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about Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeler, working for NASA and with Columbia University.

Site updates etc.

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Hi folks, just a quick maintenance notice to say that we are upgrading the blog to a more recent version of PHP (which is the code that underlies WordPress) (going from version 7.4 to 8.3). Unfortunately, this has caused problems for two of the older plugins we use, Kcite (which provides the inline links to the references from the DOI code), and Language Switcher (which we used a lot at the beginning to provide translations). Neither are actively maintained by their original coders (and we have updated some of the functionality in any case).

As of today, we’ve had to turn them off – and so the reference lists are not being generated and the languages on older posts will mixed up. If any of our readers have some relevant skill sets, we’d be happy to work with them to debug this issue! Let us know in the comments. Additionally, feel free to make suggestions for other improvements – the more specific the better!

Hopefully, we will resolve the issues soon. Thanks for your continued support and patience.

Update (Nov 28): I got the Kcite plugin working again (follow the link for details and remaining issues).

“But you said the ice was going to disappear in 10 years!”

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Almost two decades ago, some scientists predicted that Arctic summer sea ice would ‘soon’ disappear. These predictions were mentioned by Al Gore and got a lot of press. However, they did not gain wide acceptance in the scientific community, and were swiftly disproven. Unsurprisingly, this still comes up a lot. Time for a deeper dive into what happened and why…

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Time and Tide Gauges wait for no Voortman

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Here we go again. An obscure, methodologically poor, paper published with little to no review makes a convenient point and gets elevated into supposedly ‘blockbusting’ science by the merchants of bullshit, sorry, doubt. Actual scientists drop everything to respond, but not before the (convenient) nonsense has spread widely. Rebuttals are written and submitted, but by the time they are published everyone has moved on.

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DOE CWG Report “Moot”?

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Somewhat breaking news. A court filing (from 9/4) from DOE has noted that the Climate Working Group has been disbanded (as of 9/3). This was done to make the EDF/UCS lawsuit moot, but it also means that DOE is withdrawing the report, no-one will respond appropriately to the comments submitted, and (possibly) it becomes irrelevant for the EPA reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding.

What a farce.

Update: Via Andy Revkin, the EDF/UCS’s blistering response to the DOE filing. Pass the popcorn.

Climate Scientists response to DOE report

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As we’ve mentioned, Andrew Dessler and Robert Kopp have been coordinating a scientific peer review of the DOW ‘CWG’ Critique of Climate Science. It is now out.

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Melange à Trois

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In honor of the revelation today, that Koonin, Christy and Spencer have been made Special Government Employees at the Dept. of Energy, we present a quick round up of our commentary on the caliber of their arguments we’ve posted here over the last decade or so.

TL;DR? The arguments are not very good.

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WMO: Update on 2023/4 Anomalies

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The WMO released its (now) annual state of the climate report this week. As well as the (now) standard set of graphs related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, rising temperatures, reducing glacier mass, etc., Zeke Hausfather and I wrote up a short synthesis on the contributions to recent temperature anomalies.

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