the simple truth is that there are many things the world could do and perhaps even should do—such as eliminating poverty—but which it will not do for various reasons.

Another assumption in the statement is that greenhouse gas emissions alone determine warming, and that we know how the climate will respond to them to within 25 percent

So trends are often highly dependent on the time span being considered; here we can get almost any trend we want depending upon which interval we choose. Such “cherry picking” of data is unfortunately quite common in the media (and occasionally in the assessment reports) when the goal is to persuade. But if the goal is to inform, it is crucial to

Anyone referring to a scientist with the pejoratives “denier” or “alarmist” is engaging in politics or propaganda. And using the term “climate change” without distinguishing between natural and human causes signals a (perhaps deliberate) sloppiness in thinking. Many an article that purports to be about how humans have broken the climate (or how we

According to the IPCC, just stabilizing human influences on the climate would require global annual per capita emissions of CO2 to fall to less than one ton by 2075, a level comparable to today’s emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen, and Malawi. For comparison, 2015 annual per capita emissions from the United States, Europe, and China

Reporting on the scientific reality that there’s been hardly any long-term change in extreme weather doesn’t fit the ethos of If it bleeds it leads. On the other hand, there is always an extreme weather story somewhere in the world to support a sensational headline.

Writing this book has been an opportunity to collect and synthesize experiences over a fifteen-year journey in climate and energy. I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe. Since then, I’ve evolved to become a public critic of how The Science of climate science is presented. And, throughout, I’ve been

I believe the socio-technical obstacles to reducing CO2 emissions make it likely that human influences on the climate will not be stabilized, let alone reduced, in this century. If the effects of those influences become more evident and more severe than they have been to date, of course, the balance of costs and benefits might shift, and society

For example, the Carboniferous period extended from ~360 to ~300 million years ago, the interval between evolution’s invention of trees and its invention of tree rot. Since there was nothing then to consume the wood when trees died, some of the world’s great coal deposits were laid down during that time.