three new findings

At last, another climate findings post is at blisterdata. 

My apologies for the long lull (the previous findings-post dates from January).  I was editing the climate issue of Journal of Global Ethics, which is forthcoming in May, I think.  Chen Xia (Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing) and I co-authored a paper for that issue on Daoist climate ethics.

The climate findings column still needs more links to the peer-reviewed material.  Since January, it looks to me that three new data streams have come into view. 

First, the American Disenlightenment, a coin termed by Kevin Philips in his American Theocracy, is becoming a climate topic.  I've published on the cognitive flaws of US culture last year and how they yield climate denial, but this was a piece of cultural critique.  Now come the empirical researchers.

Second, declining food productivity is more and more appearing as the weak link.  I see now a real upsurge of research on the warming planet and plummeting crop yields.

Lastly, and most dramatically with regard to scientific progress, there is now work done on attribution; that is, on the causal relation of global climate change overall and specific freak weather consequences.  Up to last year, it was considered "unscientific" to make such causal attribution.  The consensus was that concrete events vanish in statistical fog.  Now the first challenges are being published. Of course they're still 'controversial,' as they say, but the topic is on the table.

Sixty-eight months left.