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.
at

1 comment:

  1. Anna Haynes1/15/2010 7:44 PM

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

    ReplyDelete

Welcome, and thanks for caring enough to donate your time and thoughts toward greater collective wisdom...

Terms of engagement:
* Please be civil.
* * * * Please do not post anonymously * * * (I'd remove this choice if I could, and I may remove your comment if you do) - instead, do this:
Click on the 'Name/URL' radiobutton, then enter your real name (if you're brave) or a pseudonym (if you're not). (You can leave the "URL" field blank.)
Or go ahead and click "Anonymous", but put your name in your comment.

* The Management reserves the right to delete comments (Moderation Certificate can be found here). You can always post it on a blog of your own.

If you run into technical difficulties, please a) accept my apologies, then b) email your comment to aherror2011 at gmail.com with "Comment for [name of this blog]" in the Subject line.

New policy re climate contrarianism comments as of 11/11/2009:
Comments questioning the climate science community's understanding of climate change (97% of active climatologists now believe that the earth is currently warming and that it's human-caused - link) will be deleted unless the commenter:
a) is local
b) uses his real name
c) provides link(s) to substantiate his claim(s)/inference(s)
d) is willing to collaborate on constructing an argument tree, to get us past the usual sterile point-counterpoint-countercounterpoint.
(For people who can't read the above, a summary:
1) Be civil;
2) Don't post w/o giving at least a pseudonym;
3) Don't espouse climate-denial crankery unless you're local and willing to stand behind it.)

Caveats:
1. Comments could be delayed: they are being moderated, and I'm sometimes away from the computer for a day or more.
2. : Perfectly legitimate comments are sometimes miscategorized (by the blogging platform) as spam, & not published. If this happens to yours, please notify me, else I might not notice for a day or two.