Daisyworld's WunderBlog

With Respect to Time

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 23:41:00 GMT

With the passing of yet another year on the Gregorian calendar, the resident climatologist here at Wunderground.com, Dr Richard Rood, started a new blog series where he discusses the role of time and human perceptions of time with respect to anthropogenic (manmade) global warming.

When he discusses this concept of time with regard to climate change - short and long term - it seems to me to coincide with the lifespan of an individual human being, or of onl...
Read More

The New Normal: Is Sandy just the tip of the iceberg?

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 02:37:00 GMT

I hate to be a cynic in these times of strife, looking at the big picture rather than focusing my sympathies on individual suffering at this hour, but this is one of those cases where I can't help but speak out on a larger topic. With over 7 million people in the dark from power outages, a devastated northeastern seaboard, and countless lives affected by flooding and storm damage, it's hard not to be angry. Not at nature, mind you, nor at the subjective pass/fail j...
Read More

A Tale of Two Cities: Evaporation Rates and Flood Risk

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 04:16:00 GMT

Within the time-frame of a month, the regular news has served us two helpings of "natural" disasters that set me thinking. Those disasters are the June 20th flooding in Duluth, MN, and the weekend flooding of the Black Sea town of Krymsk in the Krasnodar region of Russia. While the Duluth flood thankfully caused no loss of human life, the Krymsk flood killed over 170 people. Flood mitigation aside, the situation of both towns had peculiar similarities to one another...
Read More

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 03:21:00 GMT

About a year has past since I gave up on the cascade of anti-science reverberating across the media echo-chamber, tossing in the towel on my attempts to actively engage climate change denialists on the subject of global warming. Since shedding that yoke of personal responsibility, much has changed with respect to my view of these denialists. In the past, I've fumed at the incredulity of their media campaign against science, not to mention the audacity of their profo...
Read More

8,000 Years in Retrospect

Wed, 2 May 2012 11:56:00 GMT

One of the more confounding phenomena in climate science is the rise in global temperatures that ended the last ice age 11,000 years ago. Previously, it was assumed that this rise in temperature was mainly due to changes in the Earth's orbit around the Sun (called Milankovitch cycles) rather than an increase in carbon dioxide, which - in the vast historical accumulation of climate data - appears to have been the result of rising temperatures rather than the cause; c...
Read More