Last time, I expressed extreme disappointment that fossil fuel executives had any role in leading the climate meeting COP28. This is a classic example of putting the the fox in charge of the hen house. The issue is easily summed up: Setting aside economic self-interest and other human foibles, it is clear from the comments that the science is not as clear to everyone as it is to me. That’s fair;

I recently attended ScienceOnline Climate, a conference in Washington, D.C. at AAAS. You may have heard of the ScienceOnline annual meeting in North Carolina - this was one of their topical meetings focused on Climate Change. I moderated a session on working with data from the web in R, focusing on climate data. Search Twitter for #scioClimate for tweets from the conference, and #sciordata for tweets from the session I ran.

In 1986, I was a grad student at Princeton, working in the atomic physics lab of Will Happer. It was at a department colloquium that I first heard a science talk that raised serious concerns about our use of fossil fuels potentially impacting the climate. This was not received well. People asked all sorts of questions, with much of the discussion revolving around feedback effects.

One of the goals of the rOpenSci is to facilitate interoperability between different data sources around web with our tools. We can achieve this by providing functionality within our packages that converts data coming down via web APIs in one format (often a provider specific schema) into a standard format. The new version of rWBclimate that we just posted to CRAN does just that.

I’ve recently released the new package ccafs, which provides accessto data from Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security(CCAFS; http://ccafs-climate.org/) General Circulation Models (GCM) data.GCM’s are a particular type of climate model, used for weather forecasting,and climate change forecasting - read more athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model.

I have had the misfortune to encounter many terms for psychological dysfunction in many venues. Cognitive dissonance, confirmation bias, the Dunning-Kruger effect – I have witnessed them all, all too often, both in the context of science and elsewhere. Those of us who are trained as scientists are still human: though we fancy ourselves immune, we are still subject to the same cognitive foibles as everyone else.

Happy World Ocean Day! World Ocean Day is a day of celebration and action to protect our shared ocean. While I already appreciate the importance of protecting sensitive ecosystems, including the ocean ¹ , I found the idea of World Ocean Day especially touching.

An anaerobic digester at BGI. Biofuels Research Shows the Utility of Container Publishing One of the most promising areas in biofuel development is biogas, which has huge potential as a renewable and clean source of energy.

A recent video on the PBS Ideas Channel posited that the discovery of climate change is humanities greatest scientific achievement. It took synthesizing generations of data from thousands of scientists, hundreds of thousands (if not more) of hours of computer time to run models at institutions all over the world. But how can the individual researcher get their hands of some this data?

Kyle Manley, Tristan Salles Dietmar Müller Since roughly 1880 the Earth has warmed by 1 deg C, many times faster than any warming episode in the past 65 million years of Earth’s geological history. We will need to remove hundreds of gigatons of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere by the end of the twenty-first century to keep global warming below 2°C within the constraints of the global carbon budget.