As principal funder (with help from many!) and producer of Cranky Uncle, we re pleased to report that the Institute for Information Literacy at Purdue (IILP) 2023 Publication Award for Excellence in Information Literacy Scholarship has been awarded to our founder John Cook & coauthors paper The Cranky Uncle game—combining humor and gamification to build student resilience against climate misinformation, published in Environmental Education Research.
Open access notables
Sea level rise (SLR) as a result of our atmospheric accident is a certainty; the outcome we ll realize sits between brackets restng far above zero. For any country with a sea coast— particularly those with a combination of human presence and low coastal elevations— there s more or less urgent need to figure out how accomodate encroachment. We get one chance to optimize this work and it won t be easy even with the best information. So, useful information we should know is what are the foundations of our plans, and do we have any plans for SLR at all? Utah State University s Daniella Hirschfeld and her coauthors delve into this in their paper Global survey shows planners use widely varying sea-level rise projections for coastal adaptation, just published in Nature Communications Earth & Environment. There is lots of room for improvement. From the abstract:
Open access notables
What does intellectual bankruptcy often look like? Trying to switch topics by going ad hominem, that s what. When somebody stops thinking and begins flinging irrelevant insults, threats and accusations at a person, we re seeing a crisply humiliating admission: I have nothing. Going broke isn t free. In the case of climate science it s climate scientists who bear costs. Global Witness quantifies this, finding that some 50% of climate scientists have found themselves on the receiving end of vitriol hurled by (surrendering, let s remember) abusers in various online venues. Being outsmarted by a woman seems to be particularly enraging for losers, or so disproportionate statistics of degenerate behaviors suggest. The entire sorry and shaming report is available as a PDF: Global Hating. From this week s collection of government and NGO reports.
Open access notables Despite the potential for positive methane–climate feedbacks from global wetlands, most Earth System Models (ESMs) and Integrated Assessment Models (IAMs) that informed the last Assessment Report of the IPCC do not directly incorporate this process. Publishing in Nature Climate Change, Zheng et al. unpack the implications of this oversight in Recent intensification of wetland methane feedback. The authors find that compared to climate models CH4 emissions are rising notably faster than projected, on the order of perhaps 25%. This of course is not good news. The article is consistent with a steady drumbeat of large and small ugly surprises appearing in the GHG sources & sinks, flux.. section here each week.