climate science
stoat | November 5, 2006JA wigs me on having said Stern appears to have got one thing right... he has taken the IPCC view as standard, slightly updated. That was pre-report, based on a quick flip through the consultation paper. But on closer inspection I now see that he is touting the CP.net stuff even there... although far more subtly: rather than this "Several new studies suggest up to a 20% chance that warming could be greater than 5°C." that is so prominently displayed in the review, there were just some graphs buried away; and those were preceeded by 2.2-3.6 for 550 ppmv based on Hadley models (whereas in the…
stoat | October 27, 2006From the Grauniad: Cold weather's 25,000 deaths toll is scandal, say charities - so bring on global warming, they said. Except, of course, they didn't. The article doesn't even mention global warming. But if people die in heatwaves its all rather different.
From the same edition:
Figures reveal Europe falling far short of climate targets - so it looks like we're going to find out.
stoat | October 26, 2006Its a week for re-runs, now the gives us Sea change: why global warming could leave Britain feeling the cold / No new ice age yet, but Gulf Stream is weakening / Atlantic current came to halt for 10 days in 2004.
Most alarmingly, the data reveal that a part of the current, which is usually 60 times more powerful than the Amazon river, came to a temporary halt during November 2004... Researchers are not sure yet what to make of the 10-day hiatus. "We'd never seen anything like that before and we don't understand it. We didn't know it could happen," said Harry Bryden, at the National…
stoat | October 25, 2006Sometime inthis post I reached comment 1000. I think it was Dano's. So congratulations to him and happy anniversary to me. Incidentally, there are 143 posts...
Meanwhile, back at some science, the GRACE stuff gets updated at, so it is said, higher resolution. Leading to "Greenland Ice Sheet on a Downward Slide". That found via the globalchange list.
stoat | October 16, 2006Exciting BAS press release...
The first direct evidence linking human activity to the collapse of Antarctic ice shelves is published this week in the Journal of Climate. Scientists from the British Antarctic Survey (BAS), the Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling, University College London, and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, (Belgium) reveal that stronger westerly winds in the northern Antarctic Peninsula, driven principally by human-induced climate change, are responsible for the marked regional summer warming that led to the retreat and collapse of the northern Larsen Ice Shelf.…
stoat | October 5, 2006A little while ago I wrote about CLOUD which is a CERN expt designed to test theories of cloud-cosmic ray connections, and the mechanisms of how the said CR's might influence clouds. But there is bad news... they've been scooped: A team at the Danish National Space Center has discovered how cosmic rays from exploding stars can help to make clouds in the atmosphere. The results support the theory that cosmic rays influence Earth's climate. So I suppose the CERN follk will have to find something else to do...
I haven't a clue about the validity of this (well, OK, I suspect strongly that it will…
stoat | October 3, 2006There is a new paper in GRL, Does the Last Glacial Maximum constrain climate sensitivity? (subs) by Crucifix. Now the assumption of linearity in sensitivity was part of JA/JH's work on constraining climate sensitivity, this may be a partial challenge (note that JH is thanked in the paper, so presumably they know about this stuff).
Figure 1 shows that whilst the LGM response is about the same in all the models, the 2*CO2 response varies widely. Figure 2 breaks it down by region; for Antarctica there is a nice linear relation (OK, between only 4 models (ahem, updae: a reader points out that the…
stoat | September 30, 2006It seems there is a new version of the Spencer and Christy MSU product out (see here; S+C must be about the only people that still allow directory listing on their web sites). This is a provisional product and its not clear that there is any great point in talking about it, especially when RSS is likely more reliable.
However, CA have picked it up and the usual nonsense flows out again... but the bit I want to pick out is the bizarre assertion (by McI, comment 19) that of "the cooperative approach of S&C". As far as I know, no-one has seen their computer code [Oops: see uupdate]. RSS made…
stoat | September 24, 2006Head in a Cloud has a post about a GRL paper: Luis Eduardo Antunes Vieira and Ligia Alves da Silva of the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais, Brazil, entitled "Geomagnetic modulation of clouds effects in the Southern Hemisphere Magnetic Anomaly through lower atmosphere cosmic ray effects". Its from July, and this is the first I've heard of it (thanks Hank). I've put a comment in over there - it looks to me like more cloud/enso confusion, which Paul Farrar pointed out, but I'm not sure.
stoat | September 18, 2006Nature has a review on its front cover (subs req, of course) that pretty well says forget solar forcing for explaining current climate change ("brightening of the Sun is unlikely to have had a significant influence on global warming since the seventeenth century"; not to be outdone, Science refers to a Earth Planet. Sci. Lett. peice saying much the same). But inside we have Climate change: A cosmic connection about CLOUD, which is a CERN expt to try to find the elusive cosmic-ray cloud connection that much of the solar folk hope for by shooting particle beams through controlled air. This idea…
stoat | September 12, 2006A reader writes: where is the paleontological data showing the correspondence between CO2 levels and ice age events?. The answer is, all over the place; here is one possible source. The correspondence isvery good.
At this point, the s(k)eptics jump up and down and say, aha, but the T leads the CO2. To which the answer is, so what? The lead is small (on the scale of these things: maybe 800y) and hard to even measure (you certainly can't see it on the scale of that graph). We *know* it takes feedbacks between T and CO2 to create the ice age cycles, which because of their periodicity are…
stoat | September 5, 2006http://www.gci.org.uk/briefings/rising_risk.pdf asserts that the "airbourne fraction" of CO2 is coming up to 100%, having been 50%: The point of great concern here is that over the last couple few years 2003/4/5 the rate of increase has jumped to nearer 3 ppmv per annum. This gives a loading of the atmosphere by weight that is roughly equal to not half but all the emissions from fossil fuel burning.
As far as I can see this is wrong. In 2003/4 growth rates were 2+ ppmv and heading downwards.
But the main point of this post was to inquire if anyone knows where the 2005 data is hiding. I can…
stoat | September 4, 2006There is a cool pic of Ioke here, which beautifully shows the effect on SST of the hurricane passing over (thanks to CB for pointing this out on the globalchange group).
[Small note: Chris Mooney nicked a snapshot of the pic, in case it fades from cache]
scientificactivist | August 10, 2006From the archives:
(23 April 2006) The media is by its very nature sensational, and on the issue of global warming this can swing both ways. Therefore, there was a big fuss over a study in Nature this past Thursday that seemed to lay out a more conservative estimate for the expected increase in temperature due to global warming. Although some coverage was more damning than others, the quantity of press on the subject was extensive.
As an article the next day in Science explained, though, all the Nature paper did was narrow down the range of possible scenarios to what was already the widely…
scientificactivist | August 9, 2006From the archives:
(19 January 2006) Today's issue of Nature features several interesting articles about the effects of global warming. Two are research articles, with one revising estimates of the expected increase in sea level due to global warming and the other demonstrating how certain important marine ecosystems could be vulnerable to changes in ocean currents due to global warming. The journal also contains an editorial and a news feature about the need to monitor ocean currents more closely to better assess the consequences of global warming and to warn us of impending climate…
scientificactivist | August 8, 2006From the archives:
(13 January 2006) What do global warming and epidemic diseases have in common? Apparently they have a lot, at least when it comes to amphibians.
Microorganisms have a knack for showing up in unexpected places. In the 1980s, two scientists discovered a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori that causes over 80% of stomach ulcers, once thought to be primarily caused by stress. This turned medical dogma upside-down and earned them the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine . Even microorganisms aren't safe from other microorganisms, with bacteria, for example under constant…
stoat | July 28, 2006JA is bored with climate sensitivity - because he knows the answer, 3 oC, and he may well be right. But other people don't seem to have realised. And (via James again, I think) I ran across Tung and Camp on climate sensitivity, and Knutti et al.. They too think its 3 oC (well 2.8 +/- 0.9; and about 3). K et al. are doing this via CP.Net in J Climate; T&C via ERBE data in, they hope, Nature.
K et al. use the plausible idea that there could well be a relationship between the size of the seasonal cycle and the climate sensitivity of the model. And so they use 2500 perturbed-physics ensembles…
stoat | July 27, 2006I heard that within 15 years, global warming will have made Napa County too hot to grow good wine grapes. Is that true? What other changes are we going to see during our lifetimes because of global warming?...
Hmmm... well assuming 0.2-0.3 oC/decade, globally, and maybe twice that for NH continent, then 15 years gets you maybe 1 oC, on average. Is that enough to see a response from grapes? I really don't know.
In the UK we're in the middle of a heatwave, which a little thundery rain doesn't seem to touch much, and its unpleasant since were not used to it. If it gets any worse, and recurrs…
stoat | July 14, 2006There is apparently a strange thing called the Wegman report. Sadly that link only contains Smokey Joe Bartons comments on selected extracts (does anyone know where the full thing is? Is it published? Also quite what the committee/panel is, is rather vague. [Update! Aha... I should have known: since it was Per who commented on it, and since it reads like it was written by M&M, the dark side pointed me towrds the full thing]). Still, what did they say? (BTW, in case you hadn't realised, this is yet more HS stuff :-)
the paleoclimate reconstruction... does not provide insight and…
stoat | July 9, 2006In case you don't read James Empty Blog I point you towards it for a recent post on a new paper submitted to "Climate of the Past". Its a HS paper, and has provoked a flurry of comments - as James notes, more than all the other papers, which have none. A bit of a shame that. But still, this looks like it might possibly develope into an interesting discussion. What has been missing in previous exchanges (e.g. the recent Science one) is enough back-and-forth to get down into the details. It might depend on how far the CotP editors are prepared to allow the discussion to go.
What I forgot to…