Climate change journal club, anyone?
As a result of various conversations recently (and especially hearing Al Gore give his new talk a few weeks ago -- preemptive plug, when his new movie
An Inconvenient Truth comes out, go see it. If it's half as interesting as his lecture it will be worth it), I've started to get very interested in learning about the state of the art in understanding the climate and how it's changing.
The short answer is somewhere between "real trouble" and "REALLY BIG trouble." But I'd like to understand things a bit more specifically than that.
To that end, I've started to assemble a list of papers that seem to represent the current state-of-the-art in the field, and this list is sure to grow as I read through more of them and follow reference chains. In fact, I'm planning on posting something soon with a generally readable summary of one of them.
But this got me thinking: Learning a subject is better done with many people. Would anyone be interested in forming an impromptu online journal club to learn about climate modelling, climate change, and all things related? (For those of you who haven't participated in these before, what would be involved is everyone picking a paper, [or part of one for a really long paper] reading it thoroughly enough to write a good summary and explain everything that goes on in it, and then posting their summary and having a discussion about it. A typical rate is every week, someone else is responsible for a paper. It's a great way to learn a new technical subject.)
The minimum background for doing this seems to be a reasonable science or engineering background; from what I've read of the papers so far, they don't have a lot of obscure jargon beyond "stratosphere" and "sea ice," just a lot of graphs, plots, and discussion of how they got them. For those without a heavy tech background, it should still be possible (and fun, and interesting) to be part of the discussion.
I've got a few papers in my list already, from the GISS-E group:
( Possible papersCollapse )Anyone interested?
Edit: It now exists:
climatepapers. Join up!
