I have two new blog posts, both published today on blogs other than this one. They are completely different.

One is for the ENSO blog on climate.gov. It’s about the current El Niño event that is trying to get going – not so successfully by most measures. My post is about the one measure by which this event looks healthy: the warming of the tropical troposphere (the bottom ~10 miles of the tropical atmosphere). The whole tropical troposphere  warms up in a typical El Niño event, and it is doing so quite well now, even though all the other measures this event is lackluster so far. In fact the strength of the tropospheric warming and the otherwise weakness of the El Niño appear related to the same fact about this event, which is that the tropical oceans away from the “Niño regions” in the central and eastern Pacific show anomalously warm sea surface temperatures – something they usually do later in an event, but not usually this early. This post is here.

The second one is on the State of the Planet Blog of the Columbia Earth Institute, and is more personal. It’s a reflection explaining why I am going to participate in the People’s Climate March this Sunday, after having been politically inactive on global warming in the past. This one is here.