climate models

Clarifying a Cloudy Situation

One of the biggest difficulties in climate models is posed by clouds.  Modelers need to know what kinds of clouds will form, at what altitudes, and with what precipitation resulting.  These turn out to be very hard to calculate, and scientists use heuristic approximations to fill the gaps.  A new study suggests that on the …

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Climate Models Still on Track

As this graph from RealClimate shows, temperature trends are well within the envelope of model predictions, and not too far off the average of the predictions.   Even during the recent temperature dip that has received so much attention, temperatures stayed inside the envelope.  No evidence that the models are missing something fundamental at this …

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One-Stop Shopping for Climate Information

CITRIS, which is  a University of California engineering consortium, has a really useful site called Climate Navigator.  The site is a great source of information about the many dimensions of climate change, from policy to energy technology.  One neat feature is an interactive model that allows you to design your own global climate policy, setting  …

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Climate Change Lesson #6: Every Crisis is an Opportunity

This is the sixth in a series of short homilies about the lessons of climate change. It’s not clear who first observed that every crisis is an opportunity.  Probably it’s in the Bible somewhere, if not the story of Gilgamesh.   But a crisis, painful as it may be, does present opportunities for innovation. In the …

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Recent Work in Environmental Economics

What are environmental economists thinking about these days? Mostly energy and clmate change, it would seem.  Here’s a roundup of the most significant recent papers posted at SSRN’s environmental economics journal.  I’ve included links to those with free downloads: “Airline Emission Charges: Effects on Airfares, Service Quality, and Aircraft Design” JAN K. BRUECKNER and ANMING …

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The NY Times’ New Climate Skeptic

Last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine story about climate skeptic Freeman Dyson has me worried. For those readers who missed it, the profile is a largely favorable piece about Institute for Advanced Study scholar Dyson, best known for helping unite qunatum and electrodynamic theory and for his belief that nuclear weapons are the world’s greatest evil.   Dyson …

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