Less Heat - More Light

The science of weather and climate, without the politics

This first (now lightly edited) essay posted to Less Heat More Light tried to set the tone for what followed. The final post repeated the original text and expressed the hope that the goal had been achieved.

A Focus on the Science

The climate debate tends to generate more heat than light.  Readers, regardless of where they look, are confronted with opinion and doubt, charge and counter-charge.  You hear that the science is incomplete or unsettled, or that the critics are tied to corporations or lack expertise in climate science.  The back-and-forth holds little useful information for the reader.

Rarely do media presentations present substantive information that might allow readers to decide for themselves what they think on the issue.  In terms of climate stories, there seems to be a focus on reporting the most extreme events, possibly with a nod to a link to a changing weather and climate system, but climate change is not about individual extreme events.  Climate is a long-term story of gradual, if powerful, changes.

And the Numbers

As an environmental scientist, I often get this question: “Do you believe in climate change?”  My response is to gently suggest that this is not the right question.  Science is not about beliefs.  As Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson has said – the good thing about science is that it is true whether you believe in it or not!  I might rephrase the question as: “Does the evidence you have seen convince you that climate change is happening?”  To answer to that question requires some access to real evidence.

The language of science is numbers, and that can be a barrier to telling an important story.  My goal with this site is to attempt to tell the story of weather and climate based on some of the most important climate-related information acquired by the science community over a very long period of time.  It’s a story built on measurements and numbers, but also on the important process of give-and-take, argument and consensus, that defines how science happens.  And while science tries to take the personal out of the story, and rely just on observations, there will be some human stories of interest here as well.

And My Fascination With Weather and Climate

With luck, I might also be able to share with you the fascination that I have felt throughout my life for how weather works.  Even without the climate change context, how the oceans and atmosphere interact to redistribute the unequal distribution of the sun’s energy as delivered to the surface of our planet is just a fascinating subject – at least for me.  I hope I can convey some of that fascination to you.

There will be straightforward assessments here about the state of climate science and where the science says we are headed, but I will not put forth any suggestions about what we should do about climate change – no policy dictates or political suggestions – just information.  Yes, I know all the arguments about how any information has a biased source and that all science is arbitrary.  I disagree strongly with those assertions.  More on that in a future essay.

One of the first posts here will be about one role I think scientists, and myself as a scientist, can play in the discussion about climate change – and yes, I hold out hope that we might actually have a discussion rather than an argument!  Hence the title of this site, with the clearly intended double meaning.

But first, in the next post, I will offer “Climate Change in Four Easy Steps” – a look at the history of our understanding of the interaction of greenhouse gases with climate.  You may be surprised at just how long we have known the basics. 

Then there will be short and hopefully interesting essays on the science of weather and climate, on how and where creative science gets done, how we might communicate science broadly, and some insights on the research enterprise gained from a couple of decades as both a professor and a university administrator.  There will also be an essay or two about how climate science fits into a world with many other pressing social concerns.  We’ll start there, at least, and see where this takes us.  I Will try to post a new essay every week or two.

Many of the topics and approaches presented here reflect years of teaching Introduction to Environmental Science, and many of the insights I will try to present derive from excellent questions posed by the students in those classes.  A colleague who teaches non-fiction writing at my institution (The University of New Hampshire) once said that good science teaching is an exercise in creative non-fiction.  I like that analogy, and will try here to be both accurate and interesting.