Skeptical Science New Research for Week #8, 2021
Ground truths on warming
When we think about rapid climate change of the kind we ve accidentally unleashed and the warming of Earth systems inherent in the process, we tend to focus on phenomena in order of their immediate tangibility, their drama. Sea ice loss in the Arctic, atmospheric and ocean warming, more ephemeral but dramatic events such as droughts and and fires dominate our perceptions. Cuesta-Valero et al offer a refined estimate and reminder of how the very ground beneath our feet is also of course inexorably warming, in Long-term global ground heat flux and continental heat storage from geothermal data, an open access article via EGU s
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #7, 2021
Geoengineering heats up
Sorry, that was irresistible. By chance in this edition of
New Research are two intriguing papers including different perspectives on the subject of geoengineering, a topic increasingly arousing emotions. Happily both of these papers are open access and free to read. A third article underlines that enthusiasm for or reliance on geoengineering isn t yet founded on full information about the forces we re contemplating, essentially supporting the case for both sets of conclusions offered by the other two papers.
Smith & Henly reason for circumspect and thorough research into stratospheric aerosol injection, a topic of recent negative attention and even calls to restrict or terminate such investigations.These impulses to don blinkers seem ironic given that a major part of our problem with climate change is a concerted effort on the part of vested interests to restrict scientific research, pretend that we can t
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #6, 2021
The myth of temporal independence?
Nordhaus 1992 hs been a fat target for disagreement, perhaps especially because the resultant DICE was an early entrant and certainly the most ambitious effort of its day, hence highly conspicuous, widely adopted, possibly prone to oversights especially given its underpinning school of economics. Michael Grubb et al 1992 pointed out some static features built into DICE that might not pan out. 25 years have passed since those observations. Now, Grubb et al 2021 explore how certain features baked into DICE have been propagated in community wisdom and have cemented themselves into educational and policy settings despite their being essentially mythological, unsupported, and yet having profound effects on how our future will unroll:
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #5, 2021
BAMS Extreme Events of 2019
The
Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has published its annual retrospective on 2019 s extreme weather events and their connection to climate change, Explaining Extreme Events of 2019 from a Climate Perspective. The entire collection of articles is available here, (pdf) or as separate pieces down below. Open access, fascinating.
Research productivity
The BAMS 2019 report s author country constituency leads us back to the mission of Skeptical Science, in an elliptical way.
Once we ve gotten past straight climate science denial in the slice of a general population hoping to duck primary responsibility for the accidental mess we ve made of Earth s climate, a fork in the road presents itself, with one major path signed as Solutions Denial. Down that road can be found various novel rhetorical gambits and other creative shirking methods, the destination being
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #4, 2021
Diaspora: perception departs from reality
In this collection of articles are two papers currently captivating the attention of people following the science and emergence of climate change, especially the rapid variety we ve accidentally unleashed and which is now unfolding around us. The synthesis and review article
Earth s Ice Imbalance by Slater et al arrives in the same week as
Greenland Ice Sheet mass balance (1992?2020) from calibrated radar altimetry by Simonson and others, a bit surprising given its dire message commensurate with the other two papers. Together the three might be termed a dense, slushy snowball to our collective ear, an unmistakable signal. We re losing ice at a terrific rate, with our expectations of speed showing signs of being underestimations. All of these publications are open access and free to read.