Friday, January 15, 2010

Richard Alley on state of science on climate change

If you want to know the state of the science on climate change, your best source is a reputable climate scientist who's prominent in the field.

Why one that's reputable and prominent? Because "if you’re just learning from deviant views without understanding what the literature says, you’re probably going to be misled." (*)

And the "prominence" should be within the science community, since press coverage is skewed as Tobis illustrates in his graph in here. And for heaven's sake, don't trust TV weathercasters on climate, since as a class they're seriously afflicted with Dunning-Kruger syndrome.


Climatologist Richard Alley - an excellent speaker - gave an accessible and very well received talk summing up state of the science on CO2 & climate - "The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth's Climate History" - at last month's American Geophysical Union meeting in SF (video here, via AGU's "videos" page, but it wouldn't stream for me*), and short climate science videos featuring him are in the "To What Degree?" climate section of the National Science Foundation's science360.gov site. But, last I tried, these videos wouldn't play for me either.

However, it turns out that the the NSF videos (and audios, which require less bandwidth) are also here, where they worked fine.

I highly recommend them.

1 comment:

Anna Haynes said...

And, once again, visit Skeptical Science to find debunkings of contrarian talking points.