The Basics
hrynyshyn | November 14, 2011Kevin Trenberth's latest paper, which appears in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, is uncharacteristically and refreshingly blunt right from the first few words of the introduction:
Humans are changing our climate. There is no doubt whatsoever. There are arguments about how much and how important these effects are and will be in future, but many studies (e.g., see the summary by Stott et al.1) have demonstrated that effects are not trivial and have emerged from the noise of natural variability, even if they are small by some measures. So why does the science community…
hrynyshyn | November 4, 2011Among the very best of the science-oriented blogs I try to read regularly is Tom Levenson's Inverse Square Blog. Tom, who teaches science journalism at MIT, isn't a climatologist, but whenever he writes about climate science or politics, it's usually worth a look.
Apparently, the folks at Scientific American agree, and they recently invited Tom to contribute a guest post to the magazine's blog site. It's primarily about the recent kerfuffle over the possibility that neutrinos might be able to travel faster than light, and a bit on the lengthy side, but he does manage to work climate in…
hrynyshyn | October 27, 2011Don't get me wrong. I love NPR. I listen to it for at least four hours a day. But lately I've found the network's embrace of "he said, she said" journalism a little too difficult to swallow. This morning's report on censorship of a scientific report commissioned by the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality isn't perhaps the most egregious example, but it does concern climate change, so it's worth examining.
For those unfamiliar with this lazy and cowardly form of reporting, check out new media maven Jay Rosen's take. Basically, the problem is NPR is afraid to let its reporters come right…
hrynyshyn | October 20, 2011There's this notion among the climate denial community that somehow the entire professional climatology community has overlooked an obvious flaw in the science behind anthropogenic global warming. Their hypothesis is that too many of the thermometers used to record temperatures over the last 200 years have been located in or near cities, and so have produced a warming bias produced by the waste heat generated in urban areas.
It sounds plausible. The problem with the notion, of course, is that it's so obvious a potential bias that climatologists long ago learned to take the "urban heat island…
hrynyshyn | October 3, 2011Kate at Climate Sight remind us this week of just how challenging it can be for a mainstream media outlet to accurately report on climatology. Even when the reporter gets it right, a headline-writing editor can inject just enough obsfucation to leave readers puzzled or misinformed.
This particular piece of evidence attesting to the need for all journalists to possess more than just a passing knowledge of the field in question involves a new paper in Nature, "Unprecedented Arctic ozone loss in 2011." The implication of the authors' finding is that the Arctic's UV-radiation-blocking ozone…
hrynyshyn | September 20, 2011Drawing attention to misinformed pseudoskeptical analyses of peer-reviewed climatology studies is usually counterproductive. But in this case, it's worth mentioning because the author makes such a common mistake that exploring the error might actually help shed light on the why so many people are easily led astray.
The offender is Anthony Watts, who is arguably (depending on how much weight you assign to blog popularity polls) among the most influential anti-science bloggers out there. His error was to confuse (or conflate, to use a fancier term beloved by social scientists) a direct effect…
hrynyshyn | January 13, 2011So, 2010 is a statistical tie for warmest year on record. This from NASA's GISS and NOAA's NCDC. Some AGW refuseniks might cling to the fact that the year just past was 0.018 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than 2005, but then you'd know they never bothered to take a stats class. As the GISS press release puts it:
The record temperature in 2010 is particularly noteworthy, because the last half of the year was marked by a transition to strong La Niña conditions, which bring cool sea surface temperatures to the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean.
We've also just come out of an unusually long "solar…
hrynyshyn | September 3, 2010Long weekend reading: Over at e360, Climate Central's Michael Lemonick sums up the latest thinking on the big question of whether clouds will alleviate or accelerate global warming.
It's no small detail. Just about everyone agrees that anthropogenic climate change will produce more cloud cover. The mystery is whether that in turn will produce a positive or negative feedback. Lemonick's take-home message is that the evidence is beginning, just, to tilt in favor of the bad-news scenario.
And although researchers are still far from certain whether an anticipated increase in cloudiness will…
hrynyshyn | August 26, 2010The invaluable pseudonymous Tamino has a brilliant explanation of the causes of the "global cooling" trend in the mid-20th century. There's nothing new, except the clarity of the writing. So if you've ever been stumped by a skeptic who suggests that anthropogenic climate change theorists can't explain why the planet cooled for the three decades following the Second World War, bookmark this post.
Just a tease:
... the 1940-1975 time period experienced anthropogenic global cooling. This cooling was from the same root cause as volcanic cooling, namely aerosols (mostly sulfate aerosols) in the…
hrynyshyn | June 2, 2010If the title of Matt Ridley's new book, The Rational Optimist, sounds a little familiar, that's because it borrows heavily from the world view of one Bjorn "The Skeptical Environmentalist" Lomborg. Both contrarians dismiss global warming as nothing to worry about, although Ridley seems even less convinced that the planet is actually experiencing anthropogenic global warming. I don't have time to read it -- but I did manage to take a look at the kind of thinking that Ridley uses at his blog.
This week, Ridley wrote about what his research in the "Holocene Optimum," uncovered. What he found, he…
hrynyshyn | May 18, 2010What's being billed as the U.S. Senate's last chance to pass a bill that deals with climate change, the American Power Act, aims for a now-familiar target: a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 83% by 2050. The idea is that if the developed world can manage to reach that goal, the global goal only has to be something like a 50% cut by mid century. As has been pointed out, this will not be easy.
The authors of a recent paper in PNAS call it "a forbidding challenge." Why? It turns out the math and underlying science are much less forbidding. Allow me to take a stab at explaining it in…