A respected social scientist, Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University, sees his discipline having to play an increasingly critical role in the climate change arena if citizens are to become fully engaged and involved in the issue.
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A respected social scientist, Baruch Fischhoff of Carnegie Mellon University, sees his discipline having to play an increasingly critical role in the climate change arena if citizens are to become fully engaged and involved in the issue.
Veteran participants in the annual conferences of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, AAAS, will tell you it’s just another word for that meeting.
Intrepid reporters, and hungry ones, can eat their way through the annual four-day programs and barely tap their shrinking per diems and disappearing travel expense budgets.
Few climate change topics arouse more passion than the seemingly dry field of climate modeling.
Critics thunder that the models contain a “large element of subjectivity” with parameters “tweaked by those who operate the models” to achieve results that conform to scientists’ preconceptions. Some seem to think that these models simply represent a grandiose exercise in curve fitting, forecasting future climate based on the trend in temperatures over the past few decades.
As the nation’s oil capital and home to the first President Bush, Houston might seem to outsiders an unlikely place for Hansen to receive such a positive media reception. He is, after all, an outspoken critic of the current Bush administration’s response to climate change science and an advocate of urgent action to address global warming.
The state’s politics, however, provided a more ambiguous context for his Houston speech than someone focusing only on Texas’s energy-industry, red-state reputation might assume.
How does journalism mix with science on an expedition to remote mountain glaciers? In the end the answer really depends on the character and expectations of the individuals involved. So far our experiences with journalists have been very positive and productive, and I believe the same can be said for their experiences with us.
Measuring the temperature of an entire country is no easy undertaking.
Numerous factors such as the heat island effect of urban areas and poor quality measuring sites mean that any aggregate temperature calculation must adjust for potential biases.
A recent effort by Anthony Watts and a team of dozens of volunteers at SurfaceStations.org succeeded in surveying and photographing more than one third of the 1,221 temperature measuring stations in the US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). An analysis of the temperature trend in the stations identified as well sited and rural corresponds surprisingly well with the official NASA GISTEMP temperature record of the United States. The similar findings suggest that, despite a number of poor quality measuring stations, the official temperature record for the U.S. appears to be quite accurate.
Physical and atmospheric scientist Benjamin D. Santer, of Lawrence Livermore, says he is taking a new “proactive” approach in dealing with news media.
Prior to having participated in several face-to-face workshops involving climate scientists and journalists over the past few years, Santer says his standard “mode of operation” had been to:
Climate change issues were front-and-center at the Society of Environmental Journalists (SEJ) 17th annual conference at Stanford University September 5-9.