climate science

The role of science in climate politics

Jonathan in his recent post and his comments to that post made a big point of emphasizing the importance of science as the basis for action in terms of climate change.  He also emphasized his belief that the denial of climate change by leading Republicans in the current campaign is an unprecedented rejection of science …

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The Climate Misinformation Nation

Scientists are more confident than ever that climate change is happening and is largely caused by human activities.  Yet, according to a recent poll, the American public is less likely to believe that climate change is caused by humans than they were even last year. When it comes to climate science, are we a misinformation …

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Can Incomplete Information Still Be Cause For Alarm?

How much comfort should people take from the remaining gaps in our knowledge of climate change.  Not much, is the answer. Scientists have learned a lot about climate, but there are still pieces of the puzzle that are yet to be filled in.  Here’s a nice picture that Nobel Laureate Mario Molina uses to show …

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The Credibility of Climate Science

Climate denialists contend that climate science is either the result of a conspiracy of some kind  or of groupthink plus institutional incentives to support alarmist predictions.  The conspiracy theory makes even less sense than most conspiracy theories, because there would have to be hundreds, perhaps thousands of people involved, scattered across the world at  numerous …

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Climate Change: A Plausibility Check

No doubt there are many reasons for the existence of climate skepticism, but at least one is probably based on a sense of scale.  The amount of CO2 emissions is large in absolute term — now about 10 gigatons per year roughly speaking — but the atmosphere is much, much bigger.  Of course, CO2 has …

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The Roots of Climate Skepticism

if you’re a libertarian, an evangelical, a populist, and a corporate officer — or any one of those three — it may be just a little easier to live in a world that lacks the kinds of deep interdependencies highlighted by climate science.

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The Attack on Scientific Freedom

A disturbing report from Science magazine: The news that Australian climate scientists were relocated into secure offices after receiving death threats and abusive e-mails became a political issue in parliament this week. . .. Contacted by ScienceInsider, a spokesperson for the Australian National University in Canberra said, “In response to increasing harassment, including death threats, …

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U.S. House of Representatives v. Modern Science

Nature, one of the two leading scientific journals in the world, has a strongly worded editorial about the recent House hearings on climate change: At a subcommittee hearing on 14 March, anger and distrust were directed at scientists and respected scientific societies. Misinformation was presented as fact, truth was twisted and nobody showed any inclination …

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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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Melting the Ice (But Not in a Fun, Life-of-the Party Way)

The Ny Times has a lengthy article about glacial melting and sea level rise, with bad news: But researchers have recently been startled to see big changes unfold in both Greenland and Antarctica. As a result of recent calculations that take the changes into account, many scientists now say that sea level is likely to …

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