by Andrew Dessler

Posted 8 months, 1 week ago Over on DotEarth, Andy Revkin has an interesting post about the “burning embers” diagram from the latest IPCC. The upshot of the story is that several countries well-known for their desire to do nothing about climate change were able to remove an alarming figure from the 2007 report:

The diagram, known as “burning embers,” is an updated version of one that was a central feature of the panel’s preceding climate report in 2001. The main opposition to including the diagram in 2007, they say, came from officials representing the United States, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia.

People who argue… Read More

Posted 8 months, 2 weeks ago I have a paper [PDF] in this week’s Science discussing the water vapor feedback. It is a Perspective, meaning that it is a summary of the existing literature rather than new scientific results. In it, my co-author Steve Sherwood and I discuss the mountain of evidence in support of a strong and positive water vapor feedback.

Interestingly, it seems that just about everybody now agrees water vapor provides a robustly strong and positive feedback. Roy Spencer even sent me email saying that he agrees.

What I want to focus on here is model verification. If you read the blogs,… Read More

Posted 8 months, 3 weeks ago John Fleck comments on George Will’s latest zombie attack: in the 1970s, scientists said the Earth was cooling!

What’s amazing is not that George Will is selectively quoting to mislead the reader, but that he continues to do so after John sent him a copy of the article in question:

When George Will last wrote about this subject, last May, I sent him a copy of the Science News article he misleadingly quoted in the example I used above. I got a nice note back from him thanking me for sharing it.

I’ll leave it to the reader to… Read More

Posted 9 months ago This Tuesday (Feb. 10, 2009) I’ll be doing an online chat over on Eric Berger’s SciGuy website. We’ll be talking about climate, climate change, and everything else climate related. It will be at 12:45 pm CST. If you can’t make it, the transcript will be posted (I’ll put a link to it in the comments).

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Posted 9 months, 2 weeks ago The small number of credible skeptics out there (e.g., Spencer, Lindzen) have spent much of the last decade searching for a negative feedback in our climate system. If a sufficiently big one is found, then it would suggest that warming over the next century may well be small.

Most climate scientists, however, are reasonably certain that a negative feedback big enough to overwhelm the well-known positive feedbacks in the climate system, such as the water vapor feedback [PDF], does not exist. Why?

Negative feedbacks tend to dampen out climate change. If you add greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or… Read More

Posted 9 months, 3 weeks ago Tuesday, I received an email from Marc Marano, staffer for Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.). Usually, these are vectored straight into my junk folder, but apparently my computer’s spam filter has a sense of humor, because this email made it into my inbox. And what I saw astounded me.

Marc’s email contained a link to a recent post by Roy Spencer. In it, Spencer claims:

Obviously, the thermostat (feedback) issue is the most critical one that determines whether manmade global warming will be catastrophic or benign. In this context, it is critical for the public and politicians to understand that… Read More

Posted 10 months ago This post was co-written with David Roberts.

Recently Harold Ambler, climate crank and proprietor of TalkingAboutTheWeather.com,  published an essay on Huffington Post replete with gross factual errors about the science of climate change.

Word is that this was an editorial slip-up on HuffPo’s part; they don’t typically provide a place for this kind of agitprop. The essay is gone from the site’s portal pages and rumor has it The Huff herself may address the issue soon.

Regardless, the essay is out there getting skeptics all twitterpated (again). These folks can’t find a scientific journal with two hands… Read More

Posted 10 months ago A friend of mine from college emailed me the other day and expressed some skepticism about the connection between carbon dioxide emissions and global warming. It occurred to me that it would make a good topic for my next post.

So here is the reasoning that has led me to conclude that business-as-usual carbon dioxide emissions will lead to temperature increases over the next century of around 3 degrees C.

First, it has been known for over 150 years that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere will increase the temperature of the planet. In fact, the very small number of… Read More

Posted 10 months, 1 week ago This excellent article in The Philadelphia Inquirer about EPA Administrator Stephen Johnson did something I thought was impossible: lower my opinion of him.

It shows how, in case after case, Johnson put political loyalty above science and common sense—a fundamental abdication of his job.

Suffice it to say that, more than ever, I’m looking forward to Jan. 20, 2009.

For those not familiar with Stephen Johnson, see these posts.

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Posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago Memo

To: PEBO
From: Andrew Dessler
Re: What to do about NASA on your first day in office

Two things:

1. Fire Michael Griffin, NASA’s current administrator. He says stupid things about climate change and is going to be an impediment to the change that NASA needs.
   
2. Put the Earth back in NASA’s mandate. In 2006, the Bush Administration quietly deleted the phrase “to understand and protect our home planet” from the NASA mission statement. This move perfectly encapsulated Bush’s attitude toward the environment, and with a stroke of your pen you can show… Read More