IPCC

Op-ed on the IPCC and climate change

An op-ed I wrote with my colleague Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech appeared last Sunday in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.

The editorial can be found here.

Update [2007-3-16 11:55:39 by Andrew Dessler]: The link no longer appears to work. The text of the op-ed is reproduced below:

A report from the scene

As Ana mentioned, the House Science Committee held a hearing today on the new IPCC report and the state of climate science. In an unprecedented move, the Speaker of the House testified before the committee. Chris Mooney has a great account from the scene. Turns out Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) is still a tool.

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.

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 […]

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.

The former says nothing about the latter

“We found that there is just no way that the observed changes [in hurricane strength] [in sea-surface temperatures] could be attributed purely to internally generated natural variability.” (see correction at bottom of post) So said Tom Wigley — one of many people at NCAR with more expertise and peer-reviewed papers in the area of hurricanes […]

Some thoughts

Part of the confusion over Revkin’s article is that there isn’t one "climate debate." There are several. I’m going to taxonomize them in another post, but first I want to say something about the scientific one. This debate, as many folks have pointed out, is pretty much over. The denialists are wrong and they’ve been […]

‘The temperature record is unreliable’–But temperature trends are clear and widely corroborated

(Part of the How to Talk to a Global Warming Skeptic guide)

Objection: The surface temperature record is full of assumptions, corrections, differing equipment and station settings, changing technology, varying altitudes, and more. It is not possible to claim we know what the "global average temperature" is, much less determine any trend. The IPCC graphs only say what the scientists want them to say.

Get your assessment

Get a sneak peek at the massive Millennium Ecosystem Assessment before its official launch on March 30 in nine cities around the world. Billed as the most comprehensive assessment ever of the world's ecosystems and the impacts of those ecosystems on human health, the four-year study was written by 1,300 experts from 95 countries with another 900 serving as editors and reviewers. The hope is that like the consensus-driven Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the pains taken at inclusive and comprehensive scientific assessment will bring more political as well as scientific heft to the conclusions.  With the report embargoed until its release March 30, it is hard to say more. But there is something for everyone in this effort.