Guest Essay by Kip Hansen ZIKA! A frightening new disease that burst onto the front pages in 2016 as “linked to thousands of babies being born with underdeveloped brains.” Over the next two years, current outbreaks of Zika had spread from Brazil through South America, Mexico, the Caribbean, and even a few cases in…
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen A new paper in nature microbiology makes the following statement: “Dengue is a mosquito-borne viral infection that has spread throughout the tropical world over the past 60 years and now affects over half the world’s population. The geographical range of dengue is expected to further expand due to ongoing global…
Guest essay by Charles Samuels A recent article in the WUWT, The Daily Albedo Cycle, by Willis Eschenbach caught my eye when the author postulated that daily thunderstorm development was active in controlling temperatures in the tropics. The article shows that during the day as certain temperatures are reached, thunderstorms and cumulus clouds develop which…
New Paper by McKitrick and Vogelsang comparing models and observations in the tropical troposphere This is a guest post by Ross McKitrick (at Climate Audit). Tim Vogelsang and I have a new paper comparing climate models and observations over a 55-year span (1958-2012) in the tropical troposphere. Among other things we show that climate models are…
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach I was thinking about “dust devils”, the little whirlwinds of dust that you see on a hot day, and they reminded me that we get dulled by familiarity with the wonders of our planet. Suppose, for example, that “back in the olden days” your family lived for generations in a…
One of the Cape Verde waves coming off Africa has resulted in a new tropical storm. Of course it is well away from North America at the moment, but this is the place that many big storms that make U.S. landfall get their start. Here is the bulletin:
Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach There is a new paper in Nature magazine that claims that the tropics are expanding. This would be worrisome because it could push the dry zones further north and south, moving the Saharan aridity into Southern Europe. The paper is called “Recent Northern Hemisphere tropical expansion primarily driven by black…