http://www.realclimate.org Climate science commentary by actual climate scientists... Fri, 05 Sep 2008 03:24:11 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en ... is the question people have been putting a lot of thought into since the IPCC AR4 report came out. We analysed what was in the report quite carefully at the time and pointed out that the allowance for dynamic ice sheet processes was very uncertain, and actually precluded setting ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/how-much-will-sea-level-rise/ What makes science different from politics? That's not the start of a joke, but it is a good jumping off point for a discussion of the latest publication on paleo-reconstructions of the last couple of millennia. As has been relatively widely reported, Mike Mann and colleagues (including Ray Bradley and ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/09/progress-in-millennial-reconstructions/ Blogging has been a little light recently (apologies!), but here are a few pieces that have caught our eye this week. First up, the Columbia Journalism Review has a two-parter on journalistic coverage of climate change inspired by comments from Jeff Huggins on the Andy Revkin's Dot Earth blog. ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/friday-round-up/ This is a continuation of the previous (and now unwieldy) post on the current Arctic situation. We'll have a proper round up in a few weeks.Share This http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/north-pole-notes-continued/ Geoengineering is increasingly being discussed (not so sotto voce any more) in many forums. The current wave of interest has been piqued by Paul Crutzen's 2005 editorial and a number of workshops (commentary) and high profile advocacy. But most of the discussion has occurred in almost total ignorance of the ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/climate-change-methadone/ The International Geological Congress (IGC) is sometimes referred to as the geologists' equivalent of the Olympic Games and is an extremely large gathering of geologists from all over the world, taking place at 4-year intervals. This time, the IGC took place in Lillestrøm, a small place just outside Oslo, Norway ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/are-geologists-different/ What is the actual hypothesis you are testing when you compare a model to an observation? It is not a simple as 'is the model any good' - though many casual readers might assume so. Instead, it is a test of a whole set of assumptions that went into building ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/hypothesis-testing-and-long-term-memory/ Recently we received a request for setting up a glossary-only search mechanism, or perhaps one web page with a long list of glossary entries with hot links to full explanations. The glossary that we already have is a good start, but we are all busy and it's hard to ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/comprehensive-climate-glossary/ We often discuss the issues that arise in doing interdisciplinary work in climate science, and Liz Moyer and I have a commentary on that just out in Nature Reports Climate Change. Normally I don't mention these kinds of pieces on the blog, but in this case the editors commissioned a ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/08/bridging-the-divides/ Andy Revkin has a good article in the Science Times today on the problem of journalistic whiplash in climate change (also discussed here). This phenomena occurs with the more uncertain parts of a science that are being actively researched and where the full story is only slowly coming together. In ... http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2008/07/journalistic-whiplash/