Jim Belshaw sends along a Felicity Barranger story on the dwindling of the Great Lakes. Per usual, climate change is blamed, though other hypotheses are also on the table: Although the drop in levels in all three lakes is variously ascribed to climate change or new rainfall patterns, evidence is growing that people caused some …
Autumn’s Advance Guard Originally uploaded by heinemanfleck. I haven’t been taking notes, so I can’t be sure, but Aug. 12 seems awfully early for roasting chiles. It’s the smell of fall here in Albuquerque, as they put the big gas-fired roasters out in market parking lots. You buy a bag and they roast ’em for …
As deserts go, the place I live now is modest. Albuquerque is in the 10 inch (25 cm) per year range. The deserts of my youth, where I developed my fondness for arid landscapes, were the real deal – creosote and year-round sun. I can remember once as a teenager sitting with a friend on …
Dr. Water goes to the place that has none: Copiapo is one of the Atacama’s “wetter” places, as they told me they last had rainfall in 1997 – a whopping 60 mm (2.4 inches) in one day that year. The long-term annual average (meaningless, really) is 10 mm or 0.4 inches.
Drought has been an issue in Zimbabwe, but this Famine Early Warning System alert suggests climate is a relatively minor player in the country’s impending food crisis: This year’s cereal production is expected to meet only 55 percent of Zimbabwe’s requirements, according to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization and World Food Programme. The 2006/07 …
The hovering in ENSO-neutral conditions continues, with the climate prediction center saying there is a slightly greater than 50% chance of La Niña developing during the next couple of months. The spread of the recent model forecasts range from ENSO-neutral to La Niña, with a majority of dynamical models indicating a more immediate transition to …
Pumping crap into the air to cool things off has been suggested as a way of countering global warming. A new paper by Kevin Trenberth and Aiguo Dai at NCAR makes this look like a bad idea. They used actual volcanic eruptions as an analog and looked at their effect on the hydrologic cycle: Following …
Watercrunch points out the significant expansion of drought conditions in Alabama in this week’s drought monitor: The Southeast: With scattered rain last week in the Southeast, drought conditions did not improve, but instead expanded in some areas. Even with recent rains, many recording stations were below normal for July. Mississippi is a good example of …
It seems increasingly a waste of blog time to point out papers that show the planet’s warming. We already know that, right? So apologies for wasting your time, nothing really new to see here, move along. Today’s paper of the day comes from Paul Della-Marta and the University of Bern and colleagues: [O]ver the period …
birds: For the first time I can remember, two hummingbirds in an uncomfortable detente, sharing our front porch feeder. A third hovered in the distance, out by the daylilies. Why can’t we all just get along? paper of the day: For reasons that will eventually become clear – Holocene Vegetation in Chaco Canyon, by a …