Saturday, May 9, 2015

Around the climate blogs: addiction to global mean temperature; and the electricity cost of California's drought

HotWhopper exists to replace deniers' disinformation with science, which means that it's easy to forget there is real work going on out in the world. A couple of items from the Blog Roll are worth reading when you want a break from the conspiracy-theorising nuttery that goes on in the deniosphere.


Addiction to global mean temperature: Isaac Held


First of all, Isaac Held has written about the addiction to global mean temperature and the dangers in considering it in isolation. Isaac Held is a modeler with the NOAA Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Research Laboratory at Princeton University, although the views expressed are his own, not any official position. He talks about what can happen if you use simple globally averaged box models, without taking account of spatial structure of the response to forcing. His articles are for the advanced climate hawk, usually. But I dare say that most HotWhopper readers wouldn't find this latest article of his difficult.


The energy cost of the Californian drought: Peter Gleick


Moving away from the theoretical to the practical, Peter Gleick has written about the impact of the Californian drought on the cost of its electricity supply. Peter Gleick is President of the Pacific Institute in Oakland. He reports that California has had to replace cheap hydro electricity with more expensive power from natural gas. (Can you take out drought insurance against higher electricity prices?) Drought has been a big problem for electricity supply in Brazil, too.

4 comments:

  1. Brigitte Nerlich has an interesting analysis entitled "Climate Skepticism in Australia" as her latest post on the "Making Science Public" blog.

    https://blogs.nottingham.ac.uk/makingsciencepublic/

    ReplyDelete
  2. Here's another impact of the California drought and a temporary measure to deal with it:

    http://www.sfgate.com/drought/article/State-building-40M-emergency-rock-barrier-to-6252075.php

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. We can only hope the west USA gets some decent rain soon - without floods.

      Delete
    2. Oh, Colorado (part of the west) is getting a bunch right now. California, not so much. Actually we did just now get a bit of rain and snow, but so late in the year it'll largely just evaporate rather than help with the drought.

      Delete

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