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Articles by Andrew Dessler

Andrew Dessler is an associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University; his research focuses on the physics of climate change, climate feedbacks in particular.

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  • Follow-up on think tank paying writers to question IPCC

    The "AEI vs. AR/4" story has gotten a surprising amount of play in the mainstream press over the last few days. Briefly: last summer conservative think tank AEI sent letters to two of my colleagues asking them to participate in a "critique" of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR/4). Oh yeah, and they offered them $10,000 to do this.

    My initial blog post from July can be found here. It got picked up by the mainstream press and has been widely reported on over the last few days (e.g., here and here).

    This morning I received an email from AEI, asking me to post a statement about this kerfuffle, as well as a revised description of their examination of the AR/4. I posted them on my personal blog here.

    Here is my critique of AEI's new proposal to critique the AR/4.

    Andrew Dessler Climate & Energy

  • The scoop on the new IPCC climate-change report

    What is the IPCC, and what’s the deal with its new report? When climate change emerged as an important environmental issue in the late 1980s, the world governments’ first response was to establish an international body to produce summaries of scientific knowledge of climate change. That body is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The […]

    Andrew Dessler Climate & Energy

  • Another silly debate around the IPCC report

    News stories have been reporting that the IPCC will make a statement about the relation between global warming and hurricanes:

    During marathon meetings in Paris, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change approved language that said an increase in hurricane and tropical cyclone strength since 1970 "more likely than not" can be attributed to man-made global warming, according to Leonard Fields of Barbados and Cedric Nelom of Surinam.

    The blogosphere is already awash with discussion about this (see here and here), and I expect all the usual suspects to weigh in on this soon.

    Andrew Dessler Climate & Energy

  • And it ain’t pretty

    Read this and weep. When we have the Governor, the Lt. Governor, the Speaker of the House, and a senior member of the Texas legislature denying the truth of global warming, we are in bad trouble.

    I wrote and sent in this letter in response to the article:

    Andrew Dessler Climate & Energy