by Judith Curry
Based upon the precautionary principle, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) established a qualitative climate goal for the long term: stabilization of the concentrations of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. The view of climate change held by the UNFCCC regards both the problem and solution as irreducibly global. This view of the problem has framed the IPCC’s assessment and national funding priorities on the subject of climate science.
Posted in Policy, Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
Michael Lowe posted this comment on the Disagreement thread:
Wouldn’t it be great if more science was like this – hundreds of interested bloggers, laypeople and scientist interracting, arguing, disagreeing, learning. Maybe this is the real postnormal science!
Posted in Open knowledge
by Judith Curry
I am starting to see some encouraging signs that people (including the IPCC) are paying more attention to the uncertainty issue as it relates to climate change. Nature has an editorial on this issue that summarizes the situation as:
Posted in IPCC, Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
While my goal is to build bridges, I realize that there is no hope of eliminating disagreement on the climate change issue. Does this mean that we are we forever are doomed (Anthony Watts once referred to it as the world’s longest monopoly game), or do we have some chance of dealing with this issue and the risks it presents in a sensible way?
Posted in Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
I’m having another “Alice down the rabbit hole” moment, in response to the Scientific American article, the explication of the article by its author Michael Lemonick, Scientific American’s survey on whether I am a dupe or a peacemaker, and the numerous discussions in blogosphere.
Posted in Ethics
by Judith Curry
The focus of this series on detection and attribution is the following statement in the IPCC AR4:
Posted in Attribution
There is a provocative new paper available at an online discussion journal:
Makarieva, Gorshkov, Sheil, Nobre, Li: Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics. link
Posted in climate models
Not much has caught my interest in terms of climate happenings this week (perhaps this is a symptom associated with the head spinning).
Posted in Open thread
by Judith Curry
The focus of this series on detection and attribution is the following statement in the IPCC AR4:
Posted in Attribution
by Judith Curry
Arguably the most important conclusion of IPCC AR4 is the following statement:
Posted in Attribution
by Judith Curry
On the uncertainty monster thread, a scenario was defined as a plausible but unverifiable description of how the system and/or its driving forces may develop in the future. Scenarios may be regarded as a range of discrete possibilities, often with no a priori allocation of likelihood. An example is the future greenhouse gas emission scenarios used to force global climate models.
Posted in IPCC, Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
As climate models become increasingly relevant to policy makers, they are being criticized for not undergoing a formal verification and validation (V&V) process analogous to that used in engineering and regulatory applications. Further, claims are being made that climate models have been falsified by failing to predict specific future events.
Posted in climate models, Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC ) international environmental treaty (1992) states as its objective:
Posted in Climate change impacts
