The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus There was no scientific consensus in the 1970s that the Earth was headed into an imminent ice age. Indeed, the possibility of anthropogenic warming dominated the peer-reviewed literature even then. But you already knew that, right?
Props to Andy Revkin, whose NYTimes work is the gold standard in climate coverage: A staff writer for The New Yorker and a science reporter from The New York Times have won the 2008 John Chancellor Awards for Excellence in Journalism, Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism announced today. Jane Mayer won the award for …
Remember both tails: Make of climate models what you may, there is lots of evidence that a) biodiversity is being hammered, and b) climate change will bring desertification, drought, and possibly coastal flooding to many parts of the world, among other dilemmas. I don’t have a lot of faith in the exact predictive powers of …
Southwest is Drier Already
On drought, climate change and the arid southwest. (Kinda feels like old times.)
Written originally elsewhere, elaborated here. A new study by a California team looks at the effect of the warming of the Indian Ocean, which seems to be anthropogenic in origin, and how that influences precipitation in Africa. It decreases it. People go hungry as a result: We present analyses suggesting that warming in the central …
One of my crude measures of the long range energy picture has always been coal-to-liquids. At some price (the usual number I hear is somewhere at or above $60 or $70 a barrel) it becomes economical to make liquid fuels out of coal. Given Appell’s Theorem, it has seemed inevitable to me that, regardless of …
I’ve made a healthy journalistic living off of the Climate Prediction Center’s long-lead forecasts, seasonal prognostications about whether we can expect things to be wetter or drier next winter. It got so bad for a while that my sister started calling me Niña-boy. The thing is, people want to know what to expect. Regular people …
stuff I wrote elsewhere
It’s always been clear, though seldom talked about, that global warming will have its winners as well as losers. Bill Griffith has an example in today’s San Francisco Chronicle: Due to global warming, this summer’s Ho Ho crop is the largest yet.