Gareth Renowden • Feb 12, 2010 •
An opinion piece in this week’s Nature features the views of five diverse climate scientists on how the IPCC might be reformed or restructured in the light of the recent fuss about “errors” in AR4. The headine asks if we should “cherish it, tweak it or scrap it?” It makes interesting reading (it’s behind a [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Feb 09, 2010 •
Jonathan Leake at the UK Sunday Times has been swift to hail another supposedly damaging inaccuracy in the IPCC report. Africagate, the headline calls it. It occurs in the Working Group II report, which deals with the question of impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. I’ve looked up the section, which is in chapter 9 of the [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Feb 06, 2010 •
When I was writing the post on the Herald’s acceptance of journalistic say-so in its editorial on the IPCC Gareth drew my attention to the fact that the Dominion Post had also produced an editorial claiming that the ethics and integrity of climate scientists is being called into question. I was too engaged with the [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Jan 27, 2010 •
A couple of days ago one of Hot Topic’s denialist commenters triumphantly waved a UK Sunday Times article claiming that the IPCC had erred not only in relation to the likely rate of melting of Himalayan glaciers but also in linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters. I [...] … Read More
Peter Griffin • Jan 25, 2010 •
Dr Klaus Bosselman is right when he suggests in a New Zealand Herald article today that opinion polls carried out by the media are fickle things and that Government policies in relation to climate change should be based on sound science not public opinion. But there’s no denying the fact that the public is becoming increasingly sceptical about … Read More
Peter Griffin • Jan 21, 2010 •
Nature has just published a very good feature on its website which is worth reading for anyone wanting an overview of the real contentious areas of climate science. As Nature sees it, the areas that need “greater open discussion” include: regional climate forecasts, precipitation forecasts, aerosols and palaeoclimate data. A fuller reading of the e-mails from CRU in … Read More
Bryan Walker • Dec 06, 2009 •
Resolve falters before the intimidating size of the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). There are, of course, summaries, but what Andy Reisinger of Victoria University has attempted in his new book Climate Change 101: An Educational Resource is more than a summary. It is better described as an accessible overview of the ground AR4 [...] … Read More
Bryan Walker • Nov 23, 2009 •
Climatologist Stephen Schneider has often found himself in the thick of contests, as indicated by the title of his new book Science as a Contact Sport: Inside the Battle to Save Earth’s Climate. He has been engaged in climate science since its early stages in the 1970s and has much to tell about the dawning realisation [...] … Read More