Interesting news this weekend. Apparently everything we’ve done in our entire careers is a “MASSIVE lie” (sic) because all of radiative physics, climate history, the instrumental record, modeling and satellite observations turn out to be based on 12 trees in an obscure part of Siberia. Who knew?
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Archives for September 2009
Decadal predictions
There has been a lot of discussion about decadal climate predictions in recent months. It came up as part of the ‘climate services’ discussion and was alluded to in the rather confused New Scientist piece a couple of weeks ago. This is a relatively “hot” topic to be working on, exemplified by two initial high profile papers (Smith et al, 2007 and Keenlyside et al, 2008). Indeed, the specifications for the new simulations being set up for next IPCC report include a whole section for decadal simulations that many of the modelling groups will be responding to.
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Communicating Science: Not Just Talking the Talk
Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt
The issues involved in science communication are complex and often seem intractable. We’ve seen many different approaches, but guessing which will work (An Inconvenient Truth, Field Notes from a Catastrophe) and which won’t (The Eleventh Hour) is a tricky call. Mostly this is because we aren’t the target audience and so tend to rate popularizations by different criteria than lay people. Often, we just don’t ‘get it’.
Into this void has stepped Randy Olsen with his new book “Don’t be such a scientist”. For those who don’t know Randy, he’s a rather extraordinary individual – one of the few individuals who has run the gamut from hard-core scientist to Hollywood film maker. He’s walked the walk, and can talk the talk–and when he does talk, we should be listening!
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Climate Services
I recently attended the World Climate Conference-3 (WCC-3), hosted by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva. Most of the talk was of providing “climate services” (CS) and coordinating these globally. But what are climate services, and how much of what was envisaged is scientifically doable?
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