Weekend Links

• The above is European retail trade, through December 2012.  No sign whatsoever of stabilization there.
• Low snowpack in much of the western US is leading to fears of another summer of drought and wildfires.
• UK stripped of AAA rating.  Guess the Cameron government's austerity program hasn't quite worked out as planned.
• A disturbing story (slightly off-topic).
• If you have an interest in climate and have some mathematical training, this Tamino post is an absolute joy.  Basically he shows that if you take a simple two box model of the earth's climate, and then factor out the El-Nino/La Nina oscillation as noise, you can come incredibly close to the observed history of global temperature (given the known forcing data from greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar fluctuations, etc).
• Daddy bloggers objecting to how Dads are portrayed as incompetent in consumer advertising (interesting in light of the dropping male employment/population ratio suggesting more men are staying home, which might be expected to lead to cultural shifts of the kind discussed at the link).
• Below is European industrial production through Dec 2012.  Stabilizing?  Evidence of that is not very convincing at this point.