mt has an article up at And Then There’s Physics arguing that climate science should engage with the red team process and try to make lemonade out of those lemons. [more]

It may well be interesting to study scientists as a group, but it can tell you very little (if anything) about science itself. If you want to understand the systems being studied, you study those systems, you don’t study those who are doing the research. here
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here [more]

By mt. On Twitter. Storified. [more]

Today I Learned, on good authority, that it remains impossible to exclude 3 meters of sea level rise within a single human lifetime from West Antarctica alone.

If it is possible, it’s further impossible to exclude it in the lifetimes of people now living.

The time scales of the collapse of calving ice sheets depend sensitively on temperature and on the height of the cliff. [more]

Stoat argues that the fundamental question Scott Adams poses, How the heck can you – a non-expert – judge who is right? – remains a good one; but that his answer is worthless. [more]

John Nielsen-Gammon: “science doesn’t work by making predictions about future events, for the most part; it makes predictions about observable aspects of the world, things detectable in the present. The amount of trust scientists place in climate models, for example, depends on their ability to simulate relevant aspects of the past and present world. The amount of trust the public places in climate science should depend on the weight of evidence in the past and present world, which is enormous.” [more]

Results suggest that even the observed short-term temperature sensitivity from the Arctic will have little impact on the global atmospheric methane budget.
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In a worrisome development in the combat against climate change, renewables are helping to push nuclear power, the main source of zero-carbon electricity in the United States, into bankruptcy, writes Eduardo Porter in the New York Times [more]

Perhaps “scicomm” people need to get in touch with people actually in the business of changing people’s minds.

Compare studies like Boomerangs vs Javelins with The Flip is Elusive, an observation from well-known professional marketer Seth Godin.
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Somebody oversimplifies the Tobis Diagram:

http://cleantechnica.com/2016/05/02/climate-change-deniers-getting-angrier-heres/ …

Compare:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Distribution_of_professional_opinion_on_anthropogenic_climate_change_-_by_Tobis_and_Ban.jpg …

Thanks

I’ve been invited to participate in a new Bray and von Storch survey of climate scientists. The questions seem structured to de-authenticate climate models. [more]

mt writes on Only In It for the Gold

The new “ecomodernist” push implicitly restates the BTI position that getting to carbon zero follows from technological innovation alone. … to the extent that the ecomodernist manifesto does not take account of the real-world obstacles to that goal, it ducks the very question it claims to be addressing.

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Curry in over her depth without going in very deep at all. See the fireworks on the revived Only In It for the Gold blog. [more]

Naomi Oreskes: “When applied to evaluating environmental hazards, the fear of gullibility can lead us to understate threats. It places the burden of proof on the victim rather than, for example, on the manufacturer of a harmful product. The consequence is that we may fail to protect people who are really getting hurt.” [more]