This whole blog-to-blog comment conversation thing can get a bit maddening. What we really need is to all sit down in a room together. I think a lot of the misunderstandings that turn into arguments would instead play out as useful conversations. Plus we could drink beer*. Today’s disjointed conversation has Mark Hadfield raising good …
Continue reading ‘More on Globally Averaged Surface Temperature’ »
Down near the end of a long and ultimately tedious* comment thread over on Prometheus, Gavin Schmidt offered an incredibly useful little gem today. As I’ve written before, “paleoclimate and future projections on a regional scale are critical.” This is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in the argument Roger Pielke Sr. makes …
Continue reading ‘Another Vote Against Average Global Temperature – Sorta’ »
In a convergence of two topics near and dear to my journalistic heart, the Independent reports “Blair to give his blessing to new nuclear reactors as only way to cut emissions” Tony Blair is ready to give a new generation of nuclear power stations the go-ahead, Downing Street hinted last night. His expert on the …
An amusing comment today from Roger Pielke Jr. about his experience as ringmaster of an on line debate over the relevance of the hockey stick climate reconstruction, placing himself squarely between warring tribes as he tried (with some success, I thought) to spark a useful discussion. I found it amusing to find myself being attacked …
Continue reading ‘Stuck in the Middle, Attacked by Both Sides’ »
A new paper by Jian Lu and Thomas Delworth argues tentatively for a link between greenhouse warming and drought in the Sahel.(Lu and Delworth, 2005) This matters, of course, far more than my usual hobbyhorse of drought in the southwestern U.S. Here when our water supplies run low because of drought, we suffer economic dislocation. …
Kevin Vranes pretty much nails it with an insightful analysis at Prometheus about the way the hockey stick debate has become such an odd sideshow: Inaction was the political response to the 2001 SPM* presentation of the hockey stick. The hockey stick both as science and icon could not have been more hyped. But They …
If I may, then, in my next breath criticize my good friend Tim Lambert whom I’ve never met, I think his post this morning on CEI bloviator Ian Murray’s remarkable global climate change conversation rather misses he point. Murray used to be a serial denier of the consensus science on climate change. Now, in a …
Continue reading ‘Murray Capitulates, Lambert Misses the Point’ »
A discussion over at RealClimate about media coverage of climate change (an issue dear to my heart) sent me back to read a widely quoted paper last year by Boykoff and Boykoff – Balance as bias: global warming and the US prestige press.
The Barnett paper I quoted below talks about hydrologic changes “already diagnosed in some regions.” A reminder for those of you in the Western U.S. – we’re one of those regions.
A paper in Nature by Tim Barnett at Scripps and Jenny Adam and Dennis Lettenmaier at the University of Washington suggests climate change problems for folks who depend on snowpack for their water supplies: All currently available climate models predict a near-surface warming trend under the influence of rising levels of greenhouse gases in the …