Skeptical Science New Research for Week #5, 2021

The Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society has published its annual retrospective on 2019's extreme weather events and their connection to climate change, "Explaining Extreme Events of 2019 from a Climate Perspective." The entire collection of articles is available here, (pdf) or as separate pieces down below. Open access, fascinating.

Research productivity

The BAMS 2019 report's author country constituency leads us back to the mission of Skeptical Science, in an elliptical way.

Once we've gotten past straight climate science denial in the slice of a general population hoping to duck primary responsibility for the accidental mess we've made of Earth's climate, a fork in the road presents itself, with one major path signed as "Solutions Denial." Down that road can be found various novel rhetorical gambits and other creative shirking methods, the destination being "I don't have to do anything about my mess." One favorite technique is to point to somebody else's imperfections and lean on those as an excuse to avoid self-improvement.

China is a favorite shiny object to employ for "but what about them and if they don't change, why should I?" This "argument" is about as nonsensical as pointing to another vehicle full of children not wearing safety belts as an excuse to let one's own offspring be unrestrained and ready for launch through the windshield. However (and more pertinent to Skeptical Science New Research), China is in fact paying scrupulous attention to scientific research of anthropogenic climate change, climate change mitigation, decarbonization and the swath of public policy necessary to get the country past its heavy dependence on hydrocarbons ("mitigation" is "I own it and I have to fix it," for the rest of us).

This is amply apparent with a glance at the BAMS 2019 report, or any edition of New Research. China is richly equipped with supercomputer horsepower and is deploying those petaflops to perform climate modeling integrated with reanalysis at a prodigious scale, with a noticeable concentration in regional climate effects on agriculture, megacities and hydrology, these of course being special preoccupations for the country context. Policy research is very active in attempting to identify how to thread the needle of maintaining economic growth at historically high rates while rapidly decarbonizing. There is a notable level of intent for application to this collective research effort highly suggestive of urgency. China isn't going to do a perfect job in dealing with anthropogenic climate change of course (which nation is?) but neither is the country running away from the problem. China seems to fully understand the potential cost of failure to deal with climate change and appears to be engaging in a concerted effort to deal with the problem.

So, those hoping to exploit China as an excuse to dodge local responsibility may increasingly expect to hear an invitation for comparison thrown back: "OK. What are you doing about the problem?" To the extent that question goes unanswered, we're hearing hypocrisy draped on a scapegoat framework, with the scapegoat being not particularly guilty. There are in fact unfavorabe discrepancies visible in the research streams of various countries with adequate resources to drive research, these not being reflective of lack of talent but in the nature of funding priorities. Those priorities are where we're able to tell the difference between one nation and another, when it comes to assessing credibility of effort.

143 Articles

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How is New Research assembled?

Most articles appearing here are found via RSS feeds from journal publishers, filtered by search terms to produce raw output for assessment of relevance.

Relevant articles are then queried against the Unpaywall database, to identify open access articles and expose useful metadata for articles appearing in the database.

The objective of New Research isn't to cast a tinge on scientific results, to color readers' impressions. Hence candidate articles are assessed via two metrics only:

Articles are presented with a title link via the original publisher URL so as to preserve provenance information, and when (usually) available, a more permanent DOI link. When a publicly accessible PDF version of an article is found, a direct link is provided.

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Journals covered

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