Category Archives: Science

Five years

Posted on April 13, 2018 by

Turns out today is the fifth anniversary of me starting this blog. It’s been an interesting journey and I feel that I should reflect on what I’ve done, what I’ve learned, what I would have done differently, and what I’m … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, Philosophy for Bloggers, physicists, Science, Scientists | Tagged , | 28 Comments

An editorial response

Posted on April 4, 2018 by

Our response to Hermann Harde’s paper has finally appeared. What’s maybe more interesting is that there is also an editorial response by Martin Grosjean, Joel Guiot, and Zicheng Yu. It’s already been discussed at Realclimate and Rabett Run, but there … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Pseudoscience, Research, Science, Sound Science (tm), The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , | 220 Comments

The Paris climate targets

Posted on March 20, 2018 by

I’m currently in Oxford for a meeting and, having spent most of the train ride working on a book chapter I’m writing, I thought I would now spend some time writing a quick post about the recent Schurer et al. … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Policy, Science | Tagged , , , , | 46 Comments

Talking solutions and motivating action

Posted on March 6, 2018 by

There’s been a lengthy Twitter discussion about scientists moving away from simply discussing the science of climate change, to talking about solutions and motivating action. I broadly agree with this; I do think that the main discussion should be about … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Policy, Research, Science, Scientists | Tagged , , , , | 492 Comments

Long-term climate goals

Posted on March 3, 2018 by

There was quite a lot of coverage last year about a paper by Millar et al. which suggested that the carbon budget that would keep warming below 1.5oC was greater than had been earlier suggested. I wrote about it here, … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Policy, Research, Science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , | 46 Comments

Observing the earliest stages of star and planet formation

Posted on March 1, 2018 by

A while ago I wrote a post about an ALMA observation of a very young stellar object (Elias 2-27) that shows spiral density waves in its circumstellar disc (see Figure on the right). A reason I wrote that post is … Continue reading →

Posted in Personal, physicists, Research, Science | Tagged , , , , , | 5 Comments

Overhype much?

Posted on February 6, 2018 by

There has been quite a lot of news coverage suggesting that astronomer have, for the first time, discovered planets in another galaxy. It’s from a paper by Xinyu Dai and Eduardo Guerras called Probing Planets in Extragalactic Galaxies Using Quasar … Continue reading →

Posted in Research, Science, Scientists, Sound Science (tm), The scientific method | Tagged , , , , | 31 Comments