As predicted in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald, the stratosphere has been cooling. A new paper by has appeared in PNAS where they extend their previous work on the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change to include the upper stratosphere, using observations from the Stratospheric Sounding Units (SSUs) (and their successors, the AMSU instruments) that have flown since 1979. … Read Full Article about CMIP6: Not-so-sudden stratospheric cooling
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A NOAA-STAR dataset is born…
What does a new entrant in the lower troposphere satellite record stakes really imply? At the beginning of the year, we noted that the NOAA-STAR group had produced a new version (v5.0) of their MSU TMT satellite retrievals which was quite a radical departure from the previous version (4.1). It turns out that v5 has a notable lower trend than v4.1, which had the highest trend among the UAH and … Read Full Article about A NOAA-STAR dataset is born…
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The summary for policymakers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sixth assessment reports synthesis
The summary for policymakers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth synthesis report was released on March 20th (available online as a PDF). There is a recording of the IPCC Press Conference - Climate Change 2023: Synthesis Report for those who are interested in watching an … Read Full Article about The summary for policymakers of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sixth assessment reports synthesis
Serious mistakes found in recent paper by Connolly et al.
Guest post by Mark Richardson who is a Research Scientist in the Aerosol and Clouds Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. All opinions expressed are his own and do not in any way represent those of NASA, JPL or Caltech. Should scientists choose to believe … Read Full Article about Serious mistakes found in recent paper by Connolly et al.
New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William Kininmonth
I have a feeling that we are seeing the start of a new wave of climate change denial and misrepresentation of science. At the same time, CEOs of gas and oil companies express optimism for further exploitation of fossil energy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least here in … Read Full Article about New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William Kininmonth
Unforced variations: May 2023
This month's open thread on climate topics. Please be succinct, courteous and on point. … Read Full Article about Unforced variations: May 2023
Unforced Variations: Apr 2023
This month's open thread on climate topics (no joke). … Read Full Article about Unforced Variations: Apr 2023
Some new CMIP6 MSU comparisons
We add some of the CMIP6 models to the updateable MSU [and SST] comparisons. After my annual update, I was pointed to some MSU-related diagnostics for many of the CMIP6 models (24 of them at least) from courtesy of Ben Santer. These are slightly different to what we have shown for CMIP5 in that … Read Full Article about Some new CMIP6 MSU comparisons
How not to science
A trip down memory lane and a lesson on scientific integrity. I had reason to be reviewing the history of MSU satellite retrievals for atmospheric temperatures recently. It's a fascinating story of technology, creativity, hubris, error, imagination, rivalry, politics, and (for some) a search for … Read Full Article about How not to science
Unforced variations: March 2023
This month's open thread. Antarctic sea ice anyone? … Read Full Article about Unforced variations: March 2023
The established ground and new ideas
Science is naturally conservative and the scepticism to new ideas ensures high scientific quality. We have more confidence when different scholars arrive at the same conclusion independently of each other. But scientific research also brings about discoveries and innovations, and it typically takes … Read Full Article about The established ground and new ideas
2022 updates to model-observation comparisons
Our annual post related to the comparisons between long standing records and climate models. As frequent readers will know, we maintain a page of comparisons between climate model projections and the relevant observational records, and since they are mostly for the global mean numbers, these get … Read Full Article about 2022 updates to model-observation comparisons
Unforced variations: Feb 2023
This month's open thread for climate related topics. Please be constructive, polite, and succinct. … Read Full Article about Unforced variations: Feb 2023
2022 updates to the temperature records
Another January, another annual data point. As in years past, the annual rollout of the GISTEMP, NOAA, HadCRUT and Berkeley Earth analyses of the surface temperature record have brought forth many stories about the long term trends and specific events of 2022 - mostly focused on the impacts of … Read Full Article about 2022 updates to the temperature records