Keeping up with the Jones's (and several thousand other serious climate researchers)

One of the things I enjoy about my work in teaching climate change and related problems in energy is how quickly we are developing new information. Climate science has been a serious and well-funded priority for nearly twenty years in the academy, and so there's a fairly large infrastructure, and a large number of participants in the worldwide science process.

This is not to say that we still couldn't answer some important questions faster.

It is to say that there's a lot of new information to sort through, and it's very easy to get left behind. I'm a natural student and always have been. Other than a few odd hobbies (like pig farming and household energy retrofit) there's really not much out there that I enjoy more than reading the science literature and trying to revise my internal mental model of how the climate system works accordingly, so this is fun for me.

If you don't read the literature in this game, you'll be woefully out-of-date in a year or less. I'm always fascinated by how many amateur proponents there are, such as the large number of folks still on the Al Gore circuit, and so on, that don't bother to keep up with this stuff.

This latest study from CERN and collaborators contains some interesting and complicated new material about atmospheric chemistry that will inform and perhaps revise the large scale General Circulation Models (or GCMs) used in climate modeling and prediction.

At this point, the new material doesn't seriously affect the most important policy concern, which is how quickly and in what directions will the regional climates change in the next few decades. What it does mean, if supported by other lines of evidence, is that an entirely new explanation of cloud formation will be needed, and the GCMs will need to be re-parameterized to the new explanation.

Which is all to the good, because a revised explanation of clouds will go someway to reducing the remaining unexplained variation in the GCMs, which will allow us to better hone our policy recommendations to reduce upset in the human economy.

Assuming we can get people to listen, that is.