North Pacific – Ice cores from the Yukon record rising lead levels resulting from the industrialization of Asia
The global cooling mole.
This Rutishauser and colleagues have been tracking the blooming of flowers in Switzerland (can you think of a more delightful job as a scientist?). In a paper just published in GRL, they concluded that 2007 was a remarkable spring: Anomalously high temperatures led to a very early onset of plant phenological spring phases, including 98 …
Andrew Revkin writes this morning about a paper in Nature Geoscience showing an expansion of barren desert-like regions of ocean.
A lovely bit of amateur climate science from Tim Haab: Follow the bouncing ball of logic. C02 concentrations and temperatures are correlated. Sunspot activity and temperatures are not and neither are CO2 concentrations and sunspot activity. Therefore, sunspots activities are not a causal factor in determining long-term temperature trends. Don’t worry. His work is easily …
We’ve got a standard joke around the office when it starts raining: “Drought’s over.” You’ve gotta love the picture on Arizona Republic water guy Shaun McKinnon’s blog today of water spilling over the dam in the middle of Tempe. To non-southwestern desert types: that’s a place where you don’t usually see water. But Shaun bids …
Max and Jules Boykoff wrote a widely quoted paper back in 2004 that has been used as a cudgel to bludgeon the news media for providing a sort of false balance in coverage of climate change that amounts to a hidden bias. The argument is that mainstream U.S. media, in its instinctive search for “balance,” …
While I’m at it, another global drought report (I’m really just catching up on some news stories I set aside over the last week to read). This time Chile: Farmers in small towns in south-central Chile have lost crops and livestock in the drought blamed on the weather phenomenon La Nina. Rainfall records show the …