The 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 Anomalies
About Gavin
Comparison Update 2024
One 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 20242024 Hindsight
To no-one’s surprise 2024 was the warmest year on record – and by quite a clear margin.
[Read more…] about 2024 Hindsight¡AI Caramba!
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!Nature 2023: Part II
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…
References
- H.F. Goessling, T. Rackow, and T. Jung, "Recent global temperature surge intensified by record-low planetary albedo", Science, vol. 387, pp. 68-73, 2025. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.adq7280
Operationalizing Climate Science
There is a need to make climate science more agile and more responsive, and that means moving (some of it) from research to operations.
[Read more…] about Operationalizing Climate ScienceScience is not value free
An interesting commentary addressing a rather odd prior commentary makes some very correct points.
[Read more…] about Science is not value freeCold extremes do in fact decrease under global warming
The title of this post might seem like a truism, but for about a decade some people have claimed the opposite, and many people have spent much time and effort trying to understand why. Much of that effort was wasted.
[Read more…] about Cold extremes do in fact decrease under global warmingPhantastic Job!
A truly impressive paper was published this week with a new reconstruction of global temperatures over the last ~500 million years.
[Read more…] about Phantastic Job!Oh My, Oh Miocene!
A recent paper suggested that ‘climate sensitivity’ derived from a new paleo-CO2 record is around 7.2ºC (for equilibrium climate sensitivity ECS) and ~13.9ºC (Earth System Sensitivity – ESS) for a doubling of CO2. Some press has suggested that this means that “Earth’s Temperature Could Increase by 25 Degrees” (F). Huge if true! Fortunately these numbers should not be taken at face value, but we need to dig into the subtleties to see why.
[Read more…] about Oh My, Oh Miocene!