Climate Feedback

Welcome to Climate Feedback, a new blog hosted by Nature Reports: Climate Change to facilitate lively and informative discussion on the science and wider implications of global warming.

Launching in May, Nature Reports: Climate Change is a new online resource from Nature, dedicated to in-depth reporting on global change. In light of the need for greater understanding of and access to information on climate change, the new website will vastly extend Nature’s reporting on this issue of incalculable importance.

As its accompanying blog, Climate Feedback aims to encouarge less formal debate and commentary on climate science featured in our journals and others, in the news, and in the world at large. The blog will host the climate-related musings of editors of Nature and Nature Reports: Climate Change, as well as of a select group of climate scientists and policy experts. For details of our regular contributors, go to ‘Contributors’ on the blog home page. We will also host postings from other contributors outside of the core group from time to time. As Nature’s first exclusive climate blog, Climate Feedback will join the list of existing Nature blogs, which cover a diversity of subjects from neuroscience to science news.

Why the need for another climate blog?

Despite a twenty fold in increase in coverage of global warming over almost two decades in the UK (and a five fold increase in the US over the same period) (see papers by Max Boykoff) , climate change remains a low priority for the mainstream media. More importantly, climate change issues remain poorly understood among even the well-informed public. Mainstream coverage of climate change often leaves readers out in the cold when it comes to separating the known from the unknown, fact from opinion and even fact from fiction. And while the contribution of human activity to climate change is well-established, the extent and timescale of future changes and how to minimise and deal with these changes remain topics of huge debate.

Here at Nature, we have launched Climate Feedback with the aim of providing a forum for authoritative discussion on climate issues, hosting a balance of voices and a diversity of well-informed opinions. We will discuss the broader issues surrounding climate change, as well as cutting-edge climate science. Our goal is to provide a respected and trustworthy source of discussion and debate for a wide audience, from climate scientists to the scientific public.

Why ‘Climate Feedback’?

We have called our blog Climate Feedback as a tribute to the inherently complex feeedback mechanisms in the climate system that can diminish or amplify the effect of initial greenhouse warming, and which remain one of the least well understood components of climate change. Feedback occurs when one processes triggers another that then has a positive or negative influence on the first. Similarly, we hope that postings on this blog will generate feedback to which we can respond, generating dynamic discussions on climate issues.

What will we host on the blog?

-Discussion of the weekly content of Nature Reports: Climate Change and of our monthly podcasts

-Comment and analysis on climate science in our journals, other journals and in the news

-Musings from us on meetings and conferences we are attending

-Details of upcoming events, books, interesting sites, articles etc.

-Notes from climate scientists in the field ….updating us with their in situ observations

-And much more, of course!

We will be posting to the blog frequently, so do check in regularly to see what’s new. Please join in our discussions by leaving comments. If you want to contact us, email climatefeedback at nature dot com. We look forward to hearing from you!

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 30, 2007
Categories: Communicating Climate Change, Olive Heffernan | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In October 2004 we were lucky to publish in Science our critique of the ‘hockey-stick’ reconstruction of the temperature of the last 1000 years. Now, two and half years later, it may be worth reviewing what has happened since then.
The publication in 2004 was a remarkable event, because the hockey-stick had been elevated to an icon by the 3rd Assessment Report of the IPCC.

This perception was supported by a lack of healthy discussion about the method behind the hockey-stick. In the years before, due to effective gate keeping of influential scientists, papers raising critical points had a hard time or even failed to pass the review process. For a certain time, the problem was framed as an issue of mainstream scientists, supporting the concept of anthropogenic climate change, versus a group of skeptics, who doubted the reality of the blade of the hockey stick. By framing it this way, the real problems, namely the ‘wobbliness’ of the shaft of the hockey-stick, and the suppressing of valid scientific questions by gate keeping, were left out.

Hopefully, sociology of science will later study this unfortunate period of climate science, but we may conclude now that science itself has indeed corrected claims of premature knowledge. We see now a healthy and broad discussion of the issue. We had the opportunity to respond to no less than four comments on our 2004 Science paper, but unfortunately only two comments were published. Similarly, Michael Mann and his coworkers had to respond to at least 2 comments to their Journal of Climate article in 2005.

At the EGU General Assembly a few weeks ago there were no less than three papers from groups in Copenhagen and Bern assessing critically the merits of methods used to reconstruct historical climate variable from proxies; Bürger’s papers in 2005; Moberg’s paper in Nature in 2005; various papers on borehole temperature; The National Academy of Science Report from 2006 – al of which have helped to clarify that the hockey-stick methodologies lead indeed to questionable historical reconstructions. The 4th Assessment Report of the IPCC now presents a whole range of historical reconstructions instead of favoring prematurely just one hypothesis as reliable.

When looking back we are satisfied with what has been achieved – namely an open, open-minded exciting discussion about the merits and problems related to different methods; an atmosphere where mere claims about the informational content of proxy-data meet a more critical response; an evolving practice of testing the skill of reconstruction methods in the laboratory of millennial forced global climate model simulations, where the formation of proxy-data is simulated in - so far too simplified - models.

Hans von Storch and Eduardo Zorita

Posted by Olive Heffernan on April 30, 2007
Categories: Climate science, Communicating Climate Change, Hans von Storch, Paleoclimate | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)