Picture of the Day: World of Snow and Ice

Via Tyler Cowen. This picture is a few days old. A reminder of how naturally variable weather can be (and thus how hard things like climate change are to track).

Pakistan floods and world weather patterns

Via MR, striking pictures of the flooding in Pakistan, which may have affected more than 20 million people and was apparently caused by the same weather patterns responsible for this summer's heat wave in Russia (and the next global food crisis?).

Remember that the Punjab is also a major wheat breadbasket, although it does not appear to be among the majorly affected regions.

Is it climate change's fault? Hard to say, honestly, since pinning any single weather pattern on climate change is impossible, although as the Economist article cited above says, it fits the pattern of increased extreme events we would expect with global warming.

Update: Apparently one fifth(!) of the country is underwater. You could infer this from the above picture but it hadn't occurred to me that it could be interpreted so directly.

Can Wind Farms Change the Weather?

Apparently the answer is yes, in theory, if they are sufficiently massive:

Kirk-Davidoff and his UMD colleague, Daniel Barrie, used a global general circulation model of the atmosphere (similar to the models used to predict climate change) to calculate the effects of blanketing the Midwest with a grid of interconnected wind farms with thousands of wind turbines. On average, the study found that wind speeds were lowered by 5.5-6.7 miles per hour immediately downwind. More significantly, the wind turbines caused large-scale disruptions of air currents, which rippled out like waves that appeared to trigger substantial changes in the development and track of storms over the North Atlantic.

Given that "the areal coverage and density of wind turbines in the study are admittedly unrealistic," I'm going to file this away under problems to deal with once they appear in real life.