A forthcoming paper in the influential Journal of Geophysical Research has measured concentrations of methane and other alkanes in air near oil and gas operations in Weld County, Colorado, and has used that to infer rates of methane leakage from natural gas production in the region. Their results, which were reported last week by Nature and the Associated Press, point to much higher methane emissions than consensus inventories have previously found. Indeed some have read the results as confirming the highly controversial estimates of methane leakage published last year by Cornell professor Robert Howarth and his colleagues. Read more »

The IPCC has issued a special report on “Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation” (SREX). It’s an immensely useful document. Those of us whose research focuses on policy responses to climate change are bombarded daily with new studies that claim to have established that this or that cataclysmic outcome (devastating drought, mass species extinction, hurricanes galore) is a virtual certainty. But I’ve picked through too much bad climate-related work, including in top journals like Science and Nature, to simply accept every peer reviewed paper on faith. Indeed while these studies are often compelling, it’s difficult to separate those that are genuinely solid from ones that rest on less stable ground. That’s why institutions like the IPCC, and reports like this new one, are so valuable. Read more »

The following statement in a ClimateProgress post this past weekend jumped out at me:

“Peer review is the basis of modern scientific endeavour.” Read more »

Like most other climate change observers, I’ve been pretty convinced that “Climategate” – the publication of stolen e-mails from the University of East Anglia that showed climate scientists in an ugly light – has been a big contributor to American doubts about climate change. And those doubts are big: In a post earlier today, my colleague Jim Lindsay (bookmark his new blog on the domestic politics of U.S. foreign policy) flags an October Pew poll that showed only 59% of Americans believing that the earth is warming, and only 34% believing that warming is due to human activity. That’s down from 77% and 47%, respectively, in January 2007. Read more »

A group of top-flight scientists have a letter (subs. req’d) in the new issue of Science (h/t: Joe Romm, who likes the letter a lot more than I do) calling for
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