Strange bedfellows

Anthony Watts' "long awaited surfacestations paper" had as one of its co-authors John Nielsen-Gammon. I hadn't heard of him before, but some commenters around the place noted that he was no skeptic, and said he ran a pretty good blog (Climate Abyss) on climate change. (Some said they couldn't understand why he would get involved in any project with Watts.)

At Deltoid and Rabett Run, the biggest climate change blogs so far which have spent time pointing out how Watts' paper had disproved his own claims about warming bias for the US mean temperatures, Nielsen-Gammon made some comments which seemed to be attempts to protect Watts from too much criticism. Some at Deltoid had a go at him about this: why shouldn't Watts be strongly criticised for the way he pre-empted (inaccurately, and for skeptic propaganda purposes) the results of his own project for years.

Anyway, I see that Nielsen-Gammon has a new post up at his own blog which does show how much of a non-skeptic he really is. It really does confirm that he and Watts make very strange bedfellows on any climate research paper.

So, here are the best parts from Nielsen-Gammon's post:

“If carbon dioxide supposedly causes global warming, then what caused the Roman Warm Period?”

This question just floors me. I have a hard time figuring out why I’m supposed to fully understand the energy balance of the Earth 2,000 years ago, prior to the first thermometer or the second satellite,* before I’m allowed to examine data from comprehensive global observing systems to figure out what’s happening right here and now.

I’m pretty sure that what’s really being asked is the following: “The Earth’s climate has had warm and cold periods before. Why can’t this be the same old thing again?” This is a little easier to address, but still there’s the unspoken expectation that all possible natural explanations need to be understood and excluded before we should accept an anthropogenic explanation.

This does sound like a cautious choice, seemingly consistent with Sherlock Holmes the climate scientist, who would say that you should exclude all the plausible explanations before concluding that the remaining explanation, however implausible, is the correct one. The problem, though, is that the anthropogenic explanation is not the implausible one, it’s the obvious one.....

...at least one of the primary causes of the relatively warm decade of the 2000s is obvious: WE’VE MUCKED WITH THE ATMOSPHERE SO MUCH THAT IT HAD TO GET WARMER. Even just the direct effect of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases would be enough for a few tenths of a degree of warming, and the odds are overwhelming that climate feedbacks would further enhance the warming. Heck, we’ve probably done so much to the atmosphere that some of the natural processes are no longer in play. My guess is that we’ve fairly successfully prevented the next glacial period, for example....

In my previous post, I discussed some of the things that affect the Earth’s climate. I need to know more about them to see how they affected the Roman Warm Period. How much brighter was the Sun during that time? Was there a lull in volcanic activity? How much did the Romans clear forests and alter the local climate? I need to know how the climate forcings changed before I can say which one (or which combination) caused the Roman Warm Period.

After all, the only reason we know that greenhouse gases have been a major contributor to the current warming is that we’ve got decent global measurements of them, we’ve got observations from space that show the reduced infrared emissions because of those gases, and we can calculate (with simple or complex models, it doesn’t matter) that the expected rise in temperature is in the right ballpark to be greenhouse-gas induced. Oh, and we can measure the other forcings, such as solar output and aerosols from volcanoes, and they’re nowhere near large enough. Many of them, in fact, would cause cooling!

And no, I’m not impressed by how much the Earth has cooled over the past decade.

Wow.

I see that Anthony Watts has re-posted Nielsen-Gammon's post about the surfacestations.org results on diurnal temperature range (the significance of which remains unclear, but at least Watts can claim it as a useful result). I would not however, hold my breath waiting for Dr John's strongly pro-AGW post to turn up at Watts Up With That.

Noooooooo.....

gulfnews : Rosie to take over Oprah's show

They must be getting desperate for talk show host talent in the United States.

Today's news from Tromsø

Mobile phone coverage in Finland and Norway is interfering with a type of radar used to research the Northern Lights:

The scientific organisation operates five Aurora borealis radars in the Nordic region, two of which are stationed beyond the reach of mobile phone networks in the remote Svalbard Islands that belong to Norway. The Kiruna scatter radar, in turn, is experiencing problems similar to those in Sodankylä.

An EISCAT radar situated in Tromsø, Norway, keeps sending a powerful radio signal into the upper atmosphere, less than a thousandth of which is then scattered back to the surface. These soft whispers are then caught by using 300-tonne, house-sized dish antennae of the scatter radars.

These “whispers” will provide scientists with information, for example, about the Northern Lights, as the upper atmosphere contains electrically charged particles, from which the radio signal scatters.

“These days, at times the mobile phone traffic blots out the quiet scattering”, explains Professor Markku Lehtinen from the Sodankylä Geophysical Observatory, which is an independent department of the University of Oulu.

Well, I guess I'm a bit surprised that research into the Northern Lights is still active. They should just ban mobile phones.

Gittens on Abbott

I like this summary by Ross Gittens of how Tony Abbott is running the carbon tax argument:

I don't like using the L-word, but Tony Abbott is setting new lows in the lightness with which he plays with the truth. He blatantly works both sides of the street, nodding happily in the company of climate-change deniers, but in more intellectually respectable company professing belief in human-caused global warming, his commitment to reducing carbon emissions by 5 per cent by 2020 and the efficacy of his no-offence policies to achieve it.

He grossly exaggerates the costs involved in a carbon tax, telling business audiences they will have to pay the lot and be destroyed by it, while telling the punters business will pass all the costs on to them. He forgets to mention that most of the proceeds from the tax will be returned as compensation.

He repeats the half-truth that nothing we could do by ourselves would reduce global emissions, while failing to correct the punters' ignorant belief that Australia is the only country contemplating action. Last week's news that Britain's Conservative-led coalition government has pledged to cut emissions by half within 15 years is ignored. Economists call this mentality ''free-riding''; the old Australian word for it is ''bludging''.

Today's comment to Andrew Bolt

Andrew Bolt keeps tediously repeating Robyn Williams' carelessly worded comment re 100 m of sea level rise, prompting me to comment at his blog today:

Andrew, you're big on pointing out carelessly worded statements by any "warmenist", yet won't dare mention that Anthony Watts, the person who runs the world's largest skeptic blog, recently disproved his own claim that the US mean temperature record had been inflated by weather station siting issues.

Be honest and admit your own fellow traveller made a major false claim for years, and you swallowed it all; helped promote it, in fact.

We'll see if that makes it through his thread minders.

UPDATE: comment was let through. That's good. Someone asked for a link, I have tried to reply to provide it.

Keith, who seems to have been here and thinks I'm a nasty person, says Andrew did acknowledge the Watts result on his radio show. I would be curious to know when so I could listen. Is it too much to ask Bolt to acknowledge it on his blog too, given that he has previously given surfacestations.org lots of skeptic publicity? I don't think so...

Cannabis madness - yet again

ABC The Drum - High risks: cannabis and psychosis

I always like to read comments by psychiatrists condemning the use of marijuana due to its mental health risks. There's a heap of such material it to be found in this article by journalist Quentin Dempster reporting on a symposium on cannabis and mental illness held last week.

Here are some examples:

Both the Mental Health Review Tribunal in NSW and the National Cannabis Prevention and Information Centre have said publicly that if cannabis was removed from the chemistry of young brains, the incidence of schizophrenia in this country would be dramatically reduced. Adolescents who start to use cannabis at any time are considered particularly vulnerable because the human brain does not complete its development until the early to mid 20s....

Professor Jan Copeland, director of the NCPIC (www.ncpic.org.au) a government-backed preventative agency, told 7.30 NSW that if cannabis was taken out of the picture the incidence of schizophrenia in Australia could be reduced by 8 to 14 per cent. She could not be more specific. That guesstimate was based on overseas studies. There have been no studies in Australia. This is revealing....

The pharmaceutical and pain relief benefits of CBD (cannabidiols) in cannabis have been studied internationally but one experienced psychiatrist, Dr Andrew Campbell, told the symposium paracetamol would have just as beneficial analgesic effects.

The comments are worth reading too, with, I think, many more people coming out than in years past to condemn marijuana for the mental health problems they have seen develop in someone they know.

The point is once again made that the problem seems to be higher concentration of THC in hydroponically grown cannabis. Some cannabis can be grown with more of the 'protective' component CBD, and the suggestion is made this "milder' form of cannabis could be legalised.

However, if it is the THC that many users like (for the quality of the high it gives them), and there is already a well established industry providing for that, is legalisation really going to have much effect on the illegal industry?

I have my doubts.

Multiversal

Multiverse = Many Worlds, Say Physicists - Technology Review

An interesting post on the suggestion by Susskind & Bousso that "the multiverse and the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics are formally equivalent." But this only holds if we are in a "supersymmetric multiverse with vanishing cosmological constant":

If the universe takes this form, then it is possible to carry out an infinite number of experiments within the causal horizon of each other.

Now here's the key point: this is exactly what happens in the many worlds interpretation. At each instant in time, an infinite (or very large) number of experiments take place within the causal horizon of each other. As observers, we are capable of seeing the outcome of any of these experiments but we actually follow only one.

Bousso and Susskind argue that since the many worlds interpretation is possible only in their supersymmetric multiverse, they must be equivalent. "We argue that the global multiverse is a representation of the many-worlds in a single geometry," they say.

They call this new idea the multiverse interpretation of quantum mechanics.

Clear? Well, no of course not, and its untestable. But still, of interest.

UPDATE: Mathematician Peter Woit at Not Even Wrong says that even he can't really make sense of this and other papers that try to draw similar multiverse/quantum theory connections, so don't feel so bad!

Interesting

Michael Bronski's A Queer History of the United States: What do 500 years reveal about gays in America? - By Johann Hari - Slate Magazine

Quite a few things I didn't know about homosexuality in modern history are mentioned in this review.

Speculative physics, again

Small bangs and white holes

The article suggests that maybe some gamma ray bursts are from white holes.

Well, if anything is up for grabs, how about naked singularities, I wonder?

Northern view

Further to my new found interest in Tromsø, Norway, here is a nice webcam feed from the university there. Even now, midnight has quite a lot of brightness.

I should work out how such feeds are embedded.

Colebatch on carbon tax

Let consumers carry the can on carbon

My favourite economics writer has a good explanation of the Carmody suggestion to tax consumption of carbon instead of production.

I think his explanation of the problems with the idea is particularly worthwhile noting. As Colebatch himself has had a change of heart about this, it is clearly is not a case where it is obviously better than the alternative; just arguably better.

UPDATE: Alan Kohler's column about what Australia needs to do is also well worth reading, and makes considerable sense to me.

Arctic dreams

I mentioned recently that I'm reading a biography of Herbert Dyce Murphy, the Australian Antarctic explorer (well, he was on the Mawson expedition) who seems to have led an unusual life.

Before he was off to the Antarctic, he had several whaling and other trips through Arctic waters. No doubt, it's reading about this that has caused me to have dreams lately about visiting towns in spectacular Arctic settings.

Which has led me to releasing while awake that I know next to nothing about what's in the Arctic circle, and whether it does have any decent towns or cities in scenic locations.

So, first stop, to refresh my memory of how the Arctic Circle is even defined, it's off to Wikipedia. It's more complicated that I thought:

The Arctic Circle marks the southern extremity of the polar day (24-hour sunlit day, often referred to as the "midnight sun") and polar night (24-hour sunless night). North of the Arctic Circle, the sun is above the horizon for 24 continuous hours at least once per year and below the horizon for 24 continuous hours at least once per year. On the Arctic Circle those events occur, in principle, exactly once per year, at the June and December solstices, respectively....

The position of the Arctic Circle is not fixed, but directly depends on the Earth's axial tilt, which fluctuates within a margin of 2° over a 40,000 year period,^[2] notably due to tidal forces resulting from the orbit of the Moon. The Arctic Circle is currently drifting northwards at a speed of about 15 m (49 ft) per year, see Circle of latitude for more information.

It's creeping away from me as I write.

Anyhow, there is lot more land within the Arctic Circle than I would have guessed:


I didn't realise so much of Greenland was within it, or quite that much of Russia either.

So, how do I find a nice town inside the Arctic Circle? Googling around led me first to the Canadian town of Inuvik. However, this photo from the town's home page, indicates that it hardly counts as Paris of the North:


(And make sure you don't miss the Inuvik Petroleum Show that's on in June.)

What other towns or cities are up there? Yahoo Answers indicates that the three biggest cities inside the circle are Russian, and the largest is Murmansk. Yes, I've heard of it, but what's it look like?:


Well, no one holds high hopes for Russian cities looking good, do they? But maybe I am being unfair. That glossy magazine Monocle, which I've occasionally looked at in the newsagency and wondered who on Earth it is aimed at, has a short slideshow and commentary about the city, which is kind of interesting. A little sadly, you will also see that new shopping centres in far flung Arctic Circle Russia look exactly like what's been built down the road from you:



So, what about Norway? Yahoo Answers says Tromsø is pretty big - 62,000 people. And look - it's where Joanna Lumley went to see the Northern Lights in that nice documentary she made a couple of years ago. So, some photos please:





Wow. It looks a little bit like Hobart, but with more mountains, snow and wackier architecture. (OK, maybe it's just the bridge that reminds me of Hobart.)

According to Wikipedia:

In the 19th century, Tromsø was known as the "Paris of the North", probably because people in Tromsø appeared as far more civilized than expected to foreign tourists.

Mind you, it's a very chilly Paris of the North. According to a table on the Wikipedia page, the average maximum temperatures in December, January, February and March are all below freezing. (-2.2 in January.) Despite this, the main street, when you can see not under snow, looks quite normal in a quaint European way:



But, once again, this post proves, if nothing else, that new shopping centres, even in the Arctic Circle, look like every other new shopping centre in the world:


(I am distressed to see that they suffer from Giant Face Poster syndrome, as do some of our shopping centres, as I have noted in the past.)

Well, that's it. I'd say for towns in the Arctic Circle, Norway, and Tromsø in particular, is the place to go. Especially in September this year, when Roxette will be touring there. (Isn't the internet grand? There's not much else to be found by Googling for blogs about Tromsø, except to learn that there was an Italian uni student who went there to study* in 2007, made 6 posts about the women, the nightclubs, the drinking, and the free condoms everywhere, and that's it for his blog. I wonder if ever left.)

Of course, winning Lotto is the only foreseeable way of actual making the trip within the next 8 years. Either that or sudden exotic benevolence of a secret billionaire from my vast readership. (OK, it's Lotto or nothing, I know.)

So, that's it for my Arctic dreams. I should go finish the book.

* This strikes me as a particularly unusual place to go to university, but indeed, it does have a large university:

The University of Tromsø with 6.500 students and 1.700 staff members is the northernmost university in the world and one of 6 universities in Norway. It offers a broad range of subject fields in six faculties/schools with studies in humanities, social sciences, natural sciences/mathematics/statistics/informatics, law, medical sciences and fisheries science. All the main subject areas are offered at Bachelor's, Master's and PhD level. The prioritised research subject fields are mainly related to the Arctic and subarctic regions; Northern Light and space research, fisheries research, biotechnology, multicultural societies, indigenous studies, community medicine, theoretical linguistics, among others.

Friday night observations

* Just Like Heaven is a very charming movie. Probably drives hospital doctors crazy; but very charming.

* There is no better dinner in winter than ox tail stew, with mashed potato and beans, and a glass of red. (It is also the reason you just have to have a pressure cooker, even if you never cook anything else in it.)

* Tony Martin really is very funny. Why have I forgotten to bookmark The Scriveners Fancy, even though I did read it once before? I enjoyed this recent article, particularly given that I have been reading through Andrew Bolt's blog threads lately.

* Watching Pirates of the Caribbean - At World's End on TV last weekend, I decided it's not so hard to follow after three viewings. Sure, it's bloated, but it's still a fantastic looking film, with some clever ideas and impressive sequences. The new movie - On Stranger Tides, has critics pretty divided whether it works as a "re-boot" of the series or not, but I'm not put off.

* I wouldn't mind seeing Thor, too. It has made a lot of money despite quite a few poor US reviews. Not sure what explains that (the bad reviews, when it is clearly a popular success - the takings did not drop off quickly, which indicates it does have good word of mouth.)

* This post is a lot like using Twitter, I suppose, but I refuse to get into social media beyond blogs. Twitter is the Fantales of social media, and barely worth the effort.

* Speaking of movies: oh dear, the first teaser trailer for Spielberg's Tin Tin movie is out; and I remain very uncertain as to whether the creepy "is that living mannequins doing the acting?" quality of motion capture movies has been overcome. Why do smart people, like Robert Zemeckis and Spielberg, think this is a good technology. I have never seen it used in a way in which I can get over the "uncanny valley", at least when it is humans being depicted. Still, I might be wrong, who knows.

* Why is there still not so much publicity about Anthony Watts being wrong about the key part of his pet project?

Look up this fact, Andrew

Andrew Bolt has a post this morning in which he complains that scientists should just explain the facts, instead of making humorous videos which target him. (As it happens, I don't think that either video is all that good or funny.)

Anyway, I have been posting comments at his blog this week about Anthony Watts' failure to come up with the goods, and about the specific estimate of warming bias that he made to Bolt's face only last June. I don't think yesterday's comment got through on his "tips" page, although maybe I just didn't click "submit" or something.

So here is my attempt today, posted as a comment to his video post:

Andrew, you seem to be showing a distinct lack of interest in the fact that Anthony Watts' own co-authored paper has shown he was completely wrong when you interviewed him in June last year.

Are you having trouble remembering? He estimated that warming bias due to poor weather station siting in the US could account for .5 degree C of increase in the US temperature record.

You said that meant that 2/3 of the increase of .7 degree could be from this. Watts did not disagree.

His actual paper shows what 2 other studies had predicted - cooling biases had balanced warming biases and the US mean temperature record was accurate.

This is the second major, major claim on which Watts has been shown wrong - the other being that international weather station "drop out" was removing cooler stations and biasing the world temperature record.

This was quickly shown to be wrong, and not even "lukewarmenist" Lucia of Lucia's Blackboard believes it. Watts, as far as I know, has never retracted or apologised.

Andrew, why do you show no skepticism towards Watts? He made a wildly inaccurate estimate to your face, disproved by his own paper which he said was days away from being completed.

Do the right thing - get him back on the radio and ask him how specifically how he was so wrong, and to retract his earlier estimate made to you 12 months ago.

End of the Tour

Tamar dreaming

Here’s another photo from the recent trip to Tasmania – looking at the ridiculously pretty Tamar River north of Launceston. Good wine, good views; a very nice part of the world.

I’m going to have to post more slowly here for a while – a series of family things are happening soon which will no doubt distract me, and I really need to stop worrying about how many people are wrong on the internet (there are so, so many) and concentrate more on finishing work.

One thing I will be looking out for, though, is Anthony Watts’ spin on his surfacestation.org paper. He has promised a post about it, and I can’t wait to hear his explanation as to why, a year ago, he was telling Andrew Bolt that bad siting warming bias could account for .5 degree C of warming in the US. There is also no excuse for Andrew Bolt to ignore Watts’ (and others) actual paper.

If you have time, drop over to Bolt’s blog and ask for him to look into this, until he does.

Anyhow, see you around.

UPDATE: I just realised that, when using Mercury browser on my iPad, it treats surfacestation.org as an address and you can link to one of those empty domain search pages. Maybe there's a setting I need to change on Mercury? Anyway, it doesn't seem to happen on Firefox on my PC, or even Safari. Rest assured it wasn't intended.

Mini black holes re-appear

Mini black holes that look like atoms could pass through Earth daily

It's been a while since I've read anything new about mini black holes, but the paper above suggesting the type that may comprise a large part of dark matter in the universe was interesting. They argue that maybe they don't evaporate in Hawking Radiation, but have matter orbiting them sort of in the way that atoms have electrons around them. They do not consider that they would be dangerous at all.

I also saw recently that Adam Helfer, who wrote a paper years ago in which he questioned whether Hawking Radiation really existed (thereby gaining some prominence in sites concerned about whether potential mini black holes from the LHC could be dangerous) has another paper out called Black Holes Reconsidered. He still questions our understanding of Hawking Radiation, and also notes that, while they seem possible in certain scenarios, no one really knows what a naked singularity would look like.

Uncertainties continue in physics, then.

For attention: Andrew Bolt

Well, the failure of the Anthony Watts surfacestation.org project to prove what Anthony Watts promised for years (that is, that poor siting of some US weather stations would be shown to give a misleadingly higher-than-it-should-be temperature trend) is getting some attention in the climate science blogosphere.

Notably, a site which I will soon book mark "Wotts up With That" has a couple of posts about it, as well as Deltoid (from whose hat tip I've been getting quite a few hits this weekend.)

I would hope that more climate science bloggers will specifically post on it - particularly Skeptical Science - and perhaps someone in the mainstream media (Andrew Revkin, George Monbiot: this is important!) Joe Romm should be able to have a (well deserved) field day too.

But for this post, I want to note what some Australian skeptic sites have said about this project over the years:

Jo Nova: I have never taken this blog seriously, in the sense of believing both the arguments used or that it is particularly influential (the latter because I suspect its slick appearance -which makes it look like a funded PR exercise, even if it isn't - actually works against it.)

Anyhow, her short "Skeptics Handbook", which is chock full of wrong arguments, devotes an entire page to claiming the location of weather stations is a major issue.

I await the amended version of the Handbook, containing appropriate acknowledgement of the reassuring findings of the surfacestation.org project that the adjustments and work of the climate scientists did result in an accurate mean temperature trend. (Ha.)

Andrew Bolt: Australia's most influential climate skeptic blogger by far, I reckon, has made repeated references to Anthony Watts' work:

May 2009: A post headed "No way these stations could measure warming" ends on this note:

But read Anthony’s full report here - an awesome testimony to the commitment to evidence and truth from volunteers that should shame the professional alarmists which relied on these stations for their warming scare.

July 2009: Post headed "How not to measure warming" contains many photos from Watts, repeats a Pielke Snr post which pooh-poohed the NCDC's claim that siting bias were likely to cancel each other out (a fact Pielke Snr now confirms - with nary a sign of embarrassment for being wrong before,) and ends with this:

Moral: If the US data on warming is so dodgy, how much can we rely on weather stations in vast countries such as China, Russia, Brazil and India? Or even in Italy (above)?

Answer to Andrew: Well, there you go. The US data wasn't so dodgy after all. (Or, to be more precise, the degree to which any US data was "dodgy," it did not, as expected by climate scientists looking at how to best assess it, have any significant consequences for judging temperature trend.)

June 2010: in a brief note of a radio interview, Andrew notes:

Anthony Watts of Watt’s Up With That tells us when dodgy siting of weather stations may explain two thirds of the warming measured last century. (Examples in the clip above.)

I have listened to the interview, and can confirm that Watts was claiming, only a year ago, that he was estimating, at that time, that it could account for .5 degree of bias. Bolt then said (to paraphrase): well, if the globe has warmed by .7 degree over the last century, it could be that 2/3 of that is not "real warming". To which Watts concurred.

June 2010: another reminder of Watts' tour of Australia, and extracts parts of the Counterpoint interview in which Watts says:

Michael Duffy: In which direction does the bias lie? Are you suggesting that the temperature has not got as hot as the American official historical record suggests?

Anthony Watts: That’s correct. It’s an interesting situation. The early arguments against this project said that all of these different biases are going to cancel themselves out and there would be cool biases as well as warm biases, but we discovered that that wasn’t the case.

My comment to Andrew Bolt: have you read the Pielke Snr post on Watts' blog yet? The one which notes that the warming and cooling bias did cancel each other out? The one which is consistent with earlier studies that said the siting is not the confounding issue for working out temperature trends that it seemed to be?

Andrew, I strongly disagree with your take on climate change, and your willingness over the years to seemingly accept anything a contrarian has said without (apparently) seeking the climate science response to the claim. (Have you ever had a detailed read of Skeptical Science?)

But, despite this, I find it hard to believe that you could not review what Watts has been saying about this pet project for years, and not now feel that you've been taken for a ride.

Care for another interview with Mr Watts where you put to him the very same things he was saying only a year ago in your studio?

I look forward to hearing it...

The Lego success

Lego: Bricks and flicks | The Economist

The Economist notes that Lego is riding high, at the moment:

After nearly going under eight years ago, Lego now has 5.9% of the global toy market, up from 4.8% at the end of 2009. That makes it the world’s fourth-largest toymaker. It is doing especially well in America, where sales last year surpassed $1 billion for the first time. Worldwide sales were up by 37% in 2010, to DKr16 billion ($2.8 billion). Net profit increased by 69% to DKr3.7 billion. Meanwhile, the world’s biggest toymakers, Hasbro and Mattel, are struggling.

The article notes the success is certainly helped by its very successful Lego video games. I don't play them, but my kids do on Nintendo DS, and they certainly seem designed to have a long life and exhibit much wit and creativity. Congratulations, Lego.

Future rainfall worries

2,300-year climate record suggests severe tropical droughts as northern temperatures rise

A 2,300-year climate record University of Pittsburgh researchers recovered from an Andes Mountains lake reveals that as temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rise, the planet's densely populated tropical regions will most likely experience severe water shortages as the crucial summer monsoons become drier. The Pitt team found that equatorial regions of South America already are receiving less rainfall than at any point in the past millennium.