IPCC
Arctic sea ice decline happened faster than expected. This has the effect of accelerating global warming because less of the Sun's energy is reflected back into space by ice.
Northern Hemisphere snow also sends some of that energy back into space. The amount of snow cover we have is also declining.
Difference from average annual snow extent since 1971, compared to the 1966-2010 average (dashed line). Snow extents have largely been below-average since the late1980s. Graph adapted from Figure 1.1 (h) in the 2012 BAMS State of the Climate report.
The warming of the Arctic region is also…
Snow. Glaciers. Icecaps, River flows. All of these are vulnerable to climate change, especially rising temperature. This isn't just theory. It’s now observable fact.
Scientists worry about the growing threat of climate change because the global climate is tied to everything that society cares about: human and environmental health, food and industrial production, water availability, extreme events, and more. Figuring out how all these pieces tie together is difficult. And many of us, from scientists to the public to policy makers, have only a partial understanding of the true implications of…
The fifth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was released last week, saying that global warming is occurring without a doubt, and human activity is extremely likely to be the cause. Greg Laden shares a number of graphics from the report, summarizing "It is getting hotter. It is getting wetter, or dryer, depending on where you are. And the big ice hat our planet wears is falling off." Peter Gleick collates a number of excerpts related to water on Significant Figures, which say that there are likely more regions getting more rain than less; the frequency of…
The fifth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has just come out, and Greg Laden joins us this Sunday to tell us what it means. What do over 800 representatives of 85 countries have to say about the state of consensus in scientific literature? More importantly, what do we need to do about it?
Additionally, various memes denying the science of climate change have popped up again in anticipation of this report. What might you have been hearing about climate change recently, and why is it wrong?
CLICK HERE to access the podcast.
The latest in a long series of science summaries on climate change from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just been released. While the report has a massive amount of information in it, related to a wide range of geophysical implications of climate change, here are some of the key water-related findings for precipitation, evaporation, glaciers, ice mass, and more. While many other findings are reported that have hydrologic implications (such as all the findings related to temperature and warming), I have not usually included them here. Definitions of the confidence of…
But not as severely as they should have been.
The IPCC, as you know, comes out with a set of reports every five years. The reports are written by groups of experts. Draft reports are widely accessible to people who register themselves as "experts" and there is no quality control in that process, in order to keep things as transparent as possible. This means that the worst climate change denialists can simply sign up as "experts" and flood the scientists trying to write these reports with irrelevant and stupid comments, thus, I presume, wasting valuable time and effort. But, such is the cost…
So says La Curry. She is only two years behind the times. Or maybe a year and a half. To be fair, that is only the headline. But the rest of the content is what you'd expect from a shark-jumper. I cant really be bothered to analyse it, unless anyone out there is unable to see the flaws for themselves.
Which is a bit of a mouthful, so they call it SREX. In the traditional and slightly unlovely IPCC way, you can read the SPM now but will have to wait awhile for the report. But it provides enough for me to mount my hobby horses, so giddy-up!
The first point is that extremes are useless for detecting or attributing climate change: if you want to know if the globe is warming, you should look at the global temperature series. Attempting to say "floods in Pakistan - global warming must be real" is silly (depending on what you mean by "real". I mean, "is actually happening". If you mean "will have…
In thousands of ways, UN policy helps shape how we respond to emerging crises, from basic poverty to world political events, from food to climate change and population. What is emerging, however, is that UN analyses are increasingly diverging from reality - as they attempt to describe our future, they have failed to adequately (or at all) take into account that most basic of all considerations, material limits on energy resources.
The UN is one of the most powerful organizations in the world influencing international policy - the IPCC, the Populaton Council, the FAO - their work informs how…
There is a very interesting article on Nature.com that provides an example of something a bit uncommon in the climate wars: an intelligent and well reasoned disagreement with the IPCC. (h/t to Climate Etc.)
The article is well worth the read in its entirety, but its central point is a relatively straightforward one. The smaller the portion of the earth's surface (or time period for that matter) you are examining, the more difficult and less useful it is to consider attribution of climate change. And yet, the IPCC, according to this article, is seeking research that specifically attributes…
Judith Curry has become quite a blog sensation, and did so long before starting her own. I have expressed my frustration with her in the past for a seemingly reckless affinity for "hit and run" postings. I will appreciatively grant that she comments alot, and engages many conversants extensively, but she has posted many very inflammatory or technically flawed diatribes in the past, the kind sorely needing defending or ammending, and left the clear and substantive rebuttals unanswered or inadequately answered. Frequently interested readers were left with only vague promises of "more on that…
So, I didn't like the IAC prescription for the IPCC. So I need my own. And I forgot that I already had one. PK said it well in the comments:
How many IPCC reports does it take to screw in a light bulb? The bureaucratic solution for inefficient bureaucracy always seems to be more bureaucracy. If the purpose of the IPCC is to inform governments on climate change and its possible impacts, the job is pretty much done. If the purpose is to provide a rationale for global taxation and control of CO2, we'll be arguing over the results of AR15.
but it bears repeating and expanding. No number of IPCC…
It am all de rage, as they say. But is it any good? And who are the IAC anyway? Go on, hands up, before they were asked to do this: had anyone heard of them? Thought not: I certainly hadn't. This is an organisation so well-known that the wikipedia article on [[IAC]] (note: that is today's version; I assume that someone will add it, eventually) doesn't even include them, although it has space for 15 or so other IAC's. Although Gavin seems to quite like the report, I'm less sure. So before getting down to reading the report, here is another piece of meta-analysis: if you read the exec summary…
The Australian's coverage of the story of the emails stolen from CRU has been extensive -- my Factiva search found that there have published 85 articles so far that mention the matter, with repeated allegations that the emails showed that the scientists were corrupt, had acted dishonestly and that the science could not be trusted. In February they reported on the Independent Climate Change Email Review:
The university had already announced a wide-ranging probe into whether its researchers manipulated information about global warming. That review, headed by senior British civil servant Muir…
Deep Climate investigates Steve McIntyre's claim that, in the IPCC TAR, Michael Mann used a "trick" to "hide the decline" in Briffa's tree-ring proxy. You will be shocked, just shocked, to discover that:
So, once again, the accusation that Mann "truncated" or "chopped off" the data set is proven to be utterly false.
Steve McIntyre claims:
One version of the trick is used in IPCC TAR. In this version, Mann replaced post-1960 values of the Briffa reconstruction with instrumental values, then did a smooth, then truncated the Briffa reconstruction back to 1960. Post-1960 instrumental values affected the smooth by the arithmetic of the smoothing filter.
Steven Mosher claims that the same "trick" was used in IPCC AR4.
Arthur Smith investigated and shows that the 1960-truncated Briffa curve in AR4 was not padded with instrumental values, but rather with the mean of the adjacent existing values, exactly as…
In his latest column Lawrence Solomon misrepresented an article by Mike Hulme, claiming that Hulme wrote that the IPCC consensus was phoney. Of course it was Solomon's story that was phony, as Hulme explained:
"I did not say the 'IPCC misleads' anyone - it is claims that are made by other commentators, such as the caricatured claim I offer in the paper, that have the potential to mislead."
Deep Climate has all the details.
Still back at Keith Kloor's place, Judith Curry seems determined to dig in to her position that governments and the IPCC and consensus minded science bloggers need to take the climate skeptics more seriously. Personally I think she completely misses the boat, because most of these folks have in fact been soundly debunked, or at the very least thouroughly addressed in purely scientific manners. We are talking about Climate Audit and Watts Up With That, these are her candidates. As well as having had their more serious contentions seriously looked at, these sites bury any potentially…
Lord Viscount Monckton of Benchley, it turns out, really is a "swivel-eyed maniac". Or at least it is a fair thing to say.
Some month's ago, George Monbiot wrote a bog post about our good friend Monckton that said Monckton has claimed, among other things:
⢠he has read the treaty that will be signed at Copenhagen next week. That's quite a feat of clairvoyance.
⢠The treaty says that "a world government is going to be created".
⢠Greenpeace is "about to impose a communist world government on the world" and President Obama, who sympathises with that aim, will sign up to it.
Monckton made a…
Every cloud has a silver lining, and it looks like Zorita is jockeying for some of the silver: the Future of IPCC apparently is to morph into one of those nice International agencies which pay so well and are headquarted in rather nice cities, staffed by... well, clearly by the likes of independent-minded folk such as Eduardo. As he says so wisely As with finance, climate assessment is too important to be left in the hands of advocates, or other scum like the current IPCC authors: sweep them all away and leave it in the hands of people who are prepared to admit their errors... oh, wait.
And…