The climate news this past week was dominated by fallout from the 10:10 video and Cuccinelli’s shenanigans, both of which will hopefully be forgotten by next week. Here are some items that caught my interest:
• After arguing to get rid of labels in my Doubt essay, in a BBC radio interview Richard Lindzen objects to being called a skeptic and wants to be referred to as a denier. This is doubly interesting since Lindzen is Jewish.
• Yale Climate Media Forum has a fairly lengthy post on the AAAS Webinar on “Overcoming Skepticism after Climategate,” a panel of 4 that included Gavin Schmidt and Chris Mooney. My favorite statement: “The Union of Concerned Scientists’s Brenda Erkwuzel cautioned scientists not to get caught-up in frequent telling and retellings of worst-case scenarios, portraying themselves as bearers of doom.”
• While on the subject of communicating climate science, Chris Mooney has posted Part III in his series “Communicating about climate science.” He asks some good questions, and coins a new label: “dismissives.”
• Seems like Fred Pearce is hanging out with the uncertainty monster. At Climate 360, he has a very good post entitled “On Climate Models, the Case for Living with Uncertainty.”
• Uncertainty monster hiding as a bad strategy is highlighted in a post by Roger Pielke Jr. regarding the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.
• While we’re pondering the issue of dangerous climate change, Discover Magazine has an interesting essay “How Climate Change Shaped Humanity.”
• Regarding the Pakistan floods, there is a post on “Al Gore announces appointing experts to study Pakistan floods.” Hmmm . . . I wonder which experts.
In terms of the actual science, two things caught my attention, both relating to the topic of natural climate variability:
• A post at Die Klimazwiebel entitled “Aerosols or natural variability?” summarizes recent papers that bring into question the climate model attribution of climate change over the 20th century. Definitely worth reading. I will be posting on this general topic in about 2 weeks.
• There is a new paper published in Nature entitled “An influence of solar spectral variations on radiative forcing of climate” that is discussed at length at WUWT and at RealClimate. This paper reminds us of how little we know of how the sun interacts with the Earth’s climate.
And finally, the National Academies has a new assessment report:
• Ocean Acidification: A National Strategy to Meet the Challenges of a Changing Ocean.
I look forward to hearing your take on these issues, and anything else of interest that you’ve spotted. I’m considering making “week in review” a weekly post on Climate Etc., to focus the open thread a bit, let me know what you think of this.