by Judith Curry
The U.S. House of Representatives Hearing on Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy has commenced. The House website for the hearing is here.
Live blogging: Gavin Schmidt, Eli Kintisch, Jay Gulledge
Real time rebuttal (password required): Kevin Trenberth, Andrew Dessler, Gary Yohe.
by Douglas Sheil
JC note: this post is a follow on to the Water Vapor Mischief thread that discussed a paper by Makarieva et al. entitled ” Where do winds come from? A new theory on how water vapor condensation influences atmospheric pressure and dynamics.” Douglass Shiell is coauthor on the paper.
Posted in Uncategorized
by Judith Curry
NSF has a press release on a perspective published in Nature Climate Change, by Baruch Fischoff, which I reproduce here in full. The full perspective can be found online here.
Posted in Communication
JC note: this essay was prepared for a recent address at given at the Manning House, in Australia.
The debate tonight is about ‘anthropogenic global warming’, and it is a debate, not a one-sided exposition. The debate exists because many people say the matter is important, and it is plainly also most contentious. To understand why our government is going down the path that it has chosen, a carbon tax, while the USA is not doing so, we need to know more than simply the local and American political contexts. What is ‘climate change’ all about? Why is there any debate at all? Why are people so divided about it? The answers to these questions involve different elements of history, politics, ideology, narrative, science, mathematics and statistics. You can get some handle on it by recognising that if the matter were quite straightforward we would be doing something else tonight. In my judgment it is not at all straightforward, and it is hardly getting any more so.
Posted in Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
There is a forthcoming Hearing of the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology entitled “Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy.”
Posted in Policy, Politics, Uncategorized
by Judith Curry
Here is a complete (albeit rough) draft of my paper for the special issue in the journal Climatic Change (founding editor Steve Schneider) entitled Framing and Communicating Uncertainty and Confidence Judgments by the IPCC.
Posted in Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
This post is stimulated by an email I received from Georgia Tech alum Rutt Bridges, who asked for feedback on a recent article he published in First Break entitled “Economic Challenges for Carbon Capture-Storage and the Role of Natural Gas.”
Posted in Policy
by Judith Curry
I spent the 1990’s conducting research on the climate dynamics of the Arctic Ocean, and then moved onto other things circa 2002. My interest in the Arctic has recently been reinvigorated by the increasing societal implications of reduced sea ice extent in terms of security issues, the prospect of a northern sea route, implications for resource exploration and extraction, and adaptation issues for coastal villages along the Arctic Ocean coast.
This multi-part series will begin with an overview of what we know about the climate dynamics of the Arctic Ocean sea ice.
Posted in Polar regions
by Judith Curry
The UK House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology has launched an inquiry into peer review.
Posted in Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
I just came across a paper that I view to be remarkably important, entitled “Influence diagrams for representing uncertainty in climate-related propositions,” by Hall, Twyman and Kay. This paper integrates a number of themes that we have been discussing here: reasoning about uncertainty, consilience of evidence, attribution of extreme events, floods, and even the Italian flag(!). And it does the best job I’ve seen of assessing uncertainty and confidence in a climate-related proposition.
Posted in Attribution, Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
Robert Ellison sent me a link to a review of a book entitled “Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail and Why We Believe Them“, by Dan Gardner, which describes the research of UC Berkeley Professor Philip Tetlock.
Posted in Prediction
by Judith Curry
Jonathan Adler has an interesting article at the Volokh Conspiracy (a libertarian legal blog) entitled “The GOP’s Anti-Climate Policy.”
Posted in Policy
by Judith Curry
There is a recent article in the NYTimes entitled “Snubbing skeptics threatens to intensify climate war, study says.” The NYTimes article refers to a study entitled: “Talking Past Each Other: Cultural Framing of Skeptical and Convinced Logics in the Climate Change Debate.”
Posted in Communication, Policy, Politics
by Judith Curry
Roger Pielke Jr. brought to my attention a provocative paper entitled “Discursive stability meets climate instability: A critical exploration of climate stabilization in contemporary climate policy.”
Posted in Policy
by Judith Curry
In Part I, the Congressional testimony of John Christy and Francis Zwiers on extreme events was discussed. In this post, I focus in on issues related to floods. This topic was also discussed in a previous post on Attribution of Extreme Events Part II.
Posted in Attribution, Politics
by Judith Curry
In today’s Hearing on “Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations,” John Christy and Francis Zwiers both presented testimony that focused on extreme events, climate sensitivity and warming trends.
Posted in Attribution, Politics
by Judith Curry
From the U.S. House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Energy and Power are holding a hearing today Tuesday, March 8, 2011, at 10:00 a.m. entitled, “Climate Science and EPA’s Greenhouse Gas Regulations.”
Posted in Uncategorized
by Judith Curry
There has been much discussion in the climate blogosphere this past week on scientific story telling and communicating with the public.
Posted in Communication
by Tomas Milanovic
This post has been triggered by the following comment from Eli Rabbett in the spatio-temporal chaos thread :
Posted in Prediction
by Judith Curry
Motivated by a post by David Roberts at Grist, there has been some interesting reflection on Climategate this past week. Roberts’ post entitled “What we have and haven’t learned from Climategate” says:
Posted in Communication, Ethics, Uncertainty
by Judith Curry
I just spotted spotted an article on Reuters entitled “The Harry Potter Theory of Climate,” and I couldn’t resist doing a post on it.
Posted in Attribution
by Judith Curry
Schellenberger and Nordhaus of the Breakthrough Institute posted an interesting essay last week entitled “The Long Death of Environmentalism.” The summary reads:
Last week Breakthrough co-founders Michael Shellenberger and Ted Nordhaus returned to Yale University for a retrospective on their seminal 2004 essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” In their speech they argued that the critical work of rethinking green politics was cut short by fantasies about green jobs and “An Inconvenient Truth.” The latter backfired — more Americans started to believe news of global warming was being exaggerated after the movie came out — the former made false promises that could not be realized by cap and trade. What is an earnest green who cares about global warming to do now? In this speech, Nordhaus and Shellenberger reflect on what went so badly awry, and offer 12 Theses for a post-environmental approach to climate change.
Posted in Policy
