uncertainty

In recent years, numerous climate projections (such as MACA or LOCA) have been made available for use in impact assessments and adaptation planning. However, the breadth of available projections presents a daunting challenge to managers and scientists who are trying to determine which projections are appropriate for a particular decision context.

The twenty-first session of the Conference of the Parties (COP21) has convened in Paris this week to agree on global solutions to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. The goal is to achieve a legally binding international agreement aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The last such treaty signed 18 years ago, the Kyoto Protocol, failed to meet many of its objectives since it was not ratified by the US and other developed nations did not fulfill their commitments.

There have been several times so far in my short graduate career where I have ended up arguing with one professor or another over something few would think of.  How much does the small stuff matter?  That is, how much does a small change in methods in research matter?  Let me take a moment to talk about why I think that (at least in the context of climate modeling), the small stuff is very important.

This post originally appeared on May 20, 2013 and is part of our throw-back series.

The evening I’m writing this, our first real snow this winter has been on the ground for barely a day.  My desk (or rather, kitchen table) is in the watershed of the Cache La Poudre River, at the foothills of the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.  The Cache La Poudre is part of the South Platte River which drains to the Platte River, a tributary to the mighty Missouri. The snow is very welcome after a long drought year in the Cache La Poudre, but the drought is still playing out far downstream in the Missouri’s receiving waters, the Mississippi.

A chat about ice cores and oil business

A couple of evenings ago I had an interesting discussion with a friend of my roommate. Let’s call him Pete. Pete, the climate sceptic.

Pete and I had never met before, so we started with the usual introduction, and continued with the usual “Oh, where are you from?” after people notice my foreign accent. This is usually followed by “How did you end up in Oklahoma?” and that is sometimes preceded by “And what do you do here?” This time though, we didn’t make it to the How-I-got-here part.

A few days ago, I got notice about a special issue in Environmental Communication on “Media Research on Climate Change: Where have we been and where are we heading?”  One article in particular caught my attention: “How Grammatical Choice Shapes Media Representations of Climate (Un)certainty” by Bailey et al.  The article offers a comparison of U.S.