Fall AGU is in Washington DC. Follow #AGU18 for twitter discussions and highlights, and live streaming of keynotes and selected sessions. Use this thread to discuss anything arising from the meeting – or it’s controversies.
Climate science from climate scientists...
Hoy! 2018 fall agu up 12th dec. Streaming and archived video available.
https://fallmeeting.agu.org/2018/
sidd
[Response: Deserves a thread of it’s own. – gavin]
Was just watching Raymo at the end of the “Fifty Years of Scientific Ocean Drilling: How the Past Informs the Future” session. I am quite amazed to learn that we do not understand CO2 cycling on megayear timescale. I thought that was understood in terms of weathering but apparently there are ocean processes that are only now emerging out of the deeps.
sidd
And an “oh-oh” of an “observationally-driven discovery”–h/t to Susan Anderson, who posted this story over on Open Mind:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-46517396
Evidence of thinning and speeding up in several East Antarctic glaciers. It’s not just Totten anymore…
Unless this trend reverses–and why would it? Is it really likely that this is just variability?–we’re going to see SLR rates increase, too, at some point. (Not that that would be surprising, but here is a specific probable contributor to what is expected more generally.)
My climate-concerned self says thank you! But my inner grammar pedant says “it’s” is a contraction of “it is” or “it has”, not a possessive. “Its” is the correct possessive form in both cases here.
Could someone who attended the conference comment on whether any new results constraining ECS or ESS were presented? Are we still stuck with 1.5 to 4.5 degrees?
#5, KD–
That is a very good question–though I’m guessing if something significant is presented, participants won’t need our encouragement to spread the word!
“Explaining Extreme Events of 2017 from a Climate Perspective,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, presented at the AGU last Monday–this is the seventh annual issue analyzing extreme weather events of the prior year. This article posted by Dr. Jeff Masters with Bob Henson, Weather Underground, Cat 6.
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/Seven-Billion-Dollar-Disasters-2017-Likely-Affected-Climate-Change?cm_ven=cat6-widget
Human-caused climate change made more than a dozen of 2017’s most extreme weather events more likely and more intense, including seven billion-dollar disasters, according to the Explaining Extreme Events of 2017 From a Climate Perspective report, released on Monday. The report added that marine heat waves, like the one in the Tasman Sea off Australia’s southeast coast, were “virtually impossible” without the influence of human-caused climate change.
“These attribution studies are telling us that a warming Earth is continuing to send us new and more extreme weather events every year,” said Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (BAMS) editor-in-chief Jeff Rosenfield at a press conference on Monday at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in Washington D.C. “The message of this science is that our civilization is increasingly out of sync with our changing climate. A decade ago, we were focused on continental-scale, months-long extremes. Now researchers are often going after more local risks like heat waves, fire danger, and floods on scales of a few days, for pinpointed areas of extreme impacts. In barely a decade, the research focus has evolved enough to address a wider scope of societal challenges.”
NOAA research meteorologist Martin Hoerling added: “Scientific evidence supports increasing confidence that human activity is driving a variety of extreme events now. These are having large economic impacts across the United States and around the world.”
The new studies reinforce the conclusions of the Fourth National Climate Assessment, which was written by researchers from over a dozen federal agencies. The report was released by the Trump Administration on the day after Thanksgiving, in a probable attempt to keep it from getting widespread notice. The report stated that the “impacts of global climate change are already being felt in the United States and are projected to intensify in the future.”
BAMS has now put out seven annual issues analyzing extreme weather events of the prior year. Of the 146 studies presented in the reports, 70 percent found a strong connection between an event and climate change. However, not all extreme weather events have had attribution studies done on them, and the list of events studied has been dictated by what interested the researchers (and what they had the funding to do).
Climatesignals.org has compiled a more exhaustive list of climate attribution studies. They identified 216 studies published between December 1995 and August 2018 that found the fingerprint of human-caused climate change on a significant weather event or climate trend. Of these, 93 were in the United States. The earliest finding of a human-caused fingerprint was for the 1930s—a significant probability that global temperature was increasing due to human-caused climate change.
At least seven of the 29 billion-dollar weather disasters of 2017 catalogued by insurance broker Aon were linked to climate change in the new BAMS report. …engineering organizations…now reviewing their standards due to climate change considerations. [see article for more, with visuals]