Climate

William "Stoat" Connolley draws our attention to a couple of essays by Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia climate team on the role of climatologists -- and scientists in general -- in the policy-making process. I have to agree with William, it's not exactly clear just what Hulme is getting at. Some excellent points are raised, though, and the essays are worthwhile fodder for thought as the Copenhagen conference begins. Hulme may be a fine scientist, indeed one of the best, but I have trouble following his line of reasoning on this subject in both the Wall Street Journal and the BBC…
Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the battle to save Earth's climate by Stephen Schneider National Geographic, 295 pages Not even Stephen Schneider could have anticipated how timely his new book, Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the battle to save Earth's climate, would be. The histrionics generated by the theft and publication of the UEA emails suggests climatology is much rougher than even Australian rules football. Schneider was one of the first climatologists to understand the need to communicate what his research was showing with the general public. He appears in documentaries back…
A two-hour PowerPoint/Keynote presentation isn't enough time to explain the science of climate change, the political forces governing our response to it, and the economics involving in reducing greehouse gas-emissions. Oversimplification is an unavoidable hazard. Just imagine how much trouble you're going to get into if you try to compress all that into 10 minutes? Is it even possible to make a meaningful contribution in such a format? Annie Leonard's new short feature making the rounds of the net this week, The Story of Cap Trade, clocks in at 9:56. So you know there's going to be complaints…
Anyone who still thinks, fears or harbors even the tiniest suspicion that the stolen CRU emails offer evidence that climatologists are cooking their data must read Tim "Deltoid" Lambert's examination of one of the most widely cited examples of the alleged crimes.
Maybe I've just been at this too long. But it seems that the ratio between banal observations and helpful analyses of the climate crisis is much larger than usual. I mean, I was offline for five days over Thanksgiving and apparently missed nothing. Consider this conclusion from Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, writing in Yale's 360: First, climate change seems tailor-made to be a low priority for most people. The threat is distant in both time and space. As Special Agent Gibbs might say: "Ya think?" And over at Nature Climate Change Reports, an interview with NASA climatologist James…
Back to work after Thanksgiving Break ... lets clean up a few news items I missed trying to figure out the non-eruption of Karkar. Undated photo of the summit area of Gaua, Vanuatu. There was an actual eruption - or, more correctly, a continued eruption - of Gaua in Vanuatu. The current activity has prompted the evacuation of 300 villagers from the island and they will not be able to return until activity wanes. Tourists were also told to stay away from the volcano, but the airport on the island has not been affected by the eruption, which might suggest the activity is relatively localized.…
Well, that headline's a little unfair. I wrote it to lure in those who jump on every opportunity to prove that climatologists are frauds. What I really mean to say is: "Where the most recent assessment by the IPCC has been superceded by more recent findings. It's all in a new report, The Copenhagen Diagnosis, assembled by some of the top people in the field. Here's the executive summary: Surging greenhouse gas emissions: Global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels in 2008 were nearly 40% higher than those in 1990. Even if global emission rates are stabilized at present -day levels, just…
One of the commenters to my last post, an attempt to explain why the hacked climatology emails do not constitute a scientific scandal, came up with a darn fine idea: If you think that global warming rests on a few temperature data sets and models, you are very wrong. If you don't understand this then you don't know enough to have an opinion on the subject, and you most likely will be treated just like any other ineducable troll. Grab a climate textbook and do some reading...it will help if you have some physics background too. Yeah, science takes effort... I just happen to have at hand a…
Much is being made by those who really, really believe that there's a global conspiracy among climatologists of the emails and other documents stolen from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit. According to such bloggers, thousands of "embarrassing" pieces of correspondence between some of the leading climate researchers in the world now lay bare the scheme to mislead humanity about the nature of climate change. I downloaded the 62 MB file and took a quick look at a random selection of what are mostly dull little missives bereft of the context required to understand them in…
I promise to get back to substantive blogging shortly, but in the meantime, if you've got three minutes to tear yourself away from coverage of Sarah Palin's book: Scientifically sound? Not the words I would use, but not too far off the mark, either. Hyperbolic? Yes. Offensive? To some. Provocative? Absolutely. Greenpeace and the Agit-Pop gang know how to grab your attention. If, that is, you already care about preserving what's left of the planet's ability to host civilization as we know it.
Too precious not to pass along: Canadian Tourism Federation Welcome Video from Canadian Tourism Federation on Vimeo. In case there's any doubt. There is no "Canadian Tourism Federation."
A fascinating paper about to be published in Geophysical Review Letters compares the number of record highs and lows at temperature stations across the U.S. since the 1940s. The authors found that we're getting more record highs and fewer record lows, in a pattern that yet again confirms that climatologists know what they're talking about. They also extrapolate that trend into the future, with some interesting results, but first let's deal with the past. Gerald A. Meehl*, Claudia Tebaldi, Guy Walton, David Easterling and Larry McDaniel analysed millions of U.S. temperature records for the…
In an otherwise typically error-dominated Newsweek column, George F. Will spelled "minuscule" correctly. So I don't want to read any complaints that Will gets everything wrong each time he writes about climate change. Of course, that doesn't mean we can't correct his myriad other mistakes. Here's one paragraph, with some necessary edits, just to get us started. There is much an unremarkable level of debate about the reasons for, and the importance of, the fact that global warming has not increased continued for that long [11 years]. What we know is that computer models did not did predict…
Climate Cover-Up The Crusade to Deny Global Warming Greystone Books, 250 pages Canadian public relations agent James "DeSmogBlog" Hoggan has assembled a comprehensive history of corporate efforts to stall action on climate change in a modest little book that should shock and appall anyone who's been living under a rock for the past three decades. For the rest of us, Climate Cover-Up offers few new details. It still serves, however, as a convenient hard-copy reference manual for when the Internet is down and you need a rejuvenating jolt of outrage to help you decide which companies to boycott…
(Pseudo)-Skeptical Environmental Bjorn Lomborg advises in the Wall Street Journal that spending money on anti-malarial campaigns makes more sense than, and by implication is morally superior to, spending money on cutting carbon emissions. But to make his case, he has to abandon all hope of ever being invited to join the Vulcan Science Academy. It may be true that every dollar we spend combating the vectors of malaria and the treatments for it will save more lives than those who would be spared the disease if we spend it instead on avoiding catastrophic global warming. But Lomborg is abandons…
In 2006, I bought Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's first book Freakonomics and, like the four million other people who bought the book, thought it was excellent.  It was full of originality with chapters on why parents disadvantage their children with bad names and why crack dealers live with their mothers. For this reason (plus the fact that I spent $30 and drove a total of 3 hours), I had high expectations when I went to see the pair in Seattle last night. Sadly, I left feeling that Levitt and Dubner seem to be suffering from a bad case of overexposure. I should have seen the writing…
There have been a number of articles floating around the popular press for the last week that I thought I would touch on briefly ... always fun to decipher the real news from the hype. Active fumaroles on Datun Mountain in Taipei. An article out of the Taipei Times suggests that the city of Taipei in Taiwan is in great peril from Datun Mountain/volcano. The volcano, which was previously thought to have erupted ~200,000 years ago is now thought to have erupted only 5,000 years ago. That 195,000 years really does make a difference in terms of worrying about potential future eruptions, but there…
It's no wonder that the most recent Pew report finds that belief in rising temperatures is down. As Jim Hoggan explains in his new book Climate Cover-Up, the media and the public it serves are awash in a corporate conspiracy to undermine the science of climate change, the corporate buyout of politicians, and corporate greenwashing. Hoggan deals very well with the 'controversy' (i.e. there isn't one) and also shows some of the problematic issues between how corporations and scientists communicate (many of Hoggan's climate deniers are featured in Randy Olson's Sizzle, too). Yes, the book has…
Rarely does a blogging day pass that I don't stumble upon some post or comment or email that champions the value of skepticism of anthropogenic global warming and the need for scientists to answer their critics. So it's refreshing to read a concise and cogent reminder of why such attacks are misguided. From UBC's Simon Donner we get this rejoinder, made in reference to demands that real-climatologist Michael "hockey stick" Mann answer the criticism of non-climatologist Steve McIntyre Think of it this way: wouldn't you rather that doctors spend their time actually developing treatments for…
The costs of doing something about climate change are the subject of much debate these, and Canada is no exception. The federal government, like the ones before it, has shown little interest in honest analysis, so one of the country's biggest banks, TD Bank, decided to pay for a study all on its own. The results, which the bank's economists call "robust," represent perhaps the most comprehensive effort to nail down those costs, at least for one country. And what did the consultants they hired to write the report find? Good news, actually. Unless, of course, you happen to own a piece of the…