by Judith Curry
By popular request, here is new thread on one of the original ‘hot topics’ at Climate Etc.
by Judith Curry
By popular request, here is new thread on one of the original ‘hot topics’ at Climate Etc.
Posted in Skeptics
Judith Curry
Pursuant to Part I, i ask the following questions:
Posted in Polar regions
by Judith Curry
Most likely, their bullshit detectors just went on high alert. – Greg Breining
Posted in Skeptics
by Judith Curry
Overall, climate modeling has made enormous progress in the past several decades, but meeting the information needs of users will require further advances in the coming decades. – NRC
Posted in climate models
by Michael Cunningham (“Faustino”)
There are many issues of debate about global warming. Has there been warming this century? Will there be further warming? If so, will the cause be anthropogenic or other? What will be the impacts, both positive and negative? Should we take action to reduce emissions? How might we proceed, and what are the costs and benefits of various approaches?
Posted in Policy
by Judith Curry
The notion that a scientist is either an advocate or does nothing at all to shape policy is a false dichotomy that has muddied the debate about science and advocacy. – Scott and Rachlow
by Judith Curry
By advocating social policy positions, scientists may be forfeiting their credibility, instead becoming just ordinary folks with opinions. – Greg Breining
by Judith Curry
Why are weather forecasters succeeding when other predictors fail? It’s because long ago they came to accept the imperfections in their knowledge. – Nate Silver
Posted in Prediction
by Judith Curry
So . . . what do the U.S. presidential candidates have to say about climate change?
Posted in Politics
by Judith Curry
As you do not fight fire with fire, you do not fight complexity with complexity. Because complexity generates uncertainty, not risk, it requires a regulatory response grounded in simplicity, not complexity.
To ask today’s regulators to save us from tomorrow’s crisis using yesterday’s toolbox is to ask a border collie to catch a frisbee by first applying Newton’s Law of Gravity. – Haldane and Madouros
Posted in Policy
by Judith Curry
The extent to which a consensus is “hard won” can be understood to depend on the personal qualities of the participating experts.” Brent Ranalli
Posted in Communication, Consensus, Skeptics
by Judith Curry
September 2 marks the 2nd anniversary of Climate Etc. Time for some reflection, on where we’ve been and where we might be going.
Posted in Welcome
by Judith Curry
The warning signals from the planet are clear. Now is the moment for our commu- nity to adopt the rallying cry of sea kayakers confronted with conditions too challenging to handle alone: “Time to raft up!”. – Chris Rapley
Posted in Communication
by Judith Curry
We need bold science and bold action. There is a vital role for governments to play, but equally importantly is the role of academia, civil society, and industry. Harnessing that collective commitment is underway – but it remains to be seen if changes will be rapid and substantial enough. Her Excellency noted in her powerful opening remarks that there is a significant gap between the accelerating pace of degradation and the rate of effective response.
Each of you here can influence the rate of response by activating your science. – Jane Lubchenco, NOAA Administrator
by Judith Curry
Tropical Storm Isaac is now spinning up in the Gulf of Mexico. The models have finally converged on New Orleans as the landfall location. Are better forecasts of hurricanes possible? New research is pointing the way for improvements, and more useful hurricane forecasts are becoming available from the private sector, particularly at longer time horizons and also with regards to landfall impacts.
Posted in Hurricanes
by Judith Curry
The American Meteorological Society (AMS) has just published its new statement on Climate Change.
Posted in Consensus
by Judith Curry
Predictions of global famine and the end of oil in the 1970s proved just as wrong as end-of-the-world forecasts from millennialist priests. Yet there is no sign that experts are becoming more cautious about apocalyptic promises. If anything, the rhetoric has ramped up in recent years. Echoing the Mayan calendar folk, theBulletin of the Atomic Scientists moved its Doomsday Clock one minute closer to midnight at the start of 2012, commenting: “The global community may be near a point of no return in efforts to prevent catastrophe from changes in Earth’s atmosphere.” – Matt Ridley
Posted in Climate change impacts
*** SEE UPDATE AT END OF POST
This is the most interesting idea I’ve encountered in awhile.
Posted in Geoengineering
by Judith Curry
These results support the notion that the enhanced wintertime warming over high northern latitudes from 1965 to 2000 was mainly a reflection of unforced variability of the coupled climate system. Some of the simulations exhibit an enhancement of the warming along the Arctic coast, suggestive of exaggerated feedbacks. – Wallace et al.
Posted in Attribution
by Judith Curry
How and why did the scientific consensus about sea level rise due to the disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), expressed in the third Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment, disintegrate on the road to the fourth?
Posted in Scientific method, Sociology of science
by Judith Curry
Indeed, if there is a single message that sums up all of Sagarin’s work, it’s that organisms realized long ago that the world is a much less predictable place than humans would like to believe. “We spend a lot of time in planning exercises, making predictive models, and in optimization routines,” says Sagarin. “All of which have essentially been selected against in nature, because they’re incredibly wasteful when you live in an unpredictable world.”
Posted in Policy
by James Stafford
Reposted with permission from oilprice.com.
We were fortunate enough to have some time with Scotland’s First Minister Alex Salmond where we discussed a broad range of topics from Scotland’s ambitious renewable energy targets and North Sea oil & gas to Scottish independence and Donald Trump.
Posted in Energy
by Judith Curry
Should probabilistic qualities be assigned to climate model projections?
Are the approaches used by the IPCC for assessing climate model projection quality – confidence building, subjective Bayesian, and likelihood – appropriate for climate models?
What are some other approaches that could be used?
Posted in climate models, Scientific method
by Judith Curry
Much is being made of Hansen’s ‘loaded dice’ as a metaphor for the changing climate. I think we should be talking about ‘fuzzy dice.’
Posted in Attribution