So the question is not whether sea level is rising—it’s been doing that for the past 20,000 years. Instead, what we want to know is whether human influences are accelerating that rise.

Cost-effective efficiencies that lead to emissions reductions are also low-hanging fruit, particularly when there are side benefits.

But I’ve been dismayed along the way as well. First by the willingness of some climate scientists—abetted by the media and politicians—to mis-represent what the science says, and then by the many other scientists who are silently complicit in those misrepresentations. The public deserves better. By demonstrably misinforming non-experts about what

So there’s a lot to fret about in the climate modeling business. Apart from the computational challenge of simulations that can take months to run on even the world’s fastest computers, there’s the ambiguity in tuning, ill-quantified natural variability, and intricacies like the trade-off between greenhouse gas warming and aerosol cooling to

There is, however, money to be made if the cost to remove a ton of CO2 from the atmosphere could be brought below the going price of carbon. As is often the case in the climate/energy business, it would then be possible to do well financially without actually doing much good.

However, creating aerosols in the stratosphere might be the most plausible way to make a significant global impact.

The world’s oceans are both the most important and the most problematic piece of the earth’s climate system. They hold more than 90 percent of the climate’s heat and are its long-term memory.

The Agreement sets a goal of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius and for the first time agrees to pursue efforts to limit the increase in temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius. It also acknowledges that in order to meet that target, countries should aim to peak greenhouse gas emissions as soon as possible.2 Take a moment to read that again,

Scientists aren’t fortune-tellers. There’s no crystal ball that tells us how to (or even whether we’ll need to) keep our planet safe from any given natural or human-caused climate problem that might arise. What we do have is our data, as imperfect as it is, and our ability to apply critical thinking and problem-solving skills to use that data to