Articles by Andrew Dessler
Andrew Dessler is an associate professor in the Department of Atmospheric Sciences at Texas A&M University; his research focuses on the physics of climate change, climate feedbacks in particular.
All Articles
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No, but we still know enough to start taking action
A few weeks ago, I was perusing Grist when I ran across an ad for A Convenient Fiction, a slideshow rebuttal of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. The author was none other than Steve Hayward, who you might remember from the AEI-$10,000-payola scandal.
I had actually seen this slideshow discussed in the New York Times, and was interested to see it. In my previous communications with Hayward, he was at great pains to describe himself as someone who believed the science as described by the IPCC. I wanted to see if the slideshow bore that out.
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Read about it and/or watch it happen
There are something like 12 bills in the Texas Legislature this session addressing climate change. Most of them are deader than a doornail, but we might see passage this session of a bill to create a Texas climate change task force. This doesn't sound like much, but for Texas it's actually quite an accomplishment.
To get an idea of what testifying there is like, you can take a look at my archived testimony here (Real Audio). My testimony starts at 9:20. Particularly entertaining is the question and answer session starting at 19:20.
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Letter to the editor from Arkansas
This is the text of a letter to the editor printed in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on April 16 of this year:
You may have noticed that March of this year was particularly hot. As a matter of fact, I understand that it was the hottest March since the beginning of the last century. All of the trees were fully leafed out and legions of bugs and snakes were crawling around during a time in Arkansas when, on a normal year, we might see a snowflake or two.
This should come as no surprise to any reasonable person. As you know, Daylight Saving Time started almost a month early this year. You would think that members of Congress would have considered the warming effect that an extra hour of daylight would have on our climate. Or did they?
Perhaps this is another plot by a liberal Congress to make us believe that global warming is a real threat. Perhaps next time there should be serious studies performed before Congress passes laws with such far-reaching effects.
Connie M. Meskimen
Hot Springs -
Bush is working with a much stronger consensus
One argument in defense of George W. Bush's lack of action on climate change is some variation of this: "Bill Clinton wasn't any better ... he never sent the Kyoto Protocol to the Senate."
This is true. But it also ignores one important fact.
The science of climate change has improved dramatically since the mid-'90s. In its 1995 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summarized our knowledge about climate change by saying ...
... the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the climate ...
This is weak brew, and given the mixed evidence connecting human activities with warming, it was not at all clear exactly how much action to address climate change was warranted.