With all the attention surrounding carbon dioxide these days, it is easy to forget that there are a number of other important natural and human-driven factors (“forcings” in climate circles) that influence Earth’s climate.

An argument frequently used by those skeptical of the role of anthropogenic greenhouse gases in modern temperature increases is that warming is caused by the Sun. At first glance, it seems to make intuitive sense: the Sun is a massive [...]

Measuring Earth’s temperature is no easy task. Four different groups produce temperature records that attempt to compile a single global mean surface temperature: NASA’s GISStemp, the Hadley Center’s HadCRU, Remote Sensing Systems’ RSS, and the University of Alabama, Huntsville’s UAH.

Among the most iconic image of Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth” was that of coastlines and cities disappearing beneath rising seas. Sea level rise is certainly one of the more worrisome impacts of climate change, but the film’s disregard of [...]

Broadcast meteorologists do not have the best of reputations for predictive accuracy. Audiences are particularly good at remembering – and at pointing the finger – when they’re wrong. Few heap praise when their forecasts turn out to have been accurate. [...]

Water vapor is one of the most important elements of the climate system. A greenhouse gas, like carbon dioxide, it represents around 80 percent of total greenhouse gas mass in the atmosphere and 90 percent of greenhouse gas volume. Water [...]

“Global temperatures have not increased since 1998.” That point has been a common argument among climate skeptic communities in the blogosphere for the past few years. It gained prominence recently in an article in the New Statesman by David Whitehouse, [...]