Making Sense of Climate Science Denial

Ove Hoegh-Guldberg is Professor of Marine Studies at the University of Queensland in Brisbane, Australia Over the past 10 years he was Founding Director of the Global Change Institute (details here) and is Deputy Director of the Centre for Excellence in Coral Reef Studies (www.coralcoe.org.au, since 2006) and Affiliated Professor in Tropical Marine Biology at the University of Copenhagen (2016-present). Ove’s research focuses on the impacts of global change on marine ecosystems and is one of the most cited authors on climate change.

Developing these resources is part of Ove’s current push to understand and support solutions to global change with partners such as WWF International: (details here). As scientific lead, Ove has been steering a global response to the identification of 50 sites globally that are less exposed to climate change (Beyer et al 2018, Hoegh-Guldberg et al. 2018), working with WWF International to assemble a global partnership across seven countries, the Coral Reef Rescue Initiative (CRRI) (Coral Reef Rescue Initiative).

Dr John Cook is an Adjunct Lecturer at The University of Queensland and a research assistant professor at the Center for Climate Change Communication at George Mason University. In 2007, he founded Skeptical Science, a website which won the 2011 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge and 2016 Friend of the Planet Award from the National Center for Science Education. He has co-authored the college textbooks Climate Change: Examining the Facts and Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis, and Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. In 2013, John published a paper finding 97% scientific consensus on human-caused global warming, an outcome that has been highlighted by former President Barack Obama and former UK Prime Minister David Cameron. He currently co-hosts with Peter Jacobs the Evidence Squared podcast on the science of science communication.

Daniel Bedford has been studying climate and climate change since his undergraduate days in the 1980s. After receiving a BA in geography from Oxford University in the UK, he moved to the USA for Master’s and Ph.D. degrees from the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he worked with renowned climatologist Roger Barry. Bedford’s main interests are the effective teaching and communication of climate science. He teaches undergraduate classes in physical geography and climate science at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah.

Gavin Cawley is a computer scientist, with a background in electronic engineering, and research interests in machine learning. He has worked on a number of research projects with the School of Environmental Sciences and the Climatic Research Unit at UEA, during which he developed an interest in predictive uncertainty in statistical modelling. In 2011, he published a paper in the journal Energy and Fuels addressing the misunderstandings of the carbon cycle covered in his lecture. For Denial101x, Gavin will discuss some common misunderstandings of the global carbon cycle that persist in the public debate on climate change, even though there are multiple lines of evidence that very strongly support the mainstream scientific position.

Kevin Cowtan is a research fellow in the department of chemistry at the University of York, England. He is an interdisciplinary computational scientist. His main area of research has been the automated determination of the atomic structure of biological macromolecules; however, he has also published a major paper on biases in the instrumental temperature record and is a contributor a number of other areas of climate research, some of which have already been published. He is also interested in science communication and e-Learning tools. In Denial101x we will accompany Kevin in investigating how we know that the world is warming, and how misinformation is used to obscure the evidence.

Sarah A. Green is a Professor of Chemistry at Michigan Technological University, where she served as Department Chair (2004-13). Her research includes environmental changes in the Great Lakes, aspects of the carbon cycle, and gas-phase reactions. Most recently she served as a Jefferson Science Fellow in the U.S. Department of State.

Peter Jacobs is a Ph.D. student and Presidential Scholar at George Mason University in the Department of Environmental Science and Policy. His research focuses on climate-ocean interactions and their impacts on marine ecosystems in the past, present, and future. He holds an M.Sc. from the same department, with a concentration is Earth Surface Processes and Environmental Geochemistry. In addition to his primary academic research, Peter is also interested in the science of how people respond to the issue of climate change- from communications, psychological, and sociological perspectives. This has led to his participation in various projects relating to the scientific consensus on man-made global warming, principally with volunteers from the Skeptical Science team, as well as the Center for Climate Change Communication (C4) at George Mason.

Scott Mandia is Professor of Earth and Space Sciences and Assistant Chair of the Physical Sciences Department at Suffolk County Community College, Long Island, New York. He has been teaching introductory meteorology and climatology courses for over 23 years. Mandia co-authored a book titled Rising Sea Levels: An Introduction to Cause and Impact that highlights the impact of sea level rise on 25 major cities around the world. He has also co-authored a series of weather and climate learning modules titled Investigations in Atmospheric Sciences designed for non-science major college students. In 1997, Mandia won the State University of New York Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Teaching. Mandia was also honored by the American Geophysical Union in 2014 by winning the Ambassador Award given annually to honorees in recognition for outstanding contributions to the following area(s): societal impact, service to the Earth and space community, scientific leadership, and promotion of talent/career pool.

Dana Nuccitelli is an environmental scientist with a background in astrophysics. He has published climate-related papers on various subjects, from the build-up of heat in the Earth's climate system to the expert consensus on human-caused global warming. Dana has written for SkepticalScience.com since 2010, and for The Guardian since 2013. Praeger recently published his book, Climatology versus Pseudoscience, in which he details some key discoveries in the history of climate science, investigates whose global temperature predictions have been accurate, and looks at where our climate is headed in the future. Denial101x will follow Dana into his specialty of debunking climate myths including those related to the accuracy of climate models and the causes of global warming.

Mark Richardson was at the University of Reading, where he was researching how light travels through snow to help improve satellite measurements. He has recently moved to the CalTech/NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where he works on the physics of light in the atmosphere and particularly satellite measurements of clouds. His research interests are in how clouds react to climate change, and whether they reinforce it or slow it down. Denial101x will follow Mark as he goes through the evidence that we are strengthening the greenhouse effect that has driven recent global warming, and some of the myths that come from misunderstanding this evidence.

Keah Schuenemann is a Meteorology Professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver where she developed a popular Global Climate Change course. She has a Ph.D. in Atmospheric and Oceanic Science. Her research includes climate change communication, using student-generated content such as blogging in college courses, and teaching science literacy. Her climate research includes the large-scale weather pattern climatology of Greenland and changing weather patterns with a warming climate. She also teaches Dynamic Meteorology, Synoptic Meteorology, Chemistry and Physics for elementary education majors, and Weather and Climate.

Course contributor Andy Skuce unfortunately passed away on September 14, 2017 after a years long battle against cancer which he wrote about in his final blog post published a couple of weeks earlier. Andy was an independent geoscience consultant based in British Columbia, Canada. He earned an MSc in Applied Geophysics from the University of Leeds, a BSc in Geology from the University of Sheffield and was registered as a Professional Geoscientist in British Columbia. Andy has worked for the British Geological Survey and in a variety of technical and managerial roles for oil companies in Canada, Austria and Ecuador. He has published several peer-reviewed papers on a variety of Earth Science subjects, including the tectonics of volcanic continental margins, structural geology and the scientific consensus on climate change. For Denial101, Andy examined the evidence for the relative influence of human emissions and volcanoes on the rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the modern atmosphere.

The Denial101x and Skeptical Science teams are thankful for all the contributions Andy made to our efforts over the years and we bid him a heartfelt farewell here.

Read more about Andy's research and interests here and here.

Robert Way holds a Master of Science in Physical Geography and a Bachelors of Arts in Geography with a minor in Geomatics and Spatial Analysis. He is currently a PhD Candidate in the Department of Geography at the University of Ottawa, Canada studying climate change impacts on permafrost in northeastern Canada. Coming from an Inuit background and growing up in subarctic Labrador has given Robert a unique perspective on recent climate change in northern environments. Robert has visited many field locations in the Polar Regions including the Antarctic Peninsula, Iceland, Norway, Patagonia, Svalbard and the Torngat Mountains (northern Labrador). In Denial101x, Robert will discuss changes to the terrestrial cryosphere and will highlight recent advances in the field of paleoclimatology. Robert has published various peer-reviewed journal articles and reports on various topics including climate variability, glaciology, paleoclimatology, and permafrost.