IPCC

A Friendly Note to Richard Muller

Richard Muller is a Berkeley physicist who has expressed skepticism over the integrity of some climate science.  For example, he suggested that the famous hockey stick might be a distortion because the only sources with temperature readings that go back far enough in time might be located near heat sources. Not surprisingly, climate deniers and their political …

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Important New IPCC Report on Renewable Energy: Good News

Yesterday the IPCC released its Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRREN).  To the extent that such a heavily edited and negotiated report contains a bottom line, it seems to be this: As infrastructure and energy systems develop, in spite of the complexities, there are few, if any, fundamental technological limits to …

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Whose Nature? God, the GOP, and Everyone Else

Some Americans say they don’t believe in climate change because they believe in God – or, more exactly, because of what they believe about God.  A few weeks ago, the New York Times quoted some Indiana Tea Party activists who explained that, because the world was created for human use and benefit, using its mineral …

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The Best Defense….

Ann cautions about downplaying the findings that the IPCC report erred in predicting the melting of Himalayan glaciers by 2035, and in the resistance of researchers to respond to FOIA requests from a climate skeptic site. She’s right.  We shouldn’t downplay the reports: instead, we should ridicule them.  So the glaciers won’t actually melt by …

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Bad Few Months for Climate Science

The bad news for efforts to persuade the public and policy makers that climate change is happening and is human-caused continues.  Since the revelation that hackers were circulating emails from climate scientists from the University of East Anglia, two new developments promise to stoke skepticism about climate science and scientists even further.  The first is …

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Bad climate news round-up

Sometimes it’s hard to be an optimist. The recent climate news all seems ominous: Sciencereports (subscription required) on the latest paper in press from a satellite-based study of the mass of ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. Isabella Velicogna of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory finds that both ice sheets shrank at accelerating rates over the …

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