TH!NK post

ResearchBlogging.org > Climate Change

Published 28th November 2010 - 0 comments - 1126 views -

Main stream media hasn't been entirely successful in reporting climate change science. The blogosphere as a whole has been even worse. But if you know where to look blogs can be awesome. Some blogs are written by people a lot smarter than the average journalist which can be a huge advantage on topics such as climatology.

Below are some highlights from the climate change science blogosphere using the ResearchBlogging.org service.

One lesson from Climategate could be open sourcing science

In Should we close the Climategate? by Jörg Friedrich a recent article and a recent editorial from Nature are discussed. The anniversary of Climategate is celebrated by asking Phil Jones, one of the climatologists wrongly accused of fraud, on how he has changed his behaviour; he is now more careful even in private emails.

But the real message is a call to discuss further the possibilities in opening up science even further to scrutiny. Web 2.0, cloud computing, crowd source tools... all of these new concepts makes the idea worth discussing.

“Scientists should not misinterpret this as an intrusion into their hallowed halls of the mob, but as a welcome opportunity to build trust and to find a supplement to peer review.”

Meanwhile, some scientists are already very open...

Nice insect ecology blogging

Please take a look at Leaf miners & climate change? at “Dave Hubble's ecology spot” and Winter active bumblebees at “BugBlog”. Isn't that what we call blogging!? Real bug geeks musing on little observations of their own. In the context of hard core biology and – in this case – related to climate change.

Why, oh why, does this Chromatomyia aprilina look weird like that!? Seriously!? (Not that I know how it's supposed to look like...)

Stating the obvious – blogging the difficult

The blogosphere has more “it's snowing today, cancel climate change” type articles than main stream media. (In fact, most blogs suck.) But the blogosphere also has space for lengthy rationalism that the media can't operate. And awesome headlines like Greg Laden's recent The melting of the Arctic ice cap is a complex process.

The melting of the poles isn't just like an ice cube subject to a big flame. They are huge areas subject to their own climatic dynamics, varying winds, storms breaking off blocks of ice, currents carrying away ice, snowstorms helping create more ice and many more factors. Even this relatively simple part of climatology is not that simple after all.

See Greg's post for an introduction to the North Pole and perhaps my own The South Pole is melting too (also in the below PDF) about the Antarctica processes.

Predictions and forecasts

In WiSci's Worldwide Drought: Current Conditions and Future Predictions recent calculations on precipitation, evaporation and drought trends are summed up:

“Large parts of Latin America, southern Asia, Africa, and Australia face significant drought risks.”

A rather philosophically titled What do we do with forecasts of the future? starts with some observations about coral bleaching:

“heat waves that cause massive coral bleaching [...] by the 2030s will occur every 1-2 years”

And finishes with a nice ending for any climate change article:

“we know that drought-driven die-offs will increase in the future, and (I hope) we may be able to predict them in the near term. But how can we use our ability to forecast to build more resilient systems?”

During TH!NK2, the COP15 predecessor of TH!NK4, I blogged a handful of articles about science, not news or politics. They were aggregated at ResearchBlogging.org but when TH!NK4 was created from the TH!NK2 platform the URLs were destroyed in the process. Below is a PDF containing all my TH!NK2 ResearchBlogging.org articles.

Climate change science summaries Oct 2009 - Feb 2010

Category: Climate Science, | Tags:



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