Saturday, February 18, 2012

Newbies

It's good to see a few more familiar names dipping their toes into the blogosphere. Tamsin Edwards looks like she is going to write here about "how to quantify uncertainties in modelling climate change..." and Michel Crucifix has a few comments here too. Given our own interests in using paleoclimate modelling to help understand model performance, I particularly look forward to hearing more about the PaleoQUMP project whose web pages don't seem to have been updated in the last couple of years. (I assume the project itself has ended, and I know the lead scientist moved to Sydney some time ago, but based on the interesting conf presentations, there must be more papers than Tamsin's nice review in progress somewhere).

[Oh, ok, it is palaeoQUMP really, but this is one occasion where for some arbitrary and hypocritical reason that I cannot fathom, I can't be bothered adhering to what is (I presume) the original correct English spelling. Perhaps it's because I first became familiar with the term via PMIP who seem to have always used the alternative spelling.]

To be honest, I have my doubts whether Tamsin's apparent effort to engage with skeptics is likely to be productive - my position is that anyone who is genuinely open-minded and interested should have no problem finding enough reliable info already - but an increasing diversity of voices presenting similar info from a range of perspectives can only be good thing (as Dan Kahan argued convincingly in this workshop). And with other eminent voices such as Isaac Held entering the fray (some time ago in his case) we must surely be approaching the time when "blogger" will no longer be used as a sneer to denigrate someone whose research you happen to disagree with.

2 comments:

EliRabett said...

The key issue is selecting the public you are writing for.

Anonymous said...

"To be honest, I have my doubts whether Tamsin's apparent effort to engage with skeptics is likely to be productive"

Likewise, though I wish her the best. Must admit that I'm rather skeptical about this:

"About to meet Andrew Montford of The Hockey Stick Illusion, host of Bishop Hill - he's come to the Met Office for discussions."

https://twitter.com/#!/flimsin/status/172267663232483328