The Best of Denial101x – Week 1

Posted on May 17, 2015 by climatesight

The latest brainchild of John Cook is the free online edX course Denial 101x. This course, tackling basic climate science as well as the science of climate change denial, had amassed 15,000 students as of May 12.

You can access the video lectures and interviews on their YouTube channel without even signing up for the course. The best video content, in my opinion, is the full interviews with scientists. They are such interesting people with so many stories to tell, and the conversational style of the interviews makes the quality of communication absolutely top-notch. I like to listen to these interviews while I wash the dishes (our apartment has been extra clean recently thanks to John Cook).

Here are my favourites from Week 1 alone (there are multiple hours of interviews released each week, it’s kind of overwhelming):

Naomi Oreskes, who is such a strong and smart and feisty person – I want to be just like her. “My husband always says that when [climate change deniers] started attacking me, they really didn’t know what they were up against.”
Katharine Hayhoe, who brings a new perspective I haven’t really thought about much: how to reach people of faith. “I received so much support from colleagues who say, ‘I do not share your faith or don’t even understand your faith, but I support what you’re doing.'”
Michael Mann, who has probably been through more than anyone else in this community, but has nonetheless kept an incredibly positive attitude. “What I’m concerned about, more concerned about, is the fact that there are now many younger scientists out there who are doing research on climate change, and when they publish a paper that gets a lot of attention, they are finding themselves subject to these orchestrated attacks. In many cases, they’re just graduate students. They have absolutely no experience in dealing with this sort of issue.”

Two Great TED Talks

Posted on May 27, 2014 by climatesight

Both are about climate modelling, and both are definitely worth 10-20 minutes of your time.

The first is from Gavin Schmidt, NASA climate modeller and RealClimate author extraordinaire:

The second is from Steve Easterbrook, my current supervisor at the University of Toronto (this one is actually TEDxUofT, which is independent from TED):

Bits and Pieces

Posted on Sep 8, 2013 by climatesight

Now that the academic summer is over, I have left Australia and returned home to Canada. It is great to be with my friends and family again, but I really miss the ocean and the giant monster bats. Not to mention the lab: after four months as a proper scientist, it’s very hard to be an undergrad again.

While I continue to settle in, move to a new apartment, and recover from jet lag (which is way worse in this direction!), here are a few pieces of reading to tide you over:

Scott Johnson from Ars Technica wrote a fabulous piece about climate modelling, and the process by which scientists build and test new components. The article is accurate and compelling, and features interviews with two of my former supervisors (Steve Easterbrook and Andrew Weaver) and lots of other great communicators (Gavin Schmidt and Richard Alley, to name a few).

I have just started reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. So far, it is one of the best pieces of science writing I have ever read. As well as being funny and easy to understand, it makes me excited about areas of science I haven’t studied since high school.

Finally, my third and final paper from last summer in Victoria was published in the August edition of Journal of Climate. The full text (subscription required) is available here. It is a companion paper to our recent Climate of the Past study, and compares the projections of EMICs (Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity) when forced with different RCP scenarios. In a nutshell, we found that even after anthropogenic emissions fall to zero, it takes a very long time for CO₂ concentrations to recover, even longer for global temperatures to start falling, and longer still for sea level rise (caused by thermal expansion alone, i.e. neglecting the melting of ice sheets) to stabilize, let alone reverse.

General Thoughts on AGU

Posted on Dec 12, 2011 by climatesight

I returned home from the AGU Fall Meeting last night, and after a good night’s sleep I am almost recovered – it’s amazing how tired science can make you!

The whole conference felt sort of surreal. Meeting and conversing with others was definitely the best part. I shook the hand of James Hansen and assured him that he is making a difference. I talked about my research with Gavin Schmidt. I met dozens of people that were previously just names on a screen, from top scientists like Michael Mann and Ben Santer to fellow bloggers like Michael Tobis and John Cook.

I filled most of a journal with notes I took during presentations, and saw literally hundreds of posters. I attended a workshop on climate science communication, run by Susan Joy Hassol and Richard Sommerville, which fundamentally altered my strategies for public outreach. Be sure to check out their new website, and their widely acclaimed Physics Today paper that summarizes most of their work.

Speaking of fabulous communication, take a few minutes to watch this memorial video for Stephen Schneider – it’s by the same folks who turned Bill McKibben’s article into a video:

AGU inspired so many posts that I think I will publish something every day this week. Be sure to check back often!

Just Links for Now…

Posted on Dec 9, 2010 by climatesight

I apologize for my relative silence recently. I am in the midst of studying for my first set of final exams. To tide you over until that has calmed down a bit, I will share some of the interesting pieces I have read and watched recently.

My study break today was spent watching a fantastic video that Peter Sinclair recently dug up. It’s an hour-long talk by Dr. Ben Santer (see my recent interview with him), with an introduction by the late Stephen Schneider and questions at the end. He tells a very troubling story about “science, non-science and nonsense”. Lots of great quotes in there – I highly recommend giving it a watch.

John Cook from Skeptical Science has compiled his articles and rebuttals into a gorgeous document about the evidence for anthropogenic climate change, written in accessible language with effective graphics on every page. It’s so effective, I would like to print out a few dozen of these booklets and hand them out at the university.

On RealClimate, Ray Pierrehumbert addressed the common policy option of focusing on cutting emissions of methane and soot in the short-term in order to “buy us time” to reduce carbon dioxide. In fact, because these emissions have such a short atmospheric lifetime, it doesn’t really matter whether we focus on them now or later – while concentrations of carbon dioxide, with a lifetime of centuries to millennia, highly depend on when we address it. Take a look at these projections comparing our options:

Michael Tobis, however, thinks that we should focus on non-CO2 emissions despite these realities. Short-term economic and population “crashes” due to sudden warming in the near term could conceivably be more damaging to human security, because it means that we won’t be able to afford any mitigation, further worsening the long-term emissions. Both articles are worth a read.

Well, off to go memorize organic functional groups. Enjoy!

Some Cool Developments

Posted on Oct 31, 2010 by climatesight

I have really been enjoying the recent developments over at Skeptical Science, a dynamic site that is possibly the best example of climate science communication I have encountered, and to which I am proud to be a new contributing author!

It looks like John Cook, the creator of Skeptical Science, has been building a database of climate change links, everything from blog posts to newspaper articles to peer-reviewed papers, by everyone from Anthony Watts to Joe Romm to James Hansen. He’s also been keeping track of which common misconceptions appear the most and from which sources. Now you can subscribe to daily emails that include a dozen or so links from the database, organized and colour-coded according to source and bias. I’ve only been getting these emails for a few days, and they have already pointed me towards some fascinating articles I wouldn’t have had the time to seek out otherwise. (However, I can’t seem to stop Windows Live from putting them in my junk folder – any ideas?)

Skeptical Science has a great business relationship with Shine Technologies, the IT company that created Skeptical Science smartphone apps for free – simply because they care about the state of our climate. Now they’ve created a Firefox add-on that allows users to submit links to the database. If the page you’re on is already in the database, you can view, with one click of a mouse, which (if any) common misconceptions are in the article, complete with links to the ever-growing Skeptical Science rebuttal list. I haven’t tried this add-on yet, because I am a fan of Chrome, but it certainly looks very cool.

Skeptical Science has done a lot for my understanding of climate change. Early on, it was my first stop whenever I encountered a skeptic argument I was unfamiliar with, because I knew I could trust its citations and accountability. Now, I read the list of arguments and rebuttals just for fun, and to brush up my understanding. I love the new dynamic direction the site is taking, and I hope all of these projects continue and flourish.

Odds and Ends

Posted on Oct 18, 2010 by climatesight

I must thank Michael Tobis for two pieces of reading that his blog recently pointed me to. First, a fantastic article by Bill McKibben, which everyone should print out and stick to their fridge. Here’s a taste:

Read the comments on one of the representative websites: Global warming is a “fraud” or a “plot.” Scientists are liars out to line their pockets with government grants. Environmentalism is nothing but a money-spinning “scam.” These people aren’t reading the science and thinking, I have some questions about this. They’re convinced of a massive conspiracy.

The odd and troubling thing about this stance is not just that it prevents action. It’s also profoundly unconservative. If there was ever a radical project, monkeying with the climate would surely qualify. Had the Soviet Union built secret factories to pour carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and threatened to raise the sea level and subvert the Grain Belt, the prevailing conservative response would have been: Bomb them. Bomb them back to the Holocene—to the 10,000-year period of climatic stability now unraveling, the period that underwrote the rise of human civilization that conservatism has taken as its duty to protect. Conservatism has always stressed stability and continuity; since Burke, the watchwords have been tradition, authority, heritage. The globally averaged temperature of the planet has been 57 degrees, give or take, for most of human history; we know that works, that it allows the world we have enjoyed. Now, the finest minds, using the finest equipment, tell us that it’s headed toward 61 or 62 or 63 degrees unless we rapidly leave fossil fuel behind, and that, in the words of NASA scientists, this new world won’t be “similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Conservatives should be leading the desperate fight to preserve the earth we were born on.

Read the rest of the article here. Highly recommended to all.

The other link I wanted to share was a new publication entitled “Science and the Media”, just released by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (not to be confused with the American Association for the Advancement of Science – why all the acronym duplication?)

With contributions from everyone from Donald Kennedy to Alan Alda, and essays with titles from “The Scientist as Citizen” to “Civic Scientific Literacy: The Role of the Media in the Electronic Era”, I’m virtually certain that I will enjoy this one (sorry, I can’t bring myself to say things like “certain” without caveats any more). The 109-page pdf is available free of charge and can be accessed from this page, which also includes information on ordering hard copies.

In other news, the La Niña conditions in the eastern Pacific (see anomaly map above) have bumped this year’s temperatures down a bit, so January-September 2010 is now tied for the warmest on record, rather than being a clear winner. This analysis is from NCDC, however, and I’m not sure how they deal with sparse data in the Arctic (for background, see this post – a summary of one of the most interesting papers I’ve read this year). Does anyone know if GISS has an up-to-date estimate for 2010 temperatures that we could compare it to? All I can find on their website are lines and lines of raw data, and I’m not really sure how to process it myself.

That’s all for today. Enjoy the week, everyone.

A Fabulous Contribution

Posted on Sep 12, 2010 by climatesight

I’ve really been enjoying the Advanced versions of Skeptical Science’s rebuttals to common misconceptions about climate change. So far, they have all been written by someone going by the name of dana1981, who I would like to give a huge shout-out to. I am a new B.Sc. student who is interested in pursuing a career in climate change research, and these articles have been very helpful in giving me a taste of basic atmospheric science.

In “How do we know more CO₂ is causing warming?”, I was introduced to the relatively simple equation required to calculate the radiative forcing of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, as well as the expected equilibrium temperature change from CO₂, using the range of values for climate sensitivity provided by the IPCC (as calculating climate sensitivity is not quite so simple!)

In “The human fingerprint in global warming”, dana1981 discussed different attribution studies, and explained how anthropogenic warming has certain “fingerprints” – more warming at night than during the day, a cooling of the stratosphere, and a rise in tropopause height – all of which have been observed. I had a basic understanding of these fingerprints and why they occurred, but it was great to read about the current research in attribution studies, with impeccable citations.

“How sensitive is our climate?” was similar to the first article, but also addressed the common misconception that climate sensitivity is specific to different forcings. If the climate has low sensitivity to CO₂, it also has low sensitivity to solar radiation, cosmic ray feedback, etc. The equilibrium temperature change doesn’t care if the extra few W/m² is from the greenhouse effect or planetary albedo – it changes with the same speed either way, which disproves many skeptical arguments. Additionally, since the prehistoric record shows large swings in climate resulting from relatively small forcings, scientists are confident that climate sensitivity is not very low.

“Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming?” was absolutely fascinating. The equations required to calculate solar forcing using total solar irradiance were new to me, and dana1981 went so far as to analyze early 20th-century warming, calculating how much was due to an upswing in solar irradiance and how much was due to anthropogenic greenhouse gases. During the latter half of the 20th century, solar irradiance has dropped back down, but warming has only accelerated.

Skeptical Science’s recent efforts to expand their rebuttals to include beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels of explanation were inspired by a RealClimate post written by Dr. Gavin Schimdt. He thoughtfully wrote,

I think we should be explicitly thinking about information levels and explicitly catering to different audiences with different needs and capabilities. One metaphor that might work well is that of an alpine ski hill. There we have (in the US for instance) green runs for beginners wanting a gentle introduction and where hopefully nothing too bad can happen. Blue runs where the technical level is a little more ambitious and a little more care needs to be taken. Black expert runs for those who know what they are doing and are doing it well, and finally, double black diamond runs for the true masters. No-one accuses ski resorts of being patronising when they have green runs interspersed with the more difficult ones, and neither do they get accused of elitism when one peak has only black runs going down (as I recall all too painfully on my first ski outing). People self-segregate and generally find their way to the level at which the feel comfortable – whether they want a easy or challenging ride – and there is nothing stopping them varying the levels as their mood or inclination takes them.

Skeptical Science took up this challenge, and although their efforts have largely been focused on creating “plain-English” beginner articles, as a huge target audience for climate change communication is the general public, I’m extremely grateful that they’re also catering to new science enthusiasts such as myself with the advanced articles. Please, keep them coming!

While we’re on the topic, I should also mention a great new post by Skeptical Science, which is not part of their argument database – “The contradictory nature of global warming skepticism”. You can’t hold the objection that the world isn’t warming and then turn around and say that global warming is natural, but these and other self-disproving arguments reach us on a daily basis. Deniers can’t seem to agree on a single unified objection to anthropogenic global climate change, and some individuals, as the post shows, contradict themselves up to five times in six months.

And hey, I just realized right now – that post was also written by dana1981. Whoever this writer is, he or she is doing a great job.

How We Should Communicate

Posted on Jun 5, 2010 by climatesight

I really enjoyed this post by Andrew Freedman on the Washington Post blog Capital Weather Gang. I think it is written at the perfect level – basic enough for new readers to catch up on current events, while including enough creative insights to keep the interest of climate science enthusiasts.

The article covers the attempts of Dr Andrew Weaver, a top Canadian climate modeler, to fight back at the misinformation that has been willingly spread by top media outlets throughout the past few months. Here is an excerpt:

In late April Weaver filed suit against the National Post, a Canadian newspaper that has run numerous articles extremely critical of Weaver’s work and those of his colleagues. For example, according to Wihbey, the Post has called Weaver “Canada’s warmist spinner in chief,” and “generally impute[ed] to Weaver various views that he claims he doesn’t have.” (Weaver’s requests that the newspaper correct the record by issuing retractions/corrections were unsuccessful).

In the lawsuit, Weaver, who was a lead author of one of the IPCC’s working groups for its 2007 report, claims the articles include “grossly irresponsible falsehoods that have gone viral on the Internet.” Among those claims is that Weaver has turned against the IPCC and its conclusions, as trumpeted in this story in late January.

“If I sit back and do nothing to clear my name, these libels will stay on the Internet forever,” Weaver stated. “They’ll poison the factual record, misleading people who are looking for reliable scientific information about global warming.”

I am impressed at Dr Weaver’s courage and persistence to improve the accuracy of science journalism. For an issue that has potential consequences of an unprecedented scale in human history, we should be able to trust what the media tells us.

Something else I enjoyed was a sketch by Mitchell and Webb, a British comedy duo, making fun of how politicians pretend to promise action on climate change. Enjoy.

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