By Wayne Myrvold In the lead-up to the release of the contribution of Working Group I (the Physical Science Basis) to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment report (AR5), stories alleging that the state of climate science is in disarray are proliferating. If you read between the lines, there’s an air of desperation in these stories. If [...]
By Wayne Myrvold Two weeks ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued a press release stating that “the IPCC is not holding any crisis meeting.” In other news, the IPCC has not enlisted a herd of flying unicorns to carry thermometers into the stratosphere. The IPCC statement came as a result of claims in [...]
By Gordon McBean 24 September 2013 On Friday, 27 September 2013, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) for its Working Group I – The Physical Climate Basis. The full Working Group I report will be placed on the IPCC website (www.ipcc.ch) on 30 September. Due to the [...]
By Wayne Myrvold Monday, September 23. Today, in Stockholm, members of Working Group I of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are meeting to work out, and approve, the group’s contribution to the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report. Working Group I (one of three such groups) is the group tasked with reporting on the physical [...]
By Wayne Myrvold Big news of the day is the press conference that CERN held this morning, announcing strong evidence of something that has some of the right properties to be the Higgs boson. Is today the day that will forever mark the “discovery” of the Higgs boson? We like nice, neat milestones like that, [...]
By Wayne Myrvold A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science. The title was “On the Social Responsibility of Philosophers of Science.” The idea behind the talk was simple, as it pretty much had to be, given the time constraints. [...]
By Wayne Myrvold I posted a link to my blog post, “Beyond Turf Wars,” on my Facebook page. It resulted in an interest back-and-forth involving myself, philosopher Vishnya Maudlin, and Matt Leifer, a physicist working on the foundations of quantum theories, about, among other things, the differences between physics and philosophy, and the respectove roles [...]
By Wayne Myrvold There has been a bit of squabbling, of late, between physicists and philosophers of science. In 2010, in their book The Grand Design, Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow. declared that “philosophy is dead … Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge. More recently, the [...]