Monthly Archives: September 2019

Should climate scientists admit failure?

Hopefully my readers will recognise Betteridge’s Law. James Dyke highlighted an article on Twitter that suggested that [t]he climate crisis demands new ways of thinking – scientists should be first to admit failure and move on. The suggestion is that … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Policy, Politics, Scientists | Tagged , , , , | 196 Comments

IAMs – Open Thread

There’s been an interesting debate about IAMs. IAMs are Integrated Assessment Models that are used to develop mitigation pathways. In this article, Kevin Anderson argues that IAMs are simply the wrong tools for the job, while Jessica Jewel clarifies the … Continue reading

Posted in Carbon tax, Climate change, economics, GRRRROWTH, Philosophy for Bloggers, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | 103 Comments

Tortoise ThinkIn

I’m just back from a Tortoise ThinkIn. If you don’t know what that is, I didn’t either until this evening, and I’m still not sure I quite get it. According to this, it’s about building a different kind of newsroom. … Continue reading

Posted in Environmental change, Personal | Tagged , , , , | 5 Comments

Moderation at The Conversation

The Conversation has a new set of moderation policies which is motivated by a desire to improve [their] climate change coverage. It involves a zero tolerance approach to moderating climate change deniers, and sceptics. Not only will their comments be … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Personal, Sound Science (tm) | Tagged , , , , , | 61 Comments

Potentially habitable?

The exciting news in astronomy is the discovery of water in the atmosphere of a relatively small planet, known as K2-18b, that happens to lie in what we often to as the habitable zone of its parent star. The result … Continue reading

Posted in Astronomy, ethics, Research, Scientists, The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , | 61 Comments

Propagation of nonsense – part II

I thought I would look again at Pat Frank’s paper that we discussed in the previous post. Essentially Pat Frank argues that the surface temperature evolution under a change in forcing can be described as where is an enhancement factor … Continue reading

Posted in Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, physicists, Research, Satire, Scientists | Tagged , , , , | 125 Comments

Propagation of nonsense

A couple of years ago, I had a guest post about Pat Frank’s suggestion that the propagation of errors invalidate climate model projections.. The guest post was mainy highlighting a very nice video that Patrick Brown had produced so as … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Comedy, Pseudoscience, The philosophy of science, Watts Up With That | Tagged , , , , , | 55 Comments

Constraining unforced variability

Pages 2k has a new Nature paper called Consistent multidecadal variability in global temperature reconstructions and simulations over the Common Era. What they do is present 2,000-year-long global mean temperature reconstructions using seven different statistical methods that draw from a … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Research, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , | 8 Comments

Solar Radiation Management

Ray Pierrehumbert has a new article in Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists called There is no plan B for dealing with the climate crisis. The focus of the article is the possible use of geo-engineering, specifically solar radiation management, to … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Environmental change, Global warming, Policy, Research, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , | 52 Comments