Water in the West , This is a subject of intense and enduring interest. There is a magisterial treatment of this in the book, Cadillac Desert, from 1986. A new analysis of data from researchers at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography "shows that climate change from human activity is already disrupting water supplies in the western United States." Reuters has their coverage here.
"National Geographic" has a great story, Drying of the West, in their most recent issue. There are some arresting issues being discussed here such as the prolonged drought the West has been suffering, the extraordinary diminution of water levels from key sources like the Colorado River and the shrinking snowpack, the devastation from fire and insects preying on drought-weakened forests, as well as the continuing explosion of development and the waste of water. (See my recent post on Arizona.) Being "National Geographic," there are also stunning pictures.
Warming Oceans , Researchers in London have quantified the relationship of sea-surface warming and hurricane activity. This press release reports on the research, telling us "that a 0.5°C increase in sea surface temperature can be associated with a ~40 per cent increase in hurricane activity."
Meanwhile, however, there was a lot of play recently on a paper that said that warming oceans might mean fewer hurricanes hitting the U.S. This blog item from "Nature" sums up the research and gives some insights from others.
I wrote in Hurricane Season last August about a number of angles and some good resources for a further look at this critical subject.
There's another story out about the relationship of ocean warming to the food chain. See this from the website of the National Geographic Society. A recent study "shows that as temperatures warm, the growth of single-celled ocean plants called phytoplankton slows at Earth's mid and low latitudes. The plants' growth increases when the climate cools." You can find an abstract of the study itself at "Nature."
