Well, not really—unless you spent a decade studying some of the most complex science in the world in college, graduate school and postdoctoral training, and know the ins and outs of a General Circulation Model. But as climate researchers struggle to cope with a changing media landscape, persistent skepticism and hostile attacks …
climate science
The IPCC’s Media Problem
Over at Dot Earth, Andrew Revkin has gotten his hands on a couple of documents being sent to the 831 researchers who will be contributing to the fifth assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—the report that sums up the state of research on global warming, and which is set to be finalized in 2014. Both have to do …
“Climategate” Researchers Cleared—But Don’t Expect the Controversy to End
In what I really hope is the final word on “climategate”—the controversy over thousands of emails stolen from the archives of climate researchers at Britain’s East Anglia University and published on the Internet last year—an independent British inquiry into the matter largely cleared the scientists involved. Muir Russell, a senior …
Industrial Farming Slows Climate Change?
That’s the conclusion from a new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). Two Stanford researchers looked at the effects of the Green Revolution—the half-century old transition to more intensified agriculture, with more fertilizers and more irrigation—to see what impact the shift might have had on global …
An Ecocentric Introduction
I turned 32 yesterday. As periods of time go, not that long—according to the actuarial tables of the Social Security Administration I’m just 41.6% through my life, which actually looks depressing when you write it out. But the world has undergone immense changes over those years—explosions, really—and that growth forms the …