climate communication

And the forum is: http://groups.google.com/group/globalchange/. Go have a look. Why? From the welcome message: We are creating a moderated newsgroup/mailing list for the discussion of environmental science, economics, policy and politics, especially as related to global change issues such as climate change, biodiversity, and sustainability. The signal to noise ratio on sci.environment and similar unmoderated discussion lists has dropped to the point where it can no longer sustain interesting or informative exchanges of information and ideas. The success of the lightly moderated discussions…
Following on from Tim Lamberts post on Lindzens latest nonsense I found this from Henderson (as-in C+H). Its from the same conference. Its stuffed full of misrepresentation and errors, so much so that you don't get any points for spotting them. The main point seems to be: IPCC should have more economists on board. Of course it shouldn't: its mostly about climate science and so it should be. If they feel like, the economists could develope their own future CO2 scenarios, and why don't they ? (answer: SRES already spans the range and developing yet more is pointless). A secondary point is: the…
Yes, the CCSP report is now out (thanks het for the link), and it looks like the story has a happy ending after all: there is no longer a discrepancy in the rate of global average temperature increase for the surface compared with higher levels in the atmosphere. This discrepancy had previously been used to challenge the validity of climate models used to detect and attribute the causes of observed climate change. This is an important revision to and update of the conclusions of earlier reports from the U.S. National Research Council and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Jolly…
The Grauniad echoes Nature (subs req, but since the Grauniad appears to have copied Nature fairly thoroughly you're not losing much) in saying that the US govt has leaked (do they use that phrase? well I shall) the IPCC AR4 second draft. This is of course naughty of them. To test that they actually had, I sent a mail with "giant stoats are nice" as the subject line (you're supposed to send your name and affiliation) and "I wonder if this will get me the password? OR if there some filtering?" as the message. I got a reply in about 10 secs with the password, so clearly there is no filtering at…
Tim Lambert notes that Science advocates blogging (and since they mention RC and scienceblogs, who can disagree?). They also mention James A; he raises the interesting point about blogs being tolerated rather than encouraged. Certainly I get no work-credit at all for this (not that I was expecting any) but its a fun thing to talk about at conference dinners. James points out Bryan Lawrences blog (which I had on my mustelid blogroll and have just added here) and how nice it is to see someone senior (albeit a bit techy :-) blogging. Another example of someone senior "blogging" is Scientist on…
I stole my headline from RP Jr, who links to the Nature article. RP Jr modestly makes no comment; RP Sr is so modest as to not even mention it (though he is puffing the distinctly dodgy Scarfetta and West paper). So its up to me to comment, who else? Its a very soft article, nice and gentle. Most (all?) of what is written is true, but the impression left is... well. "To be frank, that irritates the hell out of me," says Gavin Schmidt is definitely true. The CCSP report gets a mention: Pielke Sr argued that members of the CCSP committee were focusing on their own work too much, and not…
ClimateScienceWatch is Promoting integrity in the use of climate science in government. But you know that because you read Chris Mooney. Lots of interesting politics-type stuff there. In Inhofe stuff is fun. I must post on the NAS stuff sometime. So I pass quickly onto the second, which is more about the science than the politics: A Few Things Ill Considered by Coby Beck. Coby has being doing an excellent job on sci.env for quite a while, displaying a remarkable patience in explaining the obvious to skeptics again and again. His site is a great reference for some of the more obvious FAQ's on…
I was invited to give a talk to CHASE - Cambridge Hi-tech Association of Small Enterprises - nice people even if they haven't quite got round to updating their web site yet :-) The subject was to be global warming - no problem - and wikipedia. The later I've never tried talking about, and found it a bit of a puzzle as to what they wanted and what to say. The talk-in-two-halves is here, and to buff up my rather tarnished open-source credentials I've put it up as a .sxi only. As you can see, the GW bit is only slightly altered from before (apart from a dramatic and startling new paper by…