Listen in on Mike Mann’s legal wranglings at AGU | Watts Up With That?

I find this really, really, strange that the AGU would be sponsoring such a meeting. For those of you thinking about bailing out of AGU membership, this is probably your cue.

Q&A: Kim Cobb, climatologist at Georgia Tech | SmartPlanet

[Cobb] We’d like to know about expected changes in precipitation, for example. We use large computer simulations of the climate system, including the ocean, the atmosphere, land and ice. We have some fundamental equations that drive the exchanges between these components of the climate model, such as how water moves from the ocean to the atmosphere. Simulating precipitation is very difficult. We rely on some parameters and shortcuts of physics in coding precipitation into models. It’s something we need very high resolution models to do. We have a fundamentally incomplete picture of the physics that drives clouds and precipitation.

This ends up being a large uncertainty in the kinds of global climate models that we run in these 100-year projections. You can see this when you look at projections from a multi-model perspective. The suite of models don’t necessarily agree in the sign of precipitation change for any given location on the planet. ...I’m a field junkie. I have two primary sites in the Tropical Pacific with my coral work and in Borneo with my cave work...You get to scuba dive and sweat and curse.

2008: Obama To Reduce Climate Change Emissions By 80% | Real Science

Speaking by video to a climate conference in Los Angeles, Mr. Obama repeated his campaign vow to reduce climate-altering carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2050, and invest $150 billion in new energy-saving technologies.