Game, Set, and Match.....to the Iraqis!

"To put this in a simple army metaphor, the Commander-in-Chief seems to have gone AWOL, that is 'absent without leave.' He neither acts nor talks as though he is in charge. Rather, he engages in tit-for-tat games…I hope the President seizes this moment for a basic change in course and signs the bill the Congress has sent him. I will respect him greatly for such a rare act of courage, and so too, I suspect, will most Americans."
- Lieutenant General William E. Odom

Does that sum it up enough for everyone? We've lost. Get over it. Move on to constructive activities in the Middle East (by which I mean NOT bombing anyone).

Drying up the rivers

Southwestern North America and other subtropical regions are going to become
increasingly arid as a consequence of rising greenhouse gases.

I'm rather busy preparing for my river trip, but I would be remiss if I didn't note this study:http://www.ldeo.columbia.edu/res/div/ocp/drought/science.shtml

Projections of anthropogenic climate change conducted by nineteen different climate modeling groups around the world, using different climate models, show widespread agreement that Southwestern North America - and the subtropics in general - are on a trajectory to a climate even more arid than now.

Seems that my home region is in real trouble.

Imminent drying of the Southwest and subtropics in the models is such a robust
result because it does not depend on poorly understood and highly parameterized
parts of the model (such as cloud physics) but instead arises as a response of the large scale atmospheric dynamics - which we think is quite well represented in models - to a warming world.

So I better enjoy my river while I can.