Our in-house blogger is James R. Mead; please feel free to contact him with your comments

Friday round-up

Blogging has been a little light recently (apologies!), but here are a few pieces that have caught our eye this week.

First up, the Columbia Journalism Review has a two-parter on journalistic coverage of climate change inspired by comments from Jeff Huggins on the Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog. The key issues CJR addresses are familiar ones to readers here: how to communicate mainstream science in a way that doesn't distort the reality of the consensus on many issues in favour of controversy on more cutting-edge topics. Definitely worth a read, and proof (if such were needed) that commenting on blogs can make a difference to coverage.  (read more...)

Climate change methadone?

The International Geological Congress (IGC) is sometimes referred to as the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games and is an extremely large gathering of geologists from all over the world, taking place at 4-year intervals. This time, the IGC took place in Lillestrøm, a small place just outside Oslo, Norway (August 6-14). The congress was opened by the Norwegian King (before he continued to the real games in Beijing), and was attended by some 6,000 scientists from 113 countries. Even the Danish Minister of Energy & Climate participated in a panel discussion on climate change. In other words, this was a serious meeting.  (read more...)

Are geologists different?

Paris encouraged incremental steps to slow global warming and prevent environmental catastrophe in lecture delivered at a conference on climate change hosted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Hilton laid out a comprehensive agenda to combat global warming consisting of a package of bills designed to... (read more...)

Paris Hilton addresses Climate Change Conference at Kuala Lumpur

Paris encouraged incremental steps to slow global warming and prevent environmental catastrophe in lecture delivered at a conference on climate change hosted in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Hilton laid out a comprehensive agenda to combat global warming consisting of a package of bills designed to... (read more...)

Half the Amazon Rainforest to be Lost by 2030

Due to the effects of global warming and deforestation, more than half of the Amazon rainforest may be destroyed or severely damaged by the year 2030, according to a report released by the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). (read more...)

Hypothesis testing and long range memory

What is the actual hypothesis you are testing when you compare a model to an observation? It is not a simple as 'is the model any good' - though many casual readers might assume so. Instead, it is a test of a whole set of assumptions that went into building the model, the forces driving it, and the assumptions that went in to what is presented as the observations. A mismatch between them can arise from a mis-specification of any of these components and climate science is full of examples where reported mismatches ended up being due to problems in the observations or forcing functions rather than the models (ice age tropical ocean temperatures, the MSU records etc.). Conversely of course, there are clear cases where the models are wrong (the double ITCZ problem) and where the search for which assumptions in the model are responsible is ongoing. (read more...)

Comprehensive climate glossary

Recently we received a request for setting up a glossary-only search mechanism, or perhaps one web page with a long list of glossary entries with hot links to full explanations. The glossary that we already have is a good start, but we are all busy and it's hard to find the time for extending this. (read more...)

Bridging the divides

We often discuss the issues that arise in doing interdisciplinary work in climate science, and Liz Moyer and I have a commentary on that just out in Nature Reports Climate Change. Normally I don't mention these kinds of pieces on the blog, but in this case the editors commissioned a nice cartoon (from Mark Roberts) illustrating our point. I liked the cartoon a lot, and so it deserves as wide an audience as possible. (read more...)