Michael Mann (of the hockey stick fame) has been exonerated by Penn state in in its inquiry into Mann’s actions in light of the recent leaked emails. Here is what they found: Allegation 1: Did you engage in, or participate in, directly or indirectly, any actions with the intent to suppress or falsify data? Decision:... Continue Reading →

News has been making the rounds that respected Canadian climatologist Andrew Weaver has throw his hat behind those that criticize the IPCC. And in some respects he has done just that, but importantly he has not called into question the science included in the IPCC reports, nor the conclusion that our GHG emissions are responsible... Continue Reading →

So says the Guardian: Banks are pulling out of the carbon-offsetting market after Copenhagen failed to reach agreement on emissions targets… Carbon financiers have already begun leaving banks in London because of the lack of activity and the drop-off in investment demand. The Guardian has been told that backers have this month pulled out of... Continue Reading →

Once more, we find that the IPCC WG2 made an error.  Only the error is not what is being trumpeted by deniers. There was a dire warning in chapter 13 of the report of IPCC Working Group II: "Up to 40% of Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this... Continue Reading →

Deniers are not making scientific arguments. Scientific arguments require consistency, something which deniers make no pretence of striving for. Plimer's argument was that climate has changed in the past. Eg - climate has a high sensitivity. Monckton's argument was that climate has a low sensitivity. I think the irony that the two [deniers] were arguing... Continue Reading →

impossiblehamster.org I like this (and not just because I am a fan of giant space hamsters, and even miniature giant space hamsters), but I think the focus is wrong.  It is not the size of the economy that maters but rather the environmental footprint of that economy. Typically the size of an economy is positively... Continue Reading →

Once again we see that scientists are not perfect, but flawed like the rest of us (duh), and it turns out the reports made by those flawed humans are also not perfect (duh). Science works fine in aggregate, but this idea that science must have only flawless people doing impeccable work is a strawman set... Continue Reading →

An infrastructure conducive to surveillance and control invites surveillance and control, both by the people you expect and by the people you don't… Whether the eavesdroppers are the good guys or the bad guys, these systems put us all at greater risk. Communications systems that have no inherent eavesdropping capabilities are more secure than systems... Continue Reading →

The greatest failure of modern media is a chronic inability to differentiate experts from cranks -Dan Moutal

Bjorn Lomborg isn’t genuine in his arguments against putting a price on carbon. His latest op-ed in the Washington Post is a prime example. Take a look at Lomborg’s calculation of costs: All the major climate economic models show that to achieve the much-discussed goal of keeping temperature increases under 2 degrees Celsius, we would... Continue Reading →

I contend that some part of the anti-consensus group deliberately sows confusion, misinformation, and doubt about the achievements of climate science to date. I think it is very difficult to separate out the perpetrators from the victims from the people who succeed in fooling themselves. It's very easy to distinguish between what they do and... Continue Reading →

When the news industry catches its own making up the content of a news story—especially involving politicians—the result is typically scandal, firings, and some public soul-searching. Why isn't the same true when it comes to science?

Given that lack of any real temperature record breakers since 1998 (technically that is not true, 2005 was slightly hotter, and we just emerged from the hottest decade on record), it isn’t surprising that deniers who don’t understand the science have repeatedly made claims that the past decade somehow invalidates global warming. Or that global... Continue Reading →

Not entirely surprising: Newly released federal documents have revealed some potentially inconvenient truths about the environmental impact of Alberta's oilsands industry, along with the risks and economic costs of the Harper government's climate change strategy. The documents take aim at a government assessment of the oilsands sector prepared by the Natural Resources Department. Officials from... Continue Reading →

There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention… We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein's theory of] relativity in the... Continue Reading →

Climategate has renewed calls that the peer-reviewed literature is either biased against global warming deniers, or is actively conspiring to prevent those with dissenting views from publishing their work. But the fact that this is happening is not evidence that such bias or conspiracy exists, as Michael Tobis writes: Starting from a blank slate, it... Continue Reading →

Bruce Schneier sums up this whole absurdity nicely: The problem with all these measures is that they're only effective if we guess the plot correctly. Defending against a particular tactic or target makes sense if tactics and targets are few. But there are hundreds of tactics and millions of targets, so all these measures will... Continue Reading →

It’s no longer possible to delve into our relationship with the global environment without drawing conclusions that make you seem like a raving fanatic to those who have yet to delve.  -Stephan Faris

How often have you heard that more certainty in climate science is needed before large scale mitigation polices should be implemented? Certainly many politicians and pundits have made that claim, and while at first blush this seems sensible, economists overwhelmingly say the opposite, as uncertainty increases so does the value of mitigation. Costs increase nonlinearly... Continue Reading →

The trouble with questioning authority, of course, doesn't come from the question; it comes from the complete indifference to the answer. –Michael Tobis UPDATE: More from Michael Tobis: The IPCC process is massive, and unprecedented, managed by flawed human beings. To make matters worse, it is a time-limited consensus process among scientists whose expertise is... Continue Reading →