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You are here: Home / Climate Science / Climate modelling / Cracking the Climate Change Case

Cracking the Climate Change Case

26 Oct 2018 by Gavin

I have an op-ed in the New York Times this week:

How Scientists Cracked the Climate Change Case
The biggest crime scene on the planet is the planet. We know the earth is warming, but who or what is causing it?
Emilia Miękisz

Many of you will recognise the metaphor from previous Realclimate pieces (this is earliest one I think, from 2007), and indeed, the working title was “CSI: Planet Earth”. The process description and conclusions are drawn from multiple sources on the attribution of recent climate trends (here, here etc.), as well the data visualization for surface temperature trends at Bloomberg News.

There have been many comments about this on Twitter – most appreciative, some expected, and a few interesting. The expected criticisms come from people who mostly appear not to have read the piece at all (“Climate has changed before!” – a claim that no-one disputes), and a lot of pointless counter-arguments by assertion. Of the more interesting comment threads, was one started by Ted Nordhaus who asked

I wonder who exactly the audience for this sort of thing is at this point… https://t.co/m977McdHZC

— Ted Nordhaus (@TedNordhaus) October 25, 2018

My response is basically that it might be old hat for him (and maybe many readers here), but I am constantly surprised at the number of people – even those concerned about climate – who are unaware of how we do attribution and how solid the science behind the IPCC statements is. And judging by many of the comments, it certainly isn’t the case that these pieces are only read by the already convinced. But asking how many people are helped to be persuaded by articles like this is a valid question, and I don’t really know the answer. Anyone?

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record, Scientific practice

About Gavin

Reader Interactions

103 Responses to "Cracking the Climate Change Case"

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« Previous 1 2 3
  1. Mr. Know It All says

    14 Nov 2018 at 4:14 AM

    The future of EVs:

    https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-11-13/autonomous-vehicles-and-rise-mobile-sex-workers

    :)

  2. Al Bundy says

    14 Nov 2018 at 9:40 AM

    Autonomous “moral” (eyeroll) killing machines would be targets. It”d be interesting to see a damaged one go on a rampage.

    War is stupid. Developing weapons consumes too many of the small number of brilliant minds that could be, I don’t know, cracking the climate change case.
    Oops, been done. Carry on attempting to get Terminator done right.

  3. Hank Roberts says

    14 Nov 2018 at 11:29 AM

    > if a computer could look at every possible known
    > chemical, and how those chemicals would interact

    Oh, man, you are deep into “if” territory.

    The toxicologists would really love it if we were able to do that kind of assessment. Given the number of persistent chemicals in the environment and being added, it would be …. interesting.

    Remember the Chinese fake milk and dog food poisonings?

    https://scienceblogs.com/effectmeasure/2007/05/12/melamine-followup

    Nobody saw that melamine+chloramine=crystals interaction coming. Nobody has that kind of computation ability.

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