Climate 411

The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

Stephen Colbert once quipped, "It’s not that I don’t believe in climate change, it’s that I don’t believe in climate. Have you ever heard anyone say, "How’s the climate?" No! They say, "How’s the weather?""

People often confuse climate and weather. They wonder how scientists can reliably predict climate 50 years from now when they can’t predict the weather a few weeks from now. The answer is that climate and weather are different, and it’s easier to predict climate than weather.

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The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

In March of this year, British TV Channel 4 aired a 72-minute diatribe called "The Great Global Warming Swindle". The program is filled with old data, data taken out of context, data misattributed, and general misinformation, and at the time it aired we thought it not worth responding to.

But people keep mentioning it, so here are the program’s main arguments and why they’re wrong. Now the next time someone brings this up, you’ll have the facts to give them.

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Many people have asked me whether global warming and the ozone hole are related. The short answer is "no". The long answer starts with "tangentially". Here’s the scoop.

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The author of today’s post, Lisa Moore, is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

This week’s scientific journals brought three interesting stories about climate change. The first is a sneak peek at an upcoming paper about global warming and the Sun. The second talks about an unexpected environmental benefit of hurricanes, and the third reports that climate change is drying up important biodiversity hotspots in the Arctic.

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Tomorrow’s Live Earth concert is expected to be quite the happening. Do you think it will help the fight against climate change? Are you planning to go? If you do go, post your experiences here!

Lisa Moore is a scientist in the Climate and Air Program.

Of everything in climate science, what seems to spark the most skeptical questions is our use of computer models. In this post and another to follow, I’ll talk about exactly what these models do, and how they contribute to our understanding of global warming.

I’ll start with why we use models in the first place. We want to project what will happen to our climate in the future – will it be warmer? How much warmer? Will it change in different ways in different places? Climate models use our knowledge of how the climate system works to calculate what different emissions scenarios mean for the future. Here’s how the models are built.

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