Some of us have been waiting quite a while now, especially since the ‘road tour’ meant to present the Special Report on Managing the Risks of Extreme Events and Disasters to Advance Climate Change Adaptation starting in Oslo on January 24th this year. The summary for policymakers (SPM) was released already in 18 November 2011 (Kampala) and now the report is finally available (link).
By Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou
One claim frequently heard regarding extreme heat waves goes something like this: ”Since this heat wave broke the previous record by 5 °C, global warming can’t have much to do with it since that has been only 1 °C over the 20th century”. Here we explain why we find this logic doubly flawed.
One can ask two different questions about the influence of global warming on heat waves (Otto et al. 2012), and we take them in turn.
1. How much hotter did global warming make this heat wave? More »
I just came across an interesting way to eliminate the impression of a global warming. A trick used to argue that the global warming had stopped, and the simple recipe is as follows:
The latest incarnation of the CRUTEM land surface temperatures and the HadCRUT global temperatures are out this week. This is the 4th version of these products, which have undergone a number of significant changes over that time and so this is a good opportunity to discuss how and why data products evolve and what that means in the bigger scheme of things.
Mathematical notation provided by QuickLatex