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Unforced variations: Jan 2026

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This month’s open thread. We’re not great ones for New Year’s resolutions, but let’s try. How about we resolve to stay substantive, refrain from abusing one another, and maintaining a generosity of spirit when interacting with others?

Lots of things get updated in January and we’ll try and keep up, though possibly with less fanfare than in previous years. In other news, we await the (supposedly imminent) release of a new “National Climate Assessment”, and the (supposedly imminent) engagement of the authors of the DOE ‘climate report’ with the extensive critiques they received. Meanwhile CMIP7 has started, and we expect results to trickle into the databases throughout the year – dig into some of the literature to get a sense of what will change (better models, improved forcings, etc.).

Eppure si riscaldi.

Raising Climate Literacy

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Guest commentary by Figen Mekik

Climate change has become “that” topic – like evolution of species, plate tectonics, or AI where the public has heard so much about it that many think they know everything they need to know.  Such confidence can be both a good and bad thing. 

The upside is that the biggest global societal problem of our time, climate change, has become a part of the broader culture. The vast majority of the world agrees that something must be done to mitigate global warming – 69% of the world population is willing to contribute 1% of their income to climate mitigation, and 89% demand climate action from their governments and politicians. 62% of Americans feel a personal duty to reduce the effects of climate change.  However, the downside is that most lack a sufficient foundation in the science of climate change which creates misconceptions, a lack of ability to discern pseudoscience, and an ill-founded surety about the realities of global warming.   Misconceptions get in the way of understanding the science behind the predictions of climate change to the point where mitigation efforts are derailed or stalled. The consequence is that anthropogenic climate change, a phrase used to describe the change in climate attributable to human activity, becomes a political “belief” rather than accepted as scientific discourse.

The U.S. is among the most politically divided countries about anthropogenic climate change. Despite 61% of Americans regarding the scientific evidence supporting a warming Earth as solid, the current administration has successfully and systematically defunded most of its institutions providing the most scientifically sound information and educational materials about climate change. The damage to NASA, NOAA, NIH, and EPA is profound and is threatening the exalted status of the U.S. as a global leader in scientific research. Such misguidedness stems in part from “The vast majority of the world” (the tendency of individuals to underestimate the willingness of others to want to mitigate climate change), and in greater part from “climate modeling ignorance.”  

One of the most pernicious misconceptions about climate change is the idea that climate models make projections for the next 100 years by simply extrapolating the globally averaged changes in weather patterns over the last 40 – 50 years into the future. This is an important misconception to correct because it goes to the core of the credibility of climate models in the mind of lay people who make political decisions about mitigating hazards of anthropogenic climate change.  This misconception is an outgrowth from another one – that weather and climate are the same thing.  Many lay people do not realize that both regional and  global climate is determined by many factors beyond atmospheric chemistry and dynamics, including (but not limited to) ocean circulation, the thermal properties of both seawater and ice, the extent and volume of ice cover as well as Earth’s orbital parameters – are all part and parcel of climate models:

Schematic illustrating fields and topics contributing to creation, modification, and usage of climate models. Contributing topics and fields are not exhaustive!

For example, “will it snow tomorrow?” is a ‘weather’ question, while “how do El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean affect winters in West Michigan?” is a climate question. This distinction matters for making decisions about mitigating climate change because it fosters the understanding that teleconnections affect both global and regional climate, and that a persistent change related to global warming in the natural cyclicity of a distant interaction between ocean and atmosphere (El Niño in the tropical Pacific) can change what to expect in West Michigan in the next 50 or 100 years. 

Another pervasive misconception is the confusion of Environmental Science with Climate Science.  Two big questions arise: “what can a climatologist do that an environmental scientist cannot?” and “why does developing Climate Science programs in colleges distinct from environmental science matter for the lay person, the broader public?” 

Nationally, while both Environmental Science and Climate Science programs are broadly
multidisciplinary and interrelated, they have important differences. Climate Science is a physical science focusing on the causes, direct effects, and changes in climate through all of Earth’s history including the Anthropocene (the “Human Era”) through computational models involving the chemistry and physics of climate change; while Environmental Science is a natural science broadly involving ecology, microbiology, soil science, conservation, restoration, natural resource management, entomology, pollution, water quality, and similar. 

For example, pollution of a river system is a massive environmental problem. So is recycling waste. But neither are problems directly related to climate change. Similarly, availability of food or clean water is a sustainability question related more to human population growth, economics, politics, and environmental change than climate change; though of course the greater the human population, the greater the amount of greenhouse gasses emitted to the atmosphere which leads to climate warming.   So, climate change affects and informs environmental change and sustainability but is only one aspect of those fields. The change in duration of the annual growth season or warmer temperatures shifting to higher latitudes will affect availability of food and water – these are sustainability issues. 

Unfortunately, only a handful of colleges and universities across the United States have developed college majors specifically in Climate Science, most recently Grand Valley State University.  However, academic programs specifically dedicated to Climate System Science are a new national trend – so new in fact that it is difficult to find information about the number of students enrolled or graduates produced annually nationwide. 

What has this got to do with “climate modeling ignorance”? 

Creating academic programs specifically focused on Climate System Science with a bend toward climate modeling is crucial at these times of swift and dangerous climate change. Lay people (the voting public) need to better understand the scientific basis for the causes and predictions related to anthropogenic climate change so humanity can make better informed decisions about mitigation efforts.  

Not everyone can dedicate resources and time to majoring in Climate Science but growing a population of well-educated climate scientists will help create a more climate literate public. Individuals specialized in climate system science who understand the strengths and uncertainties associated with climate modeling can inform the broader public about anthropogenic climate change and more effective ways of countering and preventing its hazardous effects.

A Communications major minoring in Climate Science may pursue a career as a climate journalist or spokesperson. In essence, a student minoring or majoring in Climate Science becomes a person who fosters climate literacy in their communities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average salary for climatologists is $94,570 annually, there were 10,500 people employed as climatologists in 2020, and the projected growth rate for climatologist jobs between 2020 and 2030 is 8%.  According to ZipRecruiter, the average earnings for a climate scientist or climate change specialist is $111,343. 

In summary, degrees in Climate Science and Environmental Science are distinct from one another by content and by job prospects they offer. The job prospects for climate scientists are numerous and varied because climatologists are urgently needed in a world where climate is changing fast and often times unpredictably.  

References

  1. M.S. McCaffrey, and S.M. Buhr, "Clarifying Climate Confusion: Addressing Systemic Holes, Cognitive Gaps, and Misconceptions Through Climate Literacy", Physical Geography, vol. 29, pp. 512-528, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.2747/0272-3646.29.6.512
  2. P. Andre, T. Boneva, F. Chopra, and A. Falk, "Globally representative evidence on the actual and perceived support for climate action", Nature Climate Change, vol. 14, pp. 253-259, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41558-024-01925-3
  3. A. Ziegler, "Political orientation, environmental values, and climate change beliefs and attitudes: An empirical cross country analysis", Energy Economics, vol. 63, pp. 144-153, 2017. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.eneco.2017.01.022
  4. F. Lehner, and T.F. Stocker, "From local perception to global perspective", Nature Climate Change, vol. 5, pp. 731-734, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2660
  5. M. Maslin, and P. Austin, "Climate models at their limit?", Nature, vol. 486, pp. 183-184, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/486183a
  6. D. Lombardi, and G.M. Sinatra, "College Students’ Perceptions About the Plausibility of Human-Induced Climate Change", Research in Science Education, vol. 42, pp. 201-217, 2010. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11165-010-9196-z
  7. W. Fleming, A.L. Hayes, K.M. Crosman, and A. Bostrom, "Indiscriminate, Irrelevant, and Sometimes Wrong: Causal Misconceptions about Climate Change", Risk Analysis, vol. 41, pp. 157-178, 2020. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/risa.13587

Critique of Chapter 6 “Extreme Weather” in the DOE review

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Guest commentary by Kerry Emanuel

Executive Summary

Chapter 6 of the draft DOE report examines whether global warming exacerbates extreme weather. It rightly notes that because events such as hurricanes are rare, detecting their response to climate change in short and imperfect historical records is extremely difficult—if not impossible. Yet the authors devote most of the remainder of the chapter to attempting just that. By omitting to frame such efforts in the context of theory and models, they commit three fundamental errors: 1) searching for trends where none were predicted, 2) neglecting important variables for which trends were predicted and 3) overlooking—or failing to acknowledge—that some predicted trends are of a magnitude that is not a priori detectable in existing noisy and short data sets. The draft report also overlooks recent literature on climate change effects on weather extremes, and quotes selectively and misleadingly from the most recent report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). For these reasons, I find much of Chapter 6 to be of questionable utility. There are at least three climate change-induced trends in hurricane-related hazards that were predicted theoretically, simulated by models, and confirmed by observations:

  1. Hurricanes are producing more rain, causing increased flooding. As water, not wind, is the source of most damage and mortality in hurricanes, this is the most consequential scientific finding.
  2. The proportion of hurricanes that reach high intensity is increasing.
  3. Hurricanes are intensifying more rapidly.

There is no robust scientific finding that hurricane frequency is increasing or expected to increase. Thus, much of Chapter 6 of the DOE report is devoted to refuting a hypothesis unsupported by scientific consensus. The short section on tornadoes does not include other more destructive aspects of severe convective storms, such as hail and damaging straight-line winds, and as with the section on hurricanes, omits inferences from theory and models.

[This commentary is also available as a pdf file]

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Unforced Variations: Sep 2025

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This month’s open thread. As usual try to remain substantive and avoid insults and personal attacks on other commenters. Any sock-puppetry or abusive comments will just be deleted on sight. Also, please don’t outsource your comments to ChatGPT – cut-and-pastes of long-winded LLM output are tedious and add precisely nothing to the conversation. There are real things happening in climate – please focus on them.

Unforced Variations: Aug 2025

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This month’s open thread. Please try and stay focused on substance rather than personalities. There are many real issues that are particularly salient this month, and so maybe we can collectively try not to have the comments descend into tedium.

Note: Moderation will be applied to over-frequent and pointless commenters (you know who you are, and no, we don’t care to argue about it).