Richard Hawkins
Richard has a degree in Law from the University of Nottingham, specialising in International Environmental Law (and more particularly the lack of it!). He is currently studying a part-time Masters in Energy and Environmental Studies.
Lead author of the Climate Safety report, Richard oversaw its design & production, as well as creating this site.
Posts
Media ScienceRichard Hawkins 15 February
RealClimate have just published a really useful post discussing the IPCC and media distortion.
As well as kindly praising Tim’s analysis of the affair which you can find here on climatesafety.org, the piece includes a great summary of the IPCC and its processes:
“Assessment reports are published every six or seven years and writing them takes about three years. Each working group publishes one of the three volumes of each assessment. The focus of the recent allegations is the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), which was published in 2007.
“Its three volumes are almost a thousand pages each, in small print. They were written by over 450 lead authors and 800 contributing authors; most were not previous IPCC authors. There are three stages of review involving more than 2,500 expert reviewers who collectively submitted 90,000 review comments on the drafts. These, together with the authors’ responses to them, are all in the public record.”
They get to the real crux of the recent “scandals”, asking: Do any of them effect the basic climate science?
GeneralRichard Hawkins 12 February
Dive right in:
- PCC Adjudication on Ward vs. Booker – has to be read to be believed! Can you say ‘toothless’.
- What does openness in science mean? Potential problems with open access
- Climate deniers using FOI legisation as a filibuster…
- Earlier glacial melt rate revised downward, but recent melt is accelerating dramatically
- Climate Change Denier ‘Proves’ Climate Change
- Arctic melt to cost up to $24 trillion by 2050: report | Reuters
- Climate change impact of soil underestimated: study – AFP.
- Mark Lynas – Barbarians at the gate
- Pentagon to rank global warming as destabilising force
GeneralRichard Hawkins 29 January
Dive right in:
- Radio 4, Today – IPCC ‘must earn trust’ with public
- IPCC denies newspaper claim that it overstated costs of natural disasters
- Deniergate: Turning the tables on climate sceptics
- New controversy in battle over the future of climate politics
- Great post on weather stations and the reliability of temperature data
ScienceRichard Hawkins 8 December
Keep an eye on the Climate Scoreboard during the next two weeks… Note the dark blue curve in the graphic, this is the probability distribution, it shows the full range of temperature rise the current national emissions proposals would likely give rise to. Currently it’s 2-6 degrees with 3.8 degrees is the most likely outcome (according to their analysis, climate sensitivity etc.).
With my risk managers hat on, it’s hard not to notice that we could go way above 3.8 degrees… it looks like there’s a 5-10% of going over 5 degrees… the sting’s in the tail as they say!
ScienceRichard Hawkins 8 December
For those of you not following the detail of ‘ClimateGate’ here’s a nice video explaining the meaning of the two most cited “conspiracy-proving” emails. Peter Sinclair also wades in with a short video covering the affair.
While this sort of accurate rebuttal is important, it reminds me of something Randy Olson argues in Don’t be such a scientist – that scientists often obsess too much about substance and accuracy, in every sphere they operate in. Olson even suggests that a scientist’s natural response to being called a bastard would be to present their birth certificate as counter evidence!
SolutionsRichard Hawkins 21 September
There’s an emerging economic consensus – in parallel with the scientific consensus – that investing in mitigation and adaptation is good value for money.
Joe Romm points out an overlooked conclusion of a recent IIED study by Martin Parry and others on the underestimated cost of adaptation, Romm notes:
In the “aggressive abatement” case (450 ppm), the mean “Net present value [NPV] of climate change impacts” is only $410 trillion — or $275 trillion with adaptation. So stabilizing at 450 …
GeneralRichard Hawkins 1 September
GeneralRichard Hawkins 28 August
A great new campaign from down under, Safe Climate Australia:
In their words:
Safe Climate Australia is a non-government organisation formed and steered by a foundation group of concerned scientists, community and business leaders with a shared understanding of the scientific and moral imperatives for emergency action to restore a safe climate.
Visit: www.safeclimateaustralia.org
ScienceRichard Hawkins 21 July
The Arctic Sea Ice Outlook has just been updated for July. It’s based on a synthesis of 16 estimates which utilise a range of different projection methods. They note that there is “no indication that a return to historical levels will occur”.
Big surprise!
The full range of estimates range from 4.0-5.2 million square kilometers, the record low in 2007 was around 4.3 million square kilometres (2008 was 4.7). Most estimates therefore fall between the record lows in 2007 and 2008, …
