climate science
Answering the Climategaters
Want to create a scandal? Just add “gate” to the end of any noun. Climategate is a good example. Real Climate ha an excellent post dissecting the charges of error in the IPCC report, which turn out to be quite insignificant (and some of them not even errors at all.) Of course, if you come …
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CONTINUE READINGClimate 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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CONTINUE READINGAn Unhappy Update on Climate Science
The Copenhagen Diagnosis updates the last IPCC report. Most of the news isn’t encouraging: Global ice-sheets are melting at an increased rate; Arctic sea-ice is disappearing much faster than recently projected, and future sea-level rise is now expected to be much higher than previously forecast, according to a new global scientific synthesis prepared by some …
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CONTINUE READING101 (Or So) Useful Responses to Climate Skeptics
I know a lot of people who have occasion, for one reason or another, to deal with climate skeptics. Sometimes this happens at public events, sometimes at Thanksgiving dinners. There are a lot of arguments that skeptics use, and it’s hard to carry around the responses to all of them in your head. I’ve just …
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CONTINUE READINGEnvironmental “Poetry” (Yet Again)
There once was a coal company, Which fought cap-and-trade mightily. “Costs too much,” they complained, “Emissions can’t be contained, Or our profits will face jeopardy.” There once was a scientist (or two), Whose work couldn’t pass peer review: “It’s all cosmic rays, Or perhaps high-level haze, Or something else besides plain CO2.”
CONTINUE READINGIt’s Déjà Vu All Over Again
Since opponents can’t seem to come up with any new arguments against climate change legislation, they seem determined to recycle the old, discredited ones. Here’s today’s example, straight from the GOP press release: Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner, R-Wis., and Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif, today urged the Environmental Protection Agency to include several relevant studies in its …
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CONTINUE READINGRising Seas: Doing the Math
Real Climate has a very interesting if occasionally highly technical post on sea level rise. There’s considerable disagreement about projections. Some projections rely on detailed modeling of the dynamics; others are based on fitting a model to past changes, more or less the way economists do modeling. The latter, “semi-empirical” projects are also in some …
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CONTINUE READINGIt’s Morning in America (for science)
The Washington Post reports: When President Obama lifts restrictions on funding for human embryonic stem cell research Monday, he will also issue a presidential memorandum aimed at insulating scientific decisions across the federal government from political influence, officials said today.
CONTINUE READINGClimate change is outpacing most dire models
The Washington Post reports today on Chris Field’s presentation at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in which he said: “We are basically looking now at a future climate that’s beyond anything we’ve considered seriously in climate model simulations.” Faster development of coal-fired electrical power in developing countries is …
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