skepticalscience.com

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections A farmworker cleans the solar panels of a solar water pump in the village of Jagadhri, Haryana Country, India. (Photo credit: Prashanth Vishwanathan/ IWMI) Decisions made in India over the next few years will play a key role in global efforts to head off the most catastrophic effects of climate change. The country has one of the world’s 

A listing of 26 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 28, 2024 thru Sat, May 4, 2024. Story of the week "It’s straight out of Big Tobacco’s playbook. In fact, research by John Cook and his colleagues has shown that character assassination has been one of the most common ways in which fossil fuel interests have attempted to deny accountability for the climate crisis." — Geoffrey Supan Why go low? Because when one can't fly, one creeps and crawls. Widely remarked: to fall back on ad hominem remarks is to declare intellectu

Open access notables Generative AI tools can enhance climate literacy but must be checked for biases and inaccuracies, Atkins et al., Communications Earth & Environment: In the face of climate change, climate literacy is becoming increasingly important. With wide access to generative AI tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, we explore the potential of AI platforms for ordinary citizens asking climate literacy questions. Here, we focus on a global scale and collect responses from ChatGPT (GPT-3.5 and GPT-4) on climate change-related hazard prompts over multiple iterations by utilizing the OpenAI’s API and comparing th

On February 14, 2023 we announced our Rebuttal Update Project. This included an ask for feedback about the added "At a glance" section in the updated basic rebuttal versions. This weekly blog post series highlights this new section of one of the updated basic rebuttal versions and serves as a "bump" for our ask. This week features "Clearing up misconceptions regarding 'hide the decline'". More will follow in the upcoming weeks. Please follow the Further Reading link at the bottom to read the full rebuttal and to join the discussion in the comment thread there. At a glance It's

This is a re-post from The Climate Brink by Andrew Dessler In the wake of any unusual weather event, someone inevitably asks, “Did climate change cause this?” In the most literal sense, that answer is almost always no. Climate change is never the sole cause of hurricanes, heat waves, droughts, or any other disaster, because weather variability always plays a primary role in the genesis of the events. However, climate change can make these events more intense an

A listing of 31 news and opinion articles we found interesting and shared on social media during the past week: Sun, April 21, 2024 thru Sat, April 27, 2024. Story of the week Anthropogenic climate change may be the ultimate shaggy dog story— but with a twist, because here endless subplots definitely depend upon one central element in the unfolding drama of our grand physics accident: the dominant story mechanic is that we're changing Earth's climate. This leads to outcomes. One way of seeing this is via the abstraction of statistics, while another perspective is that of individual experiences each of which is only an anecdote but together lead us back

Skeptical Science is partnering with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. This fact brief was written by Sue Bin Park in collaboration with members from our Skeptical Science team. You can submit claims you think need checking via the tipline. Is Antarctica gaining land ice? While Antarctic sea ice varies seasonally, the continent's land ice has continued to melt at an increasing pace. Sea ice forms during the Antarctic winter and retreats during the warmer months. Such freeze-thaw cycles have n

This video includes conclusions of the creator climate scientist Dr. Simon Clark. It is presented to our readers as an informed perspective. Please see video description for references (if any). This year you will be lied to! Simon Clark helps prebunk some misleading statements you'll hear about climate. The video includes a few interview snippets with John Cook and John Mason while a longer version of the interview is available on subscription based Nebula. Support Simon Clark on patreon: https://patreon.com/simonoxfphys

Open access notables Ice acceleration and rotation in the Greenland Ice Sheet interior in recent decades, Løkkegaard et al., Communications Earth & Environment: In the past two decades, mass loss from the Greenland ice sheet has accelerated, partly due to the speedup of glaciers. However, uncertainty in speed derived from satellite products hampers the detection of inland changes. In-situ measurements using stake surveys or GPS have lower uncertainties. To detect inland changes, we repeated in-situ measurements of ice-sheet surface velocities at 11 historical locations first

This is a re-post from Yale Climate Connections by Megan Valére Sosou Market gardening site of the Itchèléré de Itagui agricultural cooperative in Dassa-Zoumè (Image credit: Megan Valère Sossou) For the residents of Dassa-Zoumè, a city in the West African country of Benin, choosing between drinking water and having enough food has become a worrying