Of minor blogworthiness

Nothing much around that makes me feel like posting at length today, although people might be curious enough to read these:

* the odd problem of "fake" love hotels in Japan. Funny, I thought town planning was a concept unknown to the Japanese, but they do actually stop love hotels from being less than 200 m from a school.

* Real Climate has a good post updating the comparisons of climate models with actual observations. Result: there is no great crisis in climate science according to these comparisons, although of course it remains a complicated field.

* I missed this from December: the Billfish Foundation (great name) and NOAA say that these big fish (including tuna) are having less ocean to stay in because of increasing hypoxic areas:

While these hypoxic zones occur naturally in many areas of the world’s tropical and equatorial oceans, scientists are concerned because these zones are expanding and occurring closer to the sea surface, and are expected to continue to grow as sea temperatures rise.

“The hypoxic zone off West Africa, which covers virtually all the equatorial waters in the Atlantic Ocean, is roughly the size of the continental United States, and it’s growing,” said Dr. Eric D. Prince, NOAA’s Fisheries Service research fishery biologist. “With the current cycle of climate change and accelerated global warming, we expect the size of this zone to increase, further reducing the available habitat for these fish.”

* You probably already heard, but I'll note it here anyway: one paper last week says that climate modelling has underestimated the effect of loss of ice and snow on future temperature rises. Great...

* Did I mention this before? I don't think so, I think I intended to: it's a steam bath, but not as you know it.

There you go. Not all of that of what "minor blogworthiness" after all.

Now I should work today, as it's a holiday tomorrow.