Recent developments

Abstract

Climate science as any other “scientific” endeavor manifest itself through publications and a simple statistics of them gives a faithful idea of what are the most discussed topics. There are two hot and recent development in the climate sciences which are the warming hiatus and the geoengineering. We will deal at length with them in the chapter but just to summarize, the warming hiatus is an apparent pause in the global warming which started at the end of last century and has been going on since then. Geoengineering is the purposeful modification of the environment to correct the effects of the anthropogenic activity. Both of these fields are quite controversial and they have produced a large number of publications. A statistics prepared in 2015 at the University of Texas, Austin uses the three key words, pause, slow down, or hiatus to recover that the total number of publications from 1990 to 2015 amount to 213 concentrated between 2013 and 2015. In the same time span, the citations reached a peak of roughly 850. Belter and Seidel 2013 published a bibliometric analysis on geoengineering examing the papers published between 1988 and 2011 for a total of 750 articles.