One of my favorite stories of early western water science is the clever way geologist G.K. Gilbert, in the 19th century, used the rise and fall of the Great Salt Lake as a proxy for decadal-scale climate variability. Here’s how I told the story in my book: The lake has no outlent, and so the only …
Continue reading ‘G.K. Gilbert and the changing Great Salt Lake’ »
Update: Tom Pagano points out in the comments, I think correctly, that I’m incorrectly interpreting the data because the most recent data points cover a shorter period of time. So take this with a grain of salt…. ******* At the risk of overanalyzing a single short term data point, the weekly model runs from the …
Continue reading ‘River Beat: Colorado River Forecasts Continue to Drop’ »
I am happy to report that a paper I helped write, The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus, has been included in McGraw Hill Annual Editions Environment 10/11, a collection used as an undergraduate environmental and earth science reader. (Full disclosure: the series editor, Zach Sharp, is a friend.)
Matthew Nisbet, in Slate today, gives thoughtful voice to my growing frustration with the way my friends in the science community have been approaching the climate politics and policy discussion of late: The problems begin when scientists overestimate the influence of climate skeptics and their corporate backers. When legislation and international treaties fail, and polls …
Continue reading ‘Confusing metaphorical warfare with policy substance’ »
Emily Pierce has a story in Roll Call that illustrates the dilemma facing those who advocate greenhouse gas reductions. Action on climate change has become politically toxic, while action on energy legislation has not: Dorgan was upset that the so-far failed efforts of Kerry and Environment and Public Works Chairman Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) to craft …
Dan Vergano* has an important piece in USA Today that tries to step out of the climate wars echo chamber (apologies for metaphor butchery) to look at the data on the effect the whole CRUKerfuffleGate thing is having on the body politics. He bases his argument on data from Jon Krosnick, a leading academic pollster …
Science magazine has two very interesting papers in Friday’s issue related to climate and energy. One looks at a potentially significant climate change problem, and the second looks at a potentially significant energy system solution. The first, by Natalia Shakova and colleagues, looks at the possibility that methane is venting faster than expected from the …
Continue reading ‘Climate Coverage: A Cheap Media Case Study’ »
As Emily Green likes to point out, low is bad when it comes to flow and water storage on the Colorado, and it’s increasingly clear that low is what we’ll get this year: According to the forecast out today, flow into Lake Powell on the Upper Colorado, which is the key point on the western …
Academia’s institutional culture fails to reward the critical work of tailoring climate science to the people who most need to understand its implications, according to a fascinating new paper by Kristen Averyt, in press at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Averyt is deputy director of the Western Water Assessment, a University of Colorado-based …
Continue reading ‘Toward a More “Patient-Centered” Climate Science’ »
One of the things my colleagues and I found when reviewing the history of the ’70s global cooling myth was the consistent way alleged evidence was recycled through the literature by those perpetuating the myth. It was easy to verify the recycling in two ways. First, there were characteristic mistakes and elisions introduced early that …