Climate science from climate scientists...
Somewhat breaking news. A court filing (from 9/4) from DOE has noted that the Climate Working Group has been disbanded (as of 9/3). This was done to make the EDF/UCS lawsuit moot, but it also means that DOE is withdrawing the report, no-one will respond appropriately to the comments submitted, and (possibly) it becomes irrelevant for the EPA reconsideration of the Endangerment Finding.
What a farce.
Update: Via Andy Revkin, the EDF/UCS’s blistering response to the DOE filing. Pass the popcorn.
As we’ve mentioned, Andrew Dessler and Robert Kopp have been coordinating a scientific peer review of the DOW ‘CWG’ Critique of Climate Science. It is now out.
[Read more…] about Climate Scientists response to DOE reportSome intriguing new measurements of salinity in the oceans around Antarctica have set off reams of sensationalist speculations. Maybe some context is helpful…
[Read more…] about Ocean circulation going South?In honor of the revelation today, that Koonin, Christy and Spencer have been made Special Government Employees at the Dept. of Energy, we present a quick round up of our commentary on the caliber of their arguments we’ve posted here over the last decade or so.
TL;DR? The arguments are not very good.
[Read more…] about Melange à TroisOver multiple generations of CMIP models Arctic sea ice trend predictions have gone from much too stable to about right. Why?
[Read more…] about Predicted Arctic sea ice trends over timeThe WMO released its (now) annual state of the climate report this week. As well as the (now) standard set of graphs related to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations, rising temperatures, reducing glacier mass, etc., Zeke Hausfather and I wrote up a short synthesis on the contributions to recent temperature anomalies.
[Read more…] about WMO: Update on 2023/4 AnomaliesOne more dot on the graphs for our annual model-observations comparisons updates. Given how extraordinary the last two years have been, there are a few highlights to note.
[Read more…] about Comparison Update 2024To no-one’s surprise 2024 was the warmest year on record – and by quite a clear margin.
[Read more…] about 2024 Hindsight
Rapid progress in the use of machine learning for weather and climate models is evident almost everywhere, but can we distinguish between real advances and vaporware?
[Read more…] about ¡AI Caramba!This is a follow-on post to the previous summary of interesting work related to the temperatures in 2023/2024. I’ll have another post with a quick summary of the AGU session on the topic that we are running on Tuesday Dec 10th, hopefully in the next couple of weeks.
6 Dec 2024: Goessling et al (2024)
This is perhaps the most interesting of the papers so far that look holistically at the last couple of years of anomalies. The principle result is a tying together the planetary albedo and the temperature changes. People have been connecting these changes in vague (somewhat hand-wavy ways) for a couple of years, but this is the first paper to do so quantitatively.
The authors use the CERES data and some aspects of the ERA5 reanalysis (which is not ideal for these purposes because of issues we discussed last month) to partition the changes by latitude, and to distinguish impacts from the solar cycle anomaly (~0.03 K), ENSO (~0.07K) and the albedo (~0.22K) (see figure above).
What they can’t do using this methodology is partition the albedo changes across cloud feedbacks, aerosol effects, surface reflectivity, volcanic activity etc., and even less, partition that into the impacts of marine shipping emission reductions, Chinese aerosol emissions, aerosol-cloud interactions etc. So, in terms of what the ultimate cause(s) are, more work is still needed.
Watch this space…
