I have three not-quite news stories on climate change that have recently landed on the doorstep, each sticking in my memory. So I’ll lump them all together and, just to throw some polemical spice and melodrama on top, finish with one of the most distressing – if unfathomable in its larger scheme importance – news stories I’ve read recently.
Two of these are from Yale University, one apiece from its overlapping climate change public outreach projects. Each is something for reporters on the climate beat to have read.
- Yale e360 – Michael Lemonick (Jan 18): Can We Trust Climate Models? Increasingly, the Answer is ‘Yes.” ; Lemonick, best known recently for work at Climate Central and Time Magazine before that (and still, on occasion), does not dance around the pure impossibility of getting all the physics into general circulation models. Nobody know what all the physics is. Clouds are too complicated, for instance. So the public’s right, there are fudge factors (parameterizations) and grid-size problems. But, it says here, the models do okay and are getting better.
- Yale Forum on Climate Change and the Media – Zeke Hausfather: Global Temperature in 2010: Is is the Hottest Year on Record, and Does it Matter? ; This is a paper, not a journalism exercise, but it is the best synthesis in plain English that I’ve seen on the many annual trackings of global temperatures that all landed recently with their figures for 2010. Most interesting from here is its reminder that while global averages are going up and get the most ink, the data subset that may be more pertinent to most of us is the land temperature trend. Oceans are so slow to react, and so broad in area, they partly mask what people experience.
Third, an emeritus professor of physics and astronomy at U. Missouri-St. Louis, Richard D. Schwartz, has been sending a commentary of his to several of us in the science journalism community, hoping to provide some background on global warming, climate models and their embedded physics. It is well-written, a bit on the pedagogic side, and not a news story at all. But I am happy to share it around if only because it explains something to me I’d not known at all (and would hardly make it into a news story either). If you’d like to know something about greenhouse gases beyond which molecules are such and that they absorb infrared radiation, specifically about how they do that and why they turn it into mechanically heating their neighborhoods and why it works differently at low v. high altitudes (and on other planets) , this’ll tell you. It the author’s bio at the end.
- Richard D. Schwartz: Climate Change: Supposition or Science? ; (MSword document) ;
Fourth and last, & at the risk of sowing melancholy….a news story on a polar bear and her cub who swam away from a spot near Barrow, Alaska, seeking sea ice.
- Los Angeles Times – Kim Murphy (Jan 29): Polar bear’s long swim illustrates ice melt ;
* UPDATE: Okay, we got a FIFTH ITEM. A tipster alert us to an example of a science reporter (term used loosely) who is looking for professorial sources, but only ones who agree already with the contrarian angle he is pursuing. He reports, and he decides for you too…
- Gawker – Hamilton Nolan: Fox News Columnist Seeks Sources to Scoff at Global Warming ;
– Charlie Petit
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