Numlock Sunday: Emily Atkin is heated about climate

By Walt Hickey

Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition. Each week, I'll sit down with an author or a writer, behind one of the stories covered in a previous weekday edition for a casual conversation about what they wrote.

This week, I spoke to Emily Atkin who writes the newsletter Heated. Here's a story of her’s I wrote about last week:

A study in Geophysical Research Letters looked at the historical accuracy of climate forecasting models to answer a thorny question: how good are people at forecasting the climate long term? That’s been a considerable point of contention, at least in the political realm, with detractors of climate science arguing that the predictive models run hot, that is to say they forecast more warming compared to what actually ends up happening. The authors of the new study found 17 climate models from 1970 to 1990, all of which estimated carbon dioxide concentrations and what the global average temperature would be in the future. Of those 17 climate models, 14 correc…