climate science

At about this time last year thousands of people were standing in the snow in long lines outside the convention centre in Copenhagen where COP 15 was underway. There was great expectation in the air, but equally concern that months of unrelenting public attack on climate science was undermining the UN process, not to mention emissions mitigation policy development at national level in many countries. Roll on a year and in similar snowy weather I was able to get a brief preview of “atmosphere: exploring climate science”, a new gallery that will open in London’s Science Museum this week.[read more]

Everyone is piling on with press releases and documents to coincide with the beginning of the Cancun talks, but I would bet that the most important such event is a series of papers published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The papers look at where we’re headed, and while I haven’t had a chance to do more than...[read more]

The Republican treatment of famed Climate Scientist Michael Mann, goes well beyond rational concern about scientific misconduct, and looks more and more like outright persecution of a scientist who has dared, like Galileo to contradicts the dogmas of the powerful. But Mann, like Galileo is likely to have the last laugh.The firing of...[read more]

The previous post drawing analogies between the state of climate blogging and cable news drew a wide variety of responses, some here, some over at the Energy Collective, and some in private e-mails (if such a thing exists). There's no right answer to the question of how to respond to skepticism about well-founded scientific findings. I'm...[read more]

Last week, Dr. John Abraham of St. Thomas University helped launch a “climate rapid response team.”  CAP’s Sean Pool interviewed Abraham about this effort in this Science Progress cross-post.  It’s not easy being a climate scientist these days. They live in a world where well-funded organizations collude to spread lies and...[read more]

By Daniel GoldfarbOriginally published at Americans for Energy LeadershipEverybody loves a good fight, and Andrew Revkin reports that scientists are gearing up for an upcoming slugfest over the validity of climate science in his post “Scientists Join Forces in a Hostile Climate.” On the other side, Rep. Joe Barton (R-TX) is maneuvering...[read more]

If the climate system is in a fairly stable, if chaotic orbit, as it has been in the late Holocene (say the last 7000 years) then there is some room for climate heuristics. An anomalously warm North Atlantic indicates how far north the tropical convergence zone will migrate in Brazil that July, hence whether the north coast of South...[read more]

Stewart Brand has written an online Afterword intended to update his 2009 book Whole Earth Discipline.  In it, Brand tells us that the scientist he trusts most about climate, James Lovelock, has “softened his sense of alarm about the pace of climate change”. Lovelock is now touting the gibberish of the climate denier Garth Paltridge...[read more]

Let me state for the record that I oppose Congressional hearings into “journalistic malpractice” underlying Washington Post coverage of global warming. Sure Gawker said “The Washington Post Has the Worst Opinion Section in America.”  But is that “journalistic malpractice”?  Sure the Post seemed to abandon any journalistic...[read more]

Here's a NOAA graphic that's been floating around. It's interesting how a little attention to design makes it somehow more attractive. It really doesn't take long to get the gist. Maybe the colors will help people remember it, though. Call it the Quaternary CO2 Hockey Stick or the orange on navy blue curve.A site called Universe Today...[read more]

James Hansen has published a short piece, Scientific reticence and sea level rise [PDF], which I highly recommend. The abstract and some selected clips: I suggest that a ‘scientific reticence’ is inhibiting the communication of a threat of a potentially large sea level rise. Delay is dangerous because of system inertias that could create...[read more]

Bracken Hendricks has an excellent piece on the WaPo site, Don’t believe in global warming? That’s not very conservative, in which he points out in some detail why the so-called conservatives are acting in a particularly reckless way when it comes to climate change. The explanation for that claim, which many others (including me) have...[read more]

As CO2 levels in the atmosphere continue to rise (and given the current state of global action they could quite possibly go on rising for much of this century) we hear a great deal about storms and droughts but not a huge amount about the really difficult issue that most countries face, rising sea levels.[read more]

There's an upswing of skepticism about climate change of late, thanks in part to the crazy season in the US (and I'm not talking about the baseball playoffs, although they have been pretty surprising too). While the pundits argue, the climate keeps on moving. When I give talks about climate change and coral reefs, I almost always use...[read more]

Here’s a key point that the media has failed to explain and the the anti-science disinformers refuse to accept: The Earth’s overall temperature does not change randomly on a decadal scale — it changes when it is driven to do so by an external forcing. The Little Ice Age is a case in point, as Skeptical Science explains in this repost:...[read more]