‘Climate’ Archives
Be wary of “Mission Accomplished” claims for BP disaster clean up
Back in early May, I interviewed experts on dispersants and oil spill clean up and wrote “Out of Sight: BP’s dispersants are toxic — but not as toxic as dispersed oil.” Chemically dispersing oil spills “solves the political problem of visible oil but not the environmental problem,” Robert Brulle, a 20-year Coast Guard [...]
Happy 35th birthday, global warming!
Global warming is turning 35! Not only has the current spate of global warming been going on for about 35 years now, but also the term “global warming” will have its 35th anniversary next week. On 8 August 1975, Wally Broecker published his paper “Are we on the brink of a pronounced global warming?” in the journal Science. That appears to [...]
The Montford Delusion
Guest commentary by Tamino If you don’t know much about climate science, or about the details of the controversy over the “hockey stick,” then A. W. Montford’s book The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science might persuade you that not only the hockey stick, but all of modern climate science, is a [...]
An icy retreat
Guest Commentary by Dirk Notz, MPI Hamburg It’s almost routine by now: Every summer, many of those interested in climate change check again and again the latest data on sea-ice evolution in the Arctic. Such data are for example available on a daily basis from the US National Snow and Ice Data Center. And again and again in early summer the [...]
MIT: Simply dispatching natural gas plants before coal would cut U.S. power-sector CO2 emissions 10% – Gas can be a bridge to low-carbon future if we put a price on CO2
The overbuilding of natural gas combined cycle plants starting in the mid-1990s presents a significant opportunity for near term reductions in CO2 emissions from the power sector. The current fleet of natural gas combined cycle (NGCC) units has an average capacity factor of 41 percent, relative to a design capacity factor of up to 85 percent. [...]
The Muir Russell report
by Gavin and Mike The long-awaited and surprisingly thorough Muir Russell report (readable online version) was released this morning. We’ve had a brief read through of the report, but a thorough analysis of this and the supplemental information on the web site will have to wait for a day or so. The main issue is that they conclude that the [...]
Information levels
Rasmus’ recent post on the greenhouse effect raised some interesting points concerning the technical level at which posts or other public communications should be written. This was a relatively technical article as these things go, eschewing the very basic ‘the greenhouse effect is like a blanket’ but not really approaching the [...]
Preparing for the next public health crisis
Workers clean up the Gulf shore in this AP photo. The BP disaster underscores why we need to better manage the short- and long-term responses required to address the public health threats such disasters pose, as discussed in a new report by Ellen-Marie Whelan , CAP’s Associate Director for Health Policy, and Lesly Russell, a Senior Fellow. [...]
A simple recipe for GHE
According to some recent reports (e.g. PlanetArk; The Guardian), the public concern about global warming may be declining. It’s not clear whether this is actually true: a poll conducted by researchers at Stanford suggests otherwise. In any case, the science behind climate change has not changed (also see America’s Climate Choices), but there [...]
What do climate scientists think?
by Gavin and Eric. … and why does it matter? There is a lot of discussion this week about a new paper in PNAS (Anderegg et al, 2010) that tries to assess the credibility of scientists who have made public declarations about policy directions. This come from a long tradition of papers (and drafts) where people have tried to assess the state [...]
