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In February 2025, Dr. James Hansen and several of his scientific colleagues published an important paper titled “Global Warming Has Accelerated: Are the United Nations and the Public Well-Informed?”
➡️ https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00139157.2025.2434494
Their work is deeply researched and, to me at least, fully convincing. But the general reaction to this publication was as I described in the first entry above.
Here, in part, is what Hansen recently said about that…
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A strange phenomenon occurred in response to our paper. A few reports appeared in the media the next day, but, almost uniformly, these reports dismissed our conclusions as a fringe opinion, out of step with the larger scientific community, and thus there was no continuing discussion of the issues raised in our paper.
How did the media arrive at that conclusion, and is that conclusion truly representative of the wider scientific community? Are there important repercussions for the public of the media’s approach for assessing a climate research paper, especially for today’s young people, indeed, for the future of all people?
Our analysis puts equal emphasis on information on climate change extracted from (1) observations of ongoing climate change, (2) global climate models, and (3) Earth’s long-term climate history (paleoclimate data). We used all three of these methods in our paper to arrive at three independent analyses of climate sensitivity, with each method concluding that climate sensitivity is high, much higher than the IPCC’s best estimate.
Criticisms of the Acceleration paper in the media did not address the physics in our three assessments of climate sensitivity. Instead, criticisms were largely ad hoc opinions, even ad hominem attacks. How can science reporting have descended to this level?
Climate science is now so complex, with many sub-disciplines, that the media must rely on opinions of climate experts. Although there are thousands of capable scientists in these disciplines, the media have come to depend on a handful of scientists, a clique of climate scientists who are willing, or even eager, to be the voice of the climate science community.
Given the success of this clique in painting us as outliers, we are dependent on the larger community being willing to help educate the media about the current climate situation. For that purpose, we will discuss – one-by-one in upcoming communications – several of the matters that are raised in our papers.
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Here is where you can find those discussions Hansen describes.
➡️ https://www.columbia.edu/~jeh1/
#Science #Climate #ClimateChange #Capitalism #BusinessAsUsual
