History
-
Studies of past weather and climate events can be useful in terms of helping us to figure out current and future climate, because they give us a way to test climate models and assumptions about climate behavior. This story from Yale Climate Connections describes a volcanic eruption that occurred in Alaska in 43 BCE that…
-
I bet most of you have heard from climate skeptics that the Dust Bowl was hot as if this somehow proves that climate change is not happening. My UGA colleague Dr. Marshall Shepherd wrote a good blog post about this earlier this week. This is his response to that argument: https://www.forbes.com/sites/marshallshepherd/2022/06/20/the-dust-bowl-thenclimate-change-now-argument-deconstructed/?sh=474b276d90c4
-
Those of you who are interested in history might enjoy taking a look at this interactive timeline of agriculture in the United States at https://growinganation.org/. It provides a list of agricultural innovations and societal changes and events that affected growing crops in the U. S., broken into five different eras from 1600 to the present.…
-
You may have heard or read about the lengthy drought that has been impacting the western US over the last decade or two. Since written records only go back into the 1800s, scientists use tree rings to provide proxy data that can help identify when rainfall was scant, since trees don’t grow much in a…
-
You may have heard the phrases “global warming” and “climate change” interchangeably when talking about the earth’s recent warming due to the effects of increasing greenhouse gases. But they are really distinct ideas. This article from Ecocentricity describes the history of the two concepts and how they differ. The bottom line: “Global warming is a…
-
According to an article in the Kansas Farmer, “At the height of the 1930s Dust Bowl, the federal government invested $13.8 million to establish more than 200 million trees and shrubs in windbreaks throughout the Great Plains. Today, those important conservation tools are in decline, due to age and climate challenges…” The windbreaks helped keep…
-
If you like to hear stories about citizen science and the weather, you will love this one. According to a recent story in The Conversation, 66,000 pieces of paper containing very old weather records in the United Kingdom were digitized by volunteers during the pandemic. The records were handwritten, mostly in cursive, which made them…