Skeptical Science New Research for Week #1, 2021
Melted ice of the past answers question today?
Kate Ashley and a large crew of coauthors wind back the clock to look at Antarctic sea ice behavior in times gone by, in
Mid-Holocene Antarctic sea-ice increase driven by marine ice sheet retreat. For armchair scientists following the Antarctic sea ice situation, something jumps out in this work. Antarctic sea ice enthusiasts know that science has struggled to fully and crisply explain why sea ice around the Antarctic has generally maintained or even expanded extent, during austral winter. Hence the penultimate sentence of this article s abstract grabs our attention:
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #51, 2020
Policy dilution
Wang et al deliver a remarkable soup-to-nuts examination of adaptation policy as it pertains to increasing climate change and accompanying coastal inundation events. With reference particularly to outcomes in a country where policymakers at the top level have been sensitive to the need for and have promulgated forward-leaning responses to increased exposure, the authors examine what happens as specific policy formulations trickle down to the local scale, confronting and being buffeted by various confounding influences. Typhoon Haiyan is used as a principle example. From the article discussion of findings:
In hindsight, the Haiyan disaster highlights the gaps across tiers of government from national to city/local levels down to communities, households, and individuals, as shown in Fig. 23, at horizontal and vertical scales. In fact, the Philippine government has exerted significant efforts and great progress i
Skeptical Science New Research for Week #50, 2020 Wait - we
Readers following the Advances in climate & climate effects modeling. portion of the weekly research roundup may have noticed: in general, higher model resolution calculating climate behaviors at finer scales is helpful for increasing model fidelity against real-world observations. Coincident to this is another matter: It may be unfair as a purely scientific matter but climate models are held to a peculiarly high standard, given their crucial role as decision tools affecting huge swathes of human affairs. Within the error brackets of
we re in trouble models have been good enough for quite a while, but what with the fuss and bother of modernization to account for what we re learning some folks want to make quite sure of what they re buying into, and fair enough on that.