Volume 2, Issue 3 · March 2026

Spring 2026

Two reviews asking what the evidence actually supports rather than what the headline said. Which marine organisms ocean acidification genuinely harms, and whether a cup of pond water can really tell you what lives in it.

5 articles, in the order the club meant them to be read.

1. 1

   MethodsSpring 2026

   A Greenhouse Model You Can Check by Hand, and Where It Stops Being Honest

   The layer model is how almost everybody first meets the greenhouse effect, and it is a good model. We asked it a question it is rarely asked: how many layers does Earth need? The instrument was a Python file the club wrote and ran on a laptop, and nothing was measured by us at any point, because here the computation is the experiment. Solving the (N)-layer grey radiative-equilibrium system as a linear system for ev

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2. 2

   Original ResearchSpring 2026

   Computing the Sunlight That Started and Ended the Ice Ages

   The amount of sunlight falling on the top of the atmosphere at any latitude on any day is a geometry problem with four inputs and no physics in it at all. We solved it, and then ran it across the past million years. The instrument was a Python file the club wrote; the only thing we did not compute ourselves is the orbit, which comes from the published La2004 solution of Laskar and colleagues, downloaded on 14 Septemb

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3. 3

   Original ResearchSpring 2026

   Why the Planet Has Not Finished Warming Yet

   Heat added at the top of the atmosphere does not warm the surface immediately, because most of it goes into the ocean first. We measured how long the delay is and how much warming it hides. The instrument was a two-box energy balance model the club wrote and integrated on a laptop; no measurement of the physical world was made by us at any point, and the computation is the whole experiment. With the CMIP5 multimodel

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4. 4

   Meta-analysisMarine Biology

   Not Every Shell Dissolves: Sorting the Ocean Acidification Response Literature by Who Is Actually Affected

   We extracted 23 calcification and growth effect sizes from 16 published ocean acidification experiments, pooled them with a DerSimonian-Laird random-effects model, and asked whether taxonomic group explains why those experiments disagree with each other as violently as they do. The pooled response is a 13.0% reduction in calcification or growth (95% CI 31.0% to +9.6%), which is the number most readers arrive wanting

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5. 5

   Systematic ReviewConservation Methods

   Can a Cup of Pond Water Tell You What Lives in It? Reviewing Environmental DNA Detection Rates

   Filter some water, lyse what the membrane caught, run a PCR, and you are supposed to learn which animals were recently swimming there. We went looking for every study we could open that surveyed the same water bodies twice, once with a filter and once with a net or a torch or a camera, and that reported a detection probability for both. We found twelve we could pool and seven more we could not. On a random effects mo

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