Carbon dioxide may soon fog the brain

Is it too late for climate scientists?

A recent article on Stuff looks at the effects of high levels of carbon dioxide on brain function and suggests that the minuscule annual increases of one or two parts per million in CO2 levels will make it harder to reason. But it’s highly improbable because atmospheric levels are nowhere near those required to disrupt our thinking.

“High concentrations of carbon dioxide reduces [sic] oxygen to the brain and dulls our thinking – so what happens if we continue to burn fossil fuels indiscriminately?”

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Hey, Renwick says climate ‘could’ get hotter

He ‘could’ be worth reading

— by Owen Jennings
Member, NZ Climate Science Coalition

Someone called James Renwick, described as a “climate scientist”, managed to get himself on the front page of Granny Herald. I’m not sure what a climate scientist is. We never used to have such a term – we just had geologists, physicists, biologists, chemists, etc. Continue Reading →

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Signs of strain in justifying climate predictions

Professor Michael Kelly, Prince Philip Professor of Technology, University of Cambridge, kindly sends us his comments on a letter this month to Nature Geoscience, Test of a decadal climate forecast, by Myles R. Allen, John F.B. Mitchell and Peter A. Stott. I previously commented on the letter in Climate forecasts fulfilled or what? Mike just returned to England after spending seven months as Visiting Professor at the prestigious MacDiarmid Institute, Victoria University of Wellington.

The recent paper of Allen et al. does a careful job of estimating errors in forward projections of global temperatures from earlier calculations on global circulation models of the atmosphere. Given the simple question — are the models doing a good job or not — the increasing level of sophistication needed to defend them is of concern. For many of us, a temperature stasis of 17 years is enough to suggest that the models are not as robust as some of their advocates maintain. Continue Reading →

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