See Editor’s Note Introducing this Feature

On the heels of the Copenhagen climate talks - whose scant accomplishments reveal that climate change science may be no match for international politics - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) finds itself in a scientific controversy of its own making.

The IPCC Fourth Assessment Report’s malformed paragraph on Himalayan glacier melt has prompted intense, and warranted, criticism of the IPCC review process. This criticism has come not only from climate science skeptics or contrarians. It’s generally clear that the ungrammatical, internally contradictory two sentences - which reproduce errors found in improperly cited sources - shouldn’t have made it into the first draft of the report, much less the final.

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A San Diego TV station’s mid-January one-hour broadcast reporting that two key federal climate research centers deliberately manipulated temperature data appears to have been based on a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of the key climatology network used in calculating global temperatures.

Independent TV news station KUSI in San Diego aired a story challenging current scientific understanding of climate science and offering “breaking news” of government wrongdoing based on work of Joseph D’Aleo, a meteorologist, and E.M. Smith, a computer programmer.

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It’s no surprise that as much of the U.S. hit was with an unusual January cold spell, hyperbolic warnings of an impending ice age would be close behind.

The British tabloid The Daily Mail recently misrepresented the work of a prominent German climate scientist, Mojib Latif, to suggest that “The bitter winter afflicting much of the Northern Hemisphere is only the start of a global trend towards cooler weather that is likely to last for 20 or 30 years.”

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Will Outer Banks’ existing dunes withstand future sea level rise?

The concept of sea level rise for much of the public may suggest an image of the world’s oceans as something like a bathtub, with melting glaciers as the faucet.

“The media have this idea in mind that sea level due to climate change is a uniform, global thing,” says Glenn Milne, a geophysicist at the University of Ottawa and lead author for a recent review in the journal Nature Geoscience on the causes of sea level change.

“That’s the Waterworld kind of misconception, ” he says, “and in reality it’s going to be very different than that.”

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No climate-related stories over the past few years have attracted the level of mainstream coverage as those involving personal e-mails of prominent climate scientists that were hacked from a mail server at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom (see Yale Forum article).

These e-mails provide plenty to criticize, but the most widely-publicized quotes often are taken out of context to falsely imply a conspiracy of sorts to hide declining temperatures and a lack of recent warming. A close reading of the e-mails in question reveals a more nuanced picture, with scientists struggling with how to explain uncertainties in complex systems in a world of 60-second sound-bytes and the certainty of blistering condemnations by those ideologically opposed to accepting scientific evidence of anthropogenic warming.

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KEY WEST, FLA. - Since the 1970s, Billy Causey has observed ominous signs of change in the coral reefs of the Florida Keys. As southeast regional director for the National Marine Sanctuary Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Causey has a front-row seat.

He has spent decades diving on Florida’s coast, where he has witnessed effects of warming waters and ocean acidification on reef ecosystems. (Click below to see a three-minute video interview with Causey.)

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The current state of most of the world’s coral reefs is so calamitous that it’s difficult to over-dramatize the situation.

Reefs have seen massive declines around the globe, and while there is much debate about which particular threat is most responsible, most scientists agree humans are to blame.

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As America lumbers along toward a low-carbon economy, nuclear energy is expected to play a significant role in generating emission-free electricity.

But how significant?

The Senate’s debates this fall on plans for the nation’s energy future may provide some clues.

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The G-8, eight Northern Hemisphere industrialized countries, last month produced its first firm target for curbing rising global temperatures: no more than 2 degrees Celsius, 3.6 Fahrenheit, above pre-industrial levels.

World headlines trumpeted the target. Long the maximum ceiling acceptable to many scientists and environmental advocates, “2 degrees” has now been semi-enshrined as the consensus “magic number” for avoiding dangerous climate change.

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Questions … and answers … on causes and impacts of climate change: no longer primarily the domain of mainstream news organizations.

Wander through The California Academy of Science’s “Altered States: Climate Change in California” exhibit.

View exhibits illustrating potential damages from climate change to local resources like The Sierras AND the California coastline. Consider the potential impacts on eco-tourism.

Take notes, recording your ideas on how to solve the climate challenge. You’ll need them for when you walk over to the museum’s Carbon Café, where you can determine the carbon footprint of any meal you might select.

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