Category Archives: Climate change

Considering Catastrophe

Posted on August 9, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

There’s been quite a lot of recent coverage of a paper suggesting that climate endgames, such as global societal collapse or human extinction, have been dangerously unexplored. For those who recall the contentious RCP8.5 debate, this may seem a surprising … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Gavin Schmidt, Policy, Research, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 90 Comments

FLICC

Posted on July 20, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

I should probably be writing about the UK recording temperatures above 40oC for the first time, but it’s been covered pretty extensively elsewhere. Instead I thought I might briefly mention something that I’ve become more interested in and have been … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Philosophy for Bloggers | Tagged , , , , | 153 Comments

Climate change and social justice

Posted on June 19, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

The Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) recently released a called Deny, Deceive, Delay: Documenting and responding to climate disinformation at COP26 and beyond. It highlighted a number of people who will be familiar to those who have followed the public … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Philosophy for Bloggers, Policy | Tagged , , , | 93 Comments

The ‘hot model’ problem

Posted on June 10, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

Zeke Hausfather and colleagues recently wrote a Nature comment with suggestions about how to deal with what is called the ‘hot model’ problem. The issue is that some of the latest group of climate models have somewhat higher than expected … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Gavin Schmidt, Global warming, Research, The philosophy of science | Tagged , , , , | 207 Comments

World Atmospheric CO2

Posted on May 20, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

Early this year, a journal called Health Physics published a paper on World Atmospheric CO2, Its 14C Specific Activity, Non-fossil Component, Anthropogenic Fossil Component, and Emissions (1750–2018). The paper concluded that Our results show that the percentage of the total … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, physicists, Research, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , | 105 Comments

The science-society interface

Posted on May 8, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

I came across an interesting paper by Dietram Scheufele on Thirty Years of science-society interfaces: What’s next, which focusses mostly on science communication. Although – as the article mentions – this isn’t the only possible science-society interface. Since I have … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Philosophy for Bloggers, Scientists, The philosophy of science, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , | 120 Comments

The Greenhouse Effect

Posted on April 20, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

I’ve ended up in a rather silly discussion/debate on Twitter about the Greenhouse Effect. I realise it’s rather pointless, in that those who dispute it are very unlikely to accept its reality. However, it’s still interesting to think about how … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Greenhouse effect, Science | Tagged , , , , | 214 Comments

Techniques of climate denial

Posted on April 3, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

Steve Koonin, who I’ve written about before, had an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal a few months ago claiming that Greenland’s melting ice is no cause for climate-change panic. The article uses a graph of mass loss rate to … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Global warming | Tagged , , , , | 89 Comments

A coupled climate-social system

Posted on February 24, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

I came across an interesting paper by Frances Moore and colleagues that considers [d]eterminants of emissions pathways in the coupled climate–social system. In the context of climate science, models that consider both the climate and society tend to not be … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Policy, Research | Tagged , , , | 21 Comments

An international solar geoengineering non-use agreement

Posted on January 24, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

I wrote about Solar Radiation Managment, or solar geoengineering, earlier this year. It’s become a rather contentious topic, with some regarding it as worth exploring, and others almost seeming to regard it as something we should avoid at all costs. … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Policy, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 69 Comments