I just picked up my loan of Climate Change: Picturing the Climate and was thumbing through it when I came across this definition.

greenhouse gases: Any gas that, by an accident of chemistry, happens to absorb radiation of a type that the Earth, by an accident of history, would like to lose. …

My other first impression is that the pictures are fantastic. The image on page 134 is satellite image off the West coast of the United States that show some stratus and stratocumulus boundary layer clouds with the effects of humans visible in ship tracks, smoke from fires, and air pollution in a major city. It looks like it’s from MODIS sometime during the summer, but the caption doesn’t say.

There’s some really nice underwater pictures of flora and fauna. Just a reminder that had I chosen to be a marine biologist, I could be SCUBA diving in Hawaii right now.

I know y’all were wondering what university administrators think about this whole “epidemic”, and I have the scoop.

From http://www.uanews.org/node/25497:

officials at The University of Arizona continue to meet daily to closely monitor the situation, take immediate steps to protect the health of the campus community and to prepare to respond quickly, if necessary. (emphasis added)

So… is the administration not prepared to respond? Or is it prepared to respond, but not respond quickly? Or is prepared to respond quickly, but only when the administration deems it necessary? (Most likely something that will increase the pay of administrators, increasing class size, increasing faculty load, while magically decreasing the bottom line.) My bet’s on the first (not prepared to respond). If you see any odds in Vegas, go with that one. I may have inside information.

So apparently there’s this swine flu thing going around, and it’s been on the news. I didn’t hear about it until yesterday when I got an email. I don’t watch the enternewsment anymore. But that’s not the emergency I’m talking about (nor is it really an emergency in general). I got to work today and I forgot my coffee mug. That’s an emergency. I scrambled around this morning trying to find something, and all I could come up with was an old paper cup I had used before (in the previous emergency).

Back to the swine flu. According to Wikipedia^{[Reliable source?]}, there have been a grand total of 433 confirmed cases, and just 9 deaths, with 161 more suspected deaths. You may officially classify me as unconcerned.

In 2001, there were 29,573 deaths from firearms. If we disregard suicides, legal intervention, and undetermined causes, there were 12,150 deaths from homicides or accidents with firearms. ^{[1, original source: CDC]} Breaking out the ol’ calculator, that comes to about 33 per day. And that’s just in the United States. If we relax the definitions of infection and disease a little, it would seem that the gun homicide problem in the US could be classified as a pandemic.

And some free advise from a non-doctor: stay at home if you feel sick, wash your hands after you go to the bathroom, share your toys, and don’t play with pig feces.

I mentioned in one my latest posts that I’m going to be teaching an introductory weather and climate course this summer. I’ve exhausted the sources available, (why doesn’t the library seem to carry these introductory texts?) and the quality seems to range from “not what I’m looking for” to “might be able to use it” for the material that ”’I”’ think should be covered. Luckily, there’s this novel invention called interlibrary loan. It’s like magic. I click a link on a website, a form gets filled out automatically (which I’m supposed to check to make sure it’s right, but didn’t) and supposedly the book will appear in the library in a few days/weeks/months/sometime. If it works, it’ll be the best thing since Wikipedia. (I’m trying to change the phrase from ’sliced bread’. Although I’m not sure it works in this case, since IL probably existed before WP.)

I found 4 more potential textbooks to use, and 1 that just looked interesting. Can you tell which is which?

• The earth system by Kump, Kasting, and Crane
• Climatology by Rohli and Vega
• Earth’s climate : past and future by Ruddiman
• Climate change : picturing the science by Schmidt and Wolfe
• Understanding Earth by Grotzinger, Jordan, Press, and Siever

I’ve looked at these as possible texts, but they don’t have enough about climate.

• Essentials of Meteorology by Ahrens
• Meteorology Today: An Introduction to Weather, Climate, and the Environment by Ahrens
• Meteorology: The Atmosphere and Science of Weather by Moran, Morgan, and Pauley

This might be better, but I haven’t looked at it in depth yet.

• Understanding Weather and Climate by Aguado and Burt

I’m not quite sure a textbook exists that covers the material I want. Most seem to focus on meteorology. A few focus just on climatology. I’d like one that is about half and half. If I don’t make a decision soon, I’ll have to either use Essentials of Meteorology or have no official textbook. Any suggestions?