Critics often complain that the three major surface temperature records — NASA’s GISTemp, the University of East Anglia’s HadCRUT, and NOAA’s National Climate Data Center record — all rely on most of the same underlying station data, provided through the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). And therefore that they’re all dependent on, and vulnerable to, shortcomings in GHCN.

GHCN is comprised of around 7,000 station records at 4,500 different locations. The station records span the period from 1700 to present. GHCN contains a well-enough distributed sample of stations after 1880 to allow a reconstruction of global temperature.

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Tony Broccoli has spent the past two decades working to engage lay audiences about climate change. For him, that interest has meant using concrete, relatable images: ice skating on backyard ponds and present-day heat waves and unusual storms.

Broccoli is a professor at the School of Environmental and Biological Sciences at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J., where he works on climate modeling. Before returning to his alma mater, he spent 21 years at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory, GFDL, in Princeton, N.J. He is also the editor of the Journal of Climate, and he has been a contributor to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

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Schneider and wife Terry Root at 2008 Rothbury Festival Global Warming ‘Think Tank.’

The planet feels hotter now, and certainly more at risk. The world is smaller for the death of Stanford University climatologist Stephen H. Schneider. And certainly a whole lot less intelligent and decent.

Schneider was one-of-a-kind, “the real thing,” as they say. No one is irreplaceable, it’s true, but there is at this point no telling which scientist (or likely which scientists) it will take to fill the science and communications voids he leaves behind.

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Black carbon, a component of soot, and potentially one of the most important contributors to climate change, rises into the atmosphere each time someone fires up a traditional cook-stove or switches on an older-model diesel vehicle. The author recently co-organized a workshop under the aegis of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute (YCEI), which brought together scientists, policymakers, and development experts to discuss controlling black carbon.

That workshop had three key conclusions: stop throwing cook-stoves at the problem; target diesel; and be very careful about comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide. The first part of this article examined the limits of targeting cook-stoves as a bid to slow climate change. Part II looks at the case for phasing out diesel emissions, and urges a more cautious approach to comparing black carbon with carbon dioxide.

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Does an overly simplified perspective on black carbon, one of the most important contributors to climate change, risk society’s missing an important opportunity for managing climate warming? The first of a two-part series on black carbon helps pave the way for a better understanding of this critical issue.

A recent black carbon workshop co-organized by the author under the aegis of the Yale Climate and Energy Institute brought together scientists, policymakers, and development experts to discuss black carbon and how to control it.

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Weighing ‘convinced’ and ‘unconvinced’

As polls indicate that fewer Americans say they see solid evidence for global warming, and as climate change skeptics have grown emboldened in the wake of last fall’s hacked e-mail episode at the University of East Anglia, Stanford grad student Bill Anderegg pursued a few simple questions:

What makes someone who speaks or writes about the climate a climate expert?

Is there a difference in scientific expertise between those who subscribe to the view that humans are significantly driving up the globe’s thermostat and those who are skeptical or incredulous?

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On June 5th the local newspaper in Beeville, a small town in Southern Texas, published a story about a local 4th grade student who had it said had just won the Junior Division of the National Science Fair for a project entitled “Disproving Global Warming.” The student, Julisa Castillo, had received a package containing a trophy, medal, and plaque, along with a letter purporting to be from an official at the National Science Foundation and announcing her selection as the first place winner out of 50,000 projects entered from 50 states.

In the course of two days, the story had spread around to dozens of blogs, hundreds of twitter posts, and various media outlets. It also appears to have been an elaborate hoax.

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Canada’s Scales of Justice … Avoid ‘falsehoods’? Or ‘chilling’?

Andrew Weaver, a prominent Canadian climatologist and IPCC contributor, raised eyebrows across the climate media world recently when he filed a libel suit against a right-leaning newspaper for its tough criticisms.

In late April, Weaver filed a complaint in the Supreme Court of British Columbia contending that the National Post was guilty of libel in a series of recent articles attacking him and his work.

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A Lynchburg, Virginia, TV meteorologist for an ABC affiliate has taken the unusual task of publicly criticizing, on his blog, an elected state official, Republican Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, for initiating a legal action against former University of Virginia climate scientist Michael Mann, now at Penn State.

Cuccinelli, elected to his office in November 2009, in late April initiated a “Civil Investigative Demand” (CID) with the University of Virginia seeking a vast volume of e-mails and other communications from Mann’s 1999-2005 years with the University.

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A number of scientific efforts comparable to the climate index initiative mimicking the widely publicized Dow Jones Industrial Average are at various stages of development in the scientific community.

One such effort is that championed by climate change investments expert Dan Abbasi to help improve public understanding of climate change, described on this site in a recent posting.

Several other interests also have established indexes with similar aims.

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