Articles by Andrew Dessler

A few random notes

For Gristers in Houston, you might be interested in this event.

A good friend of mine, Emmett Duffy, has started a new blog called The Natural Patriot. Emmett is a marine scientist at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences. Check out his entry on what it means to be a Natural Patriot -- and add this blog to your RSS reader.

Hey, that’s me!

Republicans for Environmental Protection have sponsored a TV ad on climate change to run in Austin this week. The goal is to drum up support for the several bills on climate change currently before the Texas Legislature.

Here it is:

There's also an article about the ad in the Austin-American Statesman here.

Observed warming since 1990 is greater than the models predicted

An article in the May 4 issue of Science shows that observed warming in the 16 years since 1990 is greater than predicted by models.

Perhaps models are underestimating future climate change. That would be bad news.

"Recent Climate Observations Compared to Projections"

We present recent observed climate trends for carbon dioxide concentration, global mean air temperature, and global sea level, and we compare these trends to previous model projections as summarized in the 2001 assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC scenarios and projections start in the year 1990, which is also the base year of the Kyoto protocol, in which almost all industrialized nations accepted a binding commitment to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The data available for the period since 1990 raise concerns that the climate system, in particular sea level, may be responding more quickly to climate change than our current generation of models indicates.

Those who argue that great uncertainty exists in our knowledge of climate need to recognize that uncertainty cuts both ways -- things could be worse than we think just as easily as they could be better.

No, but we still know enough to start taking action

A few weeks ago, I was perusing Grist when I ran across an ad for A Convenient Fiction, a slideshow rebuttal of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The author was none other than Steve Hayward, who you might remember from the AEI-$10,000-payola scandal.

I had actually seen this slideshow discussed in the New York Times, and was interested to see it. In my previous communications with Hayward, he was at great pains to describe himself as someone who believed the science as described by the IPCC. I wanted to see if the slideshow bore that out.