It's not enough to bash in heads, you have to bash in minds

The recent Australasian heatwave has been so unprecedented that the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has had to add a new colour (purple) to represent the hottest region:

But the Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology new colour is not unprecedented.

(h/t Peter Sinclair)

via Skeptical Science

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… or nothing to see here. Move along folks.

All of this cosmic nonsense was pre-debunked by Richard Alley in his great AGU talk from 2009 titled: The Biggest Control Knob: Carbon Dioxide in Earth’s Climate History (starting at about 42 minutes):

So despite what you might have read at some less-than-reputable publications, the recent leaked IPCC drafts don’t change any game.

I find it hard to fully comprehend the scale of it

We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we’ve done it.
-Jean-Claude Juncker

Talking about financial reforms, but the exact same situation applies to climate/sustainability.

TEDx has recently been used as a platform for pseudoscience, and in response they have published an open letter full of good advice on how non experts can spot pseudoscience.

Check out the Guardian Data Blog for the whole infographic

Any questions?

via James Lawrence Powell

This talk, by Ray Pierrehumbert, is an excellent response to Naomi Oreskes’ observation that: “climate scientists are so busy talking about stuff they don’t understand that they never get around to taking credit for what they got right.

Or why I don’t expect much progress from the current meeting in Doha

h/t New Anthropocene

Perhaps you have heard that delegates from around the world have gathered in Doha to discuss what to do about the climate problem. Perhaps you hope that something worthwhile will come out of the negotiations.

Katharine Hayhoe on Twitter (or rather the service TwitLonger since 140 characters is obviously not enough) explaining climate change’s influence on Sandy, and the difficulties in communicating the nuances involved to the press:

As a scientist in a field where consensus is constantly challenged, I’m a bit sensitive about being pitted against a colleague.

The website hint.fm/wind/ (which understandably is currently very slow) has an incredibly interesting visualization of the wind patterns over the entire continental United States. An instantly recognizable feature tonight is Sandy.

Check out XKCD for the whole story.

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John Nielsen-Gammon thinks that perhaps it is better that climate change isn’t being given much attention in the 2012 election

Maybe it’s a good thing that the major political parties are not engaged in a pitched battle over climate change.  Maybe this presents us with an opportunity to remove the political baggage from the scientific evidence.  We can start thinking rationally about the problems we face and start considering those tough questions that really matter.   Then maybe, in two or four years’ time, we can leave behind the partisan extremist positions and start building the groundwork for common agreement rather than mutual distrust.