Thursday, January 04, 2007

Kilo is a thousand grams



From realclimate.org, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, David Archer, Stefan Rahmstorf, William Connolley, and Raymond Bradley talk about the "middle ground" on climate science. By "middle ground" I mean the space in between "slow, slow warming" and "runaway warming with gulf stream shutdown, etc.," as seen in my last post. These respected scientists review varying points of view in layman's terms. This piece is highly informative and very helpful.

Since I am not a climate scientist or oceanographer, I don't read all the literature coming out, so I have a hard time judging much beyond the statistical and methodological validity of single experiments or papers I see. This makes it hard for me to process the totality of the breadth of climate research coming out. Various teams of researchers are exploring different directions which climate may take and I just don't keep my ear close enough to the ground to weigh each against the other. If I have trouble doing this, you know how easy it is for a Neil Cavuto type to obfuscate the real scientific basis for debate- knowing how complex the issue is. I know that Stefan Rahmstorf is well known for his big distillations of current climate research in Scientific American-type accessible science magazines- he really knows all the research out there and he is very sharp.

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