Author Archives: gymnosperm

Postcard from a resltess mind

Posted on January 31, 2012 by gymnosperm

What level of economic growth is sustainable? In the current environment probably the anemic growth we are seeing, but capitalism has always been a boom and bust thing with a mentality that if you aren’t growing like crazy you are … Continue reading →

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Of Carbon and Sodium

Posted on January 30, 2012 by gymnosperm

Carbon is really starting to remind me of Sodium. Not that Sodium gets my hands dirty or greasy or anything. Most people have never even seen Sodium, it’s really weird stuff. But just a few years back everyone was getting … Continue reading →

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Viejo indeed! When the big dog stirrs…

Posted on January 29, 2012 by gymnosperm

El Viejo, (the old one) is an alternative name developing for the La Niña phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, ENSO. Much has been written on the impact of ENSO on global temperature, and many are coming to understand the importance of … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Climate Change, Geography, Global Warming, Oceanography | Tagged , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

528 years of PDO, the long skinny one.

Posted on January 23, 2012 by gymnosperm

        Quite a bit lost in the upload but here is the complete Shen Index plotted on three graphs and cobbed together (Excel tops out at 255 per series). Most of the time the index has been … Continue reading →

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And so goes PDO…

Posted on January 22, 2012 by gymnosperm

The first thing one notices is that this historical index shows the Pacific Oscillation to be far more medicentennial than decadal. This bears some further work for this wonderful index:  Shen, C., et al. 2006. Pacific   Decadal Oscillation Reconstruction. IGBP … Continue reading →

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Without data, there is only religion

Posted on January 22, 2012 by gymnosperm

Well here it is, finally, after hours of optical character recognition to extract the data from : Null, Jan, “A Climatology of San Francisco rainfall, 1849-1991”  (1992). Master’s  Theses. Paper  490. http://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/etd_theses/490 data that should be readily available through the publicly … Continue reading →

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Data follies continue

Posted on January 16, 2012 by gymnosperm

During the gold rush in 1849 a couple of doctors and an interesting character, a surveyor/glass blower/instrument maker, began taking rainfall measurements in San Francisco. They sold this data to local newspapers and an almanac. In 1871 the army signal … Continue reading →

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What is going on here?

Posted on January 14, 2012 by gymnosperm

I was going to do a little excel graph plotting a nice el nino/viejo index readily available from the Japanese Meterological Association (JMA) from 1864 to present against precipitation for the same period in the San Francisco area. I am … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate, Climate Change, Geography | Tagged | 1 Comment

Climate Change

Posted on June 4, 2011 by gymnosperm

Been getting up to speed on what I feel is the salient geoscientific issue of our time. We really need to get this one right. The stakes are enormous and the emotional pitch of the climate war is increasing. On … Continue reading →

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How to get your arms around a billion years

Posted on April 17, 2011 by gymnosperm

Any dog knows that humans have very poor senses of hearing and smelling. We don’t have a very good sense of time either. We really have no sense of our own lifespan, let alone a billion years. Our planet is thought to … Continue reading →

Posted in History of Life | Leave a comment