What can we do as individual citizens that is the most meaningful of all climate change actions? How can we best use our time to create the biggest difference? This question has a very surprising answer. The 2016 Yale Program on Climate Communications poll Spiral of Silence is a short, simple “must read” for anyone…
McClatchy reported on a new NOAA sea level rise impact report and made some very good points. But a lot of the true meaning is left out. I like to use well publicized journalism like this to be able to quickly get to the most important pieces of the science being reported on, that are…
The partisan divide over climate change is growing and the scholarly literature blames it on conservative political bias in the media. (Charmichael 2017, Dunlap 2016) Though this is not what we hear in the media, the reason we don’t “hear” this, is in itself the conservative bias in the media. (National Academies of Sciences 2017)…
One of the biggest myths about climate change is that emissions reductions cool Earth. This is nowhere close to reality. Even the Paris Commitments of 80 percent emissions reductions by 2050 allow warming to triple by 2050 and quintuple by 2100. We (the royal we) have great challenges as climate reform decision makers. If our…
The IPCC changed their fundamental philosophy on how they evaluate scenarios of our future climate in their 2013 reporting, but they have yet to acknowledge the most common and meaningful way our climate usually changes, implying negative consequences for traditional climate reform strategies. Popular science however, continues on the path of traditional climate reform strategies…
Scientists may not be able to tell if this calving event was caused by climate change or not because of the constraints of certainty in science, but engineers have different risk/certainty assumptions that allow a better understanding of the reality of climate impacts on ice shelf collapse. In other words, A scientists says: “We don’t…
Something that is not clear in the overall climate discussion is that global warming is a radically different beast from abrupt change. We hear abrupt change bandied about, but often it is not well defined. It appears to many that global warming is abrupt change simply because the warming we are experiencing, and that is…
Fifty-two feet of sea level rise occurred in 400 years, 14,500 years ago with ocean and collapse conditions similar to today. We were coming out of the last ice age then, but then, forcing was thousands of times less than today. Our climate’s most meaningful and common changes are classified as abrupt changes in climate…
A quick note on the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine’s review of climate pollution reform technologies: Climate Intervention — Carbon Dioxide Removal and Reliable Sequestration, June 2017. Theoretical academic publishing on the current state of direct air capture technologies, continues to color academic literature with very dated and inaccurate statements. Part of the challenge…
This New York Times article from May has compiled the best of current Antarctic science images into a huge three-part piece, but some of the most important reporting is completely wrong. And most importantly, the way it is wrong exemplifies the impacts of the Climate change Counter Movement and how they have influenced the media’s…
It’s all around us but masked by “noise” in the media; enabled by fairness in journalism, driven by myth that has been propagated by experiences that we as a society have never before experienced. When Unprecedented drought in California was replaced by unprecedented flooding, the paper says: “The media, resource management entities, and the scientific…
