Perhaps the most famous blueprint for slowing and reversing carbon emissions was the 2004 “wedges” paper by Princeton researchers Stephen Pacala and Robert Socolow. While the resulting project’s optimism, innovative approach — it includes a “Stabilization Wedges Game” and a musical lecture — and frequent citation have captured imaginations worldwide, policymakers continue to scuttle away from the hard choices it suggests for addressing climate change. As Matt Jenkins described for in the April-May 2008 issue of Miller-McCune, (“A Really Inconvenient Truth”) "... Pacala and ... Read More
Putting Climate Researchers Under the Microscope
August 13, 2010 • By • Leave a Comment
In a first-of-its-kind study, a team of Stanford University scientists have analyzed the papers published and cited by more than 900 climate researchers. Using the same metrics universities employ for making hiring or tenure decisions, the paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that researchers who doubt climate change have less expertise and are far less prominent than their colleagues: Scientists who argue for human-caused climate change published twice as many papers and were cited about 64 percent more often than the unconvinced. Still ... the ... Read More
Forecast: Warm With a Chance of Denial
February 16, 2010 • By • 3 Comments
Do weathermen themselves "know which way the wind blows"? A recent national survey of TV weather forecasters, all of them meteorologists, reveals that nearly 1 in 3 believes "global warming is a scam," 1 in 4 is not sure, and three out of four are not convinced that the warming of the Earth since 1950 is man-made. As reported in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the admittedly small survey sample of 121 forecasters was dominated by climate change skeptics who questioned the findings of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world authority on ... Read More
The Dirt on Climate Change
December 21, 2009 • By • 3 Comments
Conflicts tend to scatter people, and ideas, in unexpected ways. After the American Civil War, a flood of so-called Confederados fled the devastated South and set up farms in the Brazilian Amazon. They planted rice and sugar cane and tobacco, and they prospered. But the lands they settled — primarily high bluffs along rivers — weren't any more pristine than Alabama or the Carolinas had been. As they plowed, the settlers unearthed vast quantities of potsherds that showed the land had been inhabited before. And the ceramics weren't the only sign of previous human cultivation: The deep black ... Read More
Quailing Before the Messy Business of Science
December 5, 2009 • By • 2 Comments
Recent events are showing that, in the contact sport of climate change science, reasonable people on both sides may have cause to fear that the loser will be the scientific method. As scientists, policymakers, diplomats and environmentalists begin to converge on Copenhagen for climate talks, the integrity of leading climate change researchers has come under attack; a release of some 1,000 hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia in Britain has created a stir, with some suggesting the e-mails demonstrate hoarding of and manipulation of data by climate researchers. The e-mails ... Read More
Let’s Just Rejigger the Globe to Cool it Off
September 1, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
In July the American Meteorological Society stepped gingerly into the far outer reaches of the climate debate, a place where a reluctant but growing number of scientists, and even more science fiction fans, have been talking about geoengineering. The controversial idea suggests that if we can't curb our greenhouse gas emissions in time to avert cataclysmic climate change, maybe we should contemplate changing the Earth system itself — fertilizing the oceans with iron to stimulate plankton that would sequester carbon dioxide or spraying the stratosphere with dust particles that would ... Read More
Climate Models Get Biological Makeover
July 7, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
It's springtime in Silicon Valley and a timeless tale is being retold. Kevin Arrigo, an oceanography professor at Stanford University, stands in the front of a classroom of students explaining how life works. He's not talking about any old life though, but life in the ocean — where life began. And it's not the fishes and the whales, either; as Arrigo puts it, "If it's big enough to see, it's probably not important." Arrigo is talking about the tiny plants that make up the base of the oceanic food pyramid — the phytoplankton. Like all plants, microscopic phytoplankton take light from the ... Read More
Lessons From the Reverse Engineering of Nature
April 20, 2009 • By • Leave a Comment
On the Significance of Species Beginning in the mid-1980s with evolutionary biologist and writer Stephen J. Gould, the University of Minnesota has invited world-renowned speakers to give public addresses in a lecture series named for the university's longtime president and Graduate School dean, Guy Stanton Ford. In 1994, I had just started as assistant professor in the department of ecology, evolution and behavior when I was thrilled to discover that the speaker for that year would be Richard Dawkins, another famous evolutionary biologist and writer. I joined the hundreds in the packed ... Read More
Riddles of an Acerbic Sea
April 13, 2009 • By • 1 Comment
Just a quarter of the carbon dioxide generated by burning fuels ends up being recycled through the biological processes of terrestrial plants and animals, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Another quarter of this man-generated carbon dioxide floats aloft in the atmosphere, and the rest, NOAA says, ends up in the drink. That amounts to 260 billion tons of carbon dioxide dissolved into the sea since the beginning of the industrial era — a good thing when it comes to reducing greenhouse gasses that warm the planet. But, it also lowers the pH of the normally ... Read More
Public Opinion’s Climate-Change Ping-Pong
March 26, 2009 • By • 3 Comments
Two years ago, when the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore received the Nobel Peace prize, many of us thought the global warming debate was over and it was time to address what they had identified as a problem threatening mankind. But there always have been skeptics of the panel's conclusions, and they have not gone home quietly. A recent Gallup poll suggests that their continued — and lately more vocal — dissent may be having an effect on Americans' attitudes. According to poll results, a record-high 41 percent of Americans think global warming, ... Read More
