Hi, I’m a postdoc in climate science, just made an account. I’ve been reading SSC off and on for about two years, then started exploring LW more recently and wanted to join the discussion.
I’m curious what questions you have about climate science, and what resources you think are needed to make it more accessible? More blogs? More easily accessible review papers?
Welcome to LessWrong! I appreciate you popping up.
Out of the gate, I should probably say this isn’t really specific to climate science; getting up to date on any rapidly advancing field is pretty tough. The saturation of political offense and defense just makes it tougher, is all. The likelihood functions over p-values question is one that I expect would help all scientific fields more-or-less equally.
The questions I personally have are mostly about the state of the various feedback-loops or runaway-processes that have been proposed as drivers of radical climate change. For example, the clathrate gun hypothesis; the last thing I read on the subject was commentary from a scientist who had just completed sampling of methane releases in the Arctic Ocean, who thought it had already fired. Sometime later I was reading a summary which largely agrees with the Wikipedia article that the role of this mechanism in past events is not as great as we previously thought/feared, but then later still I read that clathrate mining had officially begun. The example of the American natural gas boom suggests to me that mining will probably make the problem worse. There’s plenty of stuff on the various equilibrium processes like the nitrogen cycle or the sulphur cycle; I feel like something on what are effectively dis-equilibrium processes would also be useful both for learning and for risk evaluation.
For the most part, information about this kind of thing is scattered across papers which are infrequently meta-analyzed, or buried deep in reports like the IPCC’s and limited in nuance. I think more easily accessible—and in particular findable—review papers would be very helpful to me. In particular, if papers which discuss the history and intuition of an open problem could be found, I would love that. To give you a sense of what I mean, take a look at Macroscopic Prediction by ET Jaynes. This was a habit of the author more than anything else and it runs throughout his writings; is there anyone like that in climate science?
More blogs is probably a good idea, but I haven’t delved deeply enough to find out if any of the ones which already exist are actually good—chiefly this is because of the political noise flooding my search results. What I would really like to find is someone working in climate science with a blog like Andrew Gelman or Scott Aaronson, who I could rely on to be an expositor of their personal thinking while flagging important developments. Then I could use that blog as the launchpad for my related searches, and be more productive that way.
You might very well be like “check out <person> and <person>” and completely resolve my difficulties, which would be awesome.
It’s interesting to see what your concerns are. There’s probably less research on these kinds of feedback loops/tail risks then there should be. Part of the problem is just how uncertain they are—a combination of the difficulty of measuring things like methane releases and the problem of not being able to resolve these processes in models. Our best guide is probably paleoclimate observations, but I’m not an expert on these.
In terms of blogs, Real Climate is the best place to start. They can get combative, and they aren’t always the most rigorous researchers, but they at least give you a sense of what’s going on. Isaac Held is a giant in climate science and had a very widely-read blog for a few years, but he’s mostly gone quiet since the Trump administration took over (he’s a federal scientist). Going through his posts is a great way of getting caught up on the field. I put up notes here occasionally. And for someone with more of a “denier” bent, Judith Curry is worth checking out (though she clearly wants to push the discussion in specific directions). Finally, if you have access to it, Nature Climate Change publishes a lot of good stuff (with the caveat that it wants to publish high profile work), including summaries and perspectives which give overviews of specific subfields and questions. Any important work on tipping points and feedback loops will be in a Nature journal.
Hi, I’m a postdoc in climate science, just made an account. I’ve been reading SSC off and on for about two years, then started exploring LW more recently and wanted to join the discussion.
I’m curious what questions you have about climate science, and what resources you think are needed to make it more accessible? More blogs? More easily accessible review papers?
Welcome to LessWrong! I appreciate you popping up.
Out of the gate, I should probably say this isn’t really specific to climate science; getting up to date on any rapidly advancing field is pretty tough. The saturation of political offense and defense just makes it tougher, is all. The likelihood functions over p-values question is one that I expect would help all scientific fields more-or-less equally.
The questions I personally have are mostly about the state of the various feedback-loops or runaway-processes that have been proposed as drivers of radical climate change. For example, the clathrate gun hypothesis; the last thing I read on the subject was commentary from a scientist who had just completed sampling of methane releases in the Arctic Ocean, who thought it had already fired. Sometime later I was reading a summary which largely agrees with the Wikipedia article that the role of this mechanism in past events is not as great as we previously thought/feared, but then later still I read that clathrate mining had officially begun. The example of the American natural gas boom suggests to me that mining will probably make the problem worse. There’s plenty of stuff on the various equilibrium processes like the nitrogen cycle or the sulphur cycle; I feel like something on what are effectively dis-equilibrium processes would also be useful both for learning and for risk evaluation.
For the most part, information about this kind of thing is scattered across papers which are infrequently meta-analyzed, or buried deep in reports like the IPCC’s and limited in nuance. I think more easily accessible—and in particular findable—review papers would be very helpful to me. In particular, if papers which discuss the history and intuition of an open problem could be found, I would love that. To give you a sense of what I mean, take a look at Macroscopic Prediction by ET Jaynes. This was a habit of the author more than anything else and it runs throughout his writings; is there anyone like that in climate science?
More blogs is probably a good idea, but I haven’t delved deeply enough to find out if any of the ones which already exist are actually good—chiefly this is because of the political noise flooding my search results. What I would really like to find is someone working in climate science with a blog like Andrew Gelman or Scott Aaronson, who I could rely on to be an expositor of their personal thinking while flagging important developments. Then I could use that blog as the launchpad for my related searches, and be more productive that way.
You might very well be like “check out <person> and <person>” and completely resolve my difficulties, which would be awesome.
Thanks for the response!
It’s interesting to see what your concerns are. There’s probably less research on these kinds of feedback loops/tail risks then there should be. Part of the problem is just how uncertain they are—a combination of the difficulty of measuring things like methane releases and the problem of not being able to resolve these processes in models. Our best guide is probably paleoclimate observations, but I’m not an expert on these.
In terms of blogs, Real Climate is the best place to start. They can get combative, and they aren’t always the most rigorous researchers, but they at least give you a sense of what’s going on. Isaac Held is a giant in climate science and had a very widely-read blog for a few years, but he’s mostly gone quiet since the Trump administration took over (he’s a federal scientist). Going through his posts is a great way of getting caught up on the field. I put up notes here occasionally. And for someone with more of a “denier” bent, Judith Curry is worth checking out (though she clearly wants to push the discussion in specific directions). Finally, if you have access to it, Nature Climate Change publishes a lot of good stuff (with the caveat that it wants to publish high profile work), including summaries and perspectives which give overviews of specific subfields and questions. Any important work on tipping points and feedback loops will be in a Nature journal.