I wrote this for IIASA’s NEXUS blog for a post on 5 October 2018. While living in Cairo in 2010, I witnessed first-hand the human toll of political and environmental disasters that washed over Africa at the end of the last century. Unprecedented numbers of migrants were pressing into North Africa, many pushed out of theirContinue reading “History may not repeat, but it rhymes”
Tag Archives: southwest usa
Simulated impact of paleoclimate change on Fremont Native American maize farming in Utah, 850–1449 CE, using crop and climate models
Our paper in Quaternary International just went online today. The pithy takeaway: Ancient dryland farmers in Utah adapted to warming and drying during the MCA but were unable to adapt to increased variability at the MCA-LIA transition, and abandoned the area for maize farming. Because increased variability is one of the near certainties for temperate semi-aridContinue reading “Simulated impact of paleoclimate change on Fremont Native American maize farming in Utah, 850–1449 CE, using crop and climate models”
After the monsoon
The North American Monsoon (NAM) is a major delivery system of water to the interior of the American Southwest, the Sonoran Desert in particular. The NAM usually peaks in the mid to late summer, arising from the south over the Sonoran desert (Adams and Comrie 1997; Higgins et al. 1997; Metcalfe et al. 2015). But theContinue reading “After the monsoon”
AGU Paleoclimatology session
They never know quite where to put me at AGU. But I was very pleased to see that this year others are getting into the same things I have been: (1) strange behavior of the Medieval Climate Anomaly (MCA) in the Southwest USA; and (2) computer models! Omid Mazdiyasni (UC Irvine & YSSP2016) came byContinue reading “AGU Paleoclimatology session”
Marcus James Thomson, Ph.D. 