• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

RealClimate

Climate science from climate scientists...

  • Start here
  • Model-Observation Comparisons
  • Miscellaneous Climate Graphics
  • Surface temperature graphics
You are here: Home / Archives for Gavin

about Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeler, working for NASA and with Columbia University.

About Gavin

Ocean circulation going South?

13 Jul 2025 by Gavin 42 Comments

Some 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?

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, hydrological cycle, Instrumental Record, Oceans Tagged With: salinity, sea ice, Southern Ocean

Melange à Trois

8 Jul 2025 by Gavin 80 Comments

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 Trois

Filed Under: Climate Science, Featured Story, In the News, Instrumental Record, Model-Obs Comparisons, Scientific practice Tagged With: John Christy, MSU, Roy Spencer, Steve Koonin

Predicted Arctic sea ice trends over time

31 May 2025 by Gavin

Over 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 time

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Model-Obs Comparisons Tagged With: Arctic amplification, CMIP3, CMIP5, CMIP6

WMO: Update on 2023/4 Anomalies

20 Mar 2025 by Gavin

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

Filed Under: Aerosols, Climate modelling, Climate Science, El Nino, Featured Story, Instrumental Record Tagged With: 2023, 2024

Comparison Update 2024

27 Jan 2025 by Gavin

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 2024

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Instrumental Record, Model-Obs Comparisons

2024 Hindsight

11 Jan 2025 by Gavin

To no-one’s surprise 2024 was the warmest year on record – and by quite a clear margin.

[Read more…] about 2024 Hindsight

Filed Under: Climate Science, El Nino, Featured Story, Instrumental Record, IPCC Tagged With: 1.5ºC, MSU

¡AI Caramba!

28 Dec 2024 by Gavin

Bart Simpson seeing a ChatGPT logo and saying "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!

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story Tagged With: AI/ML, CMIP7, Machine Learning

Nature 2023: Part II

6 Dec 2024 by Gavin

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.

Fig 1B from Goessling et al (2024) giving an attribution of the 2023 anomaly from the pre-industrial.

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

  1. 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

Filed Under: Aerosols, Climate Science, El Nino, Featured Story, Instrumental Record Tagged With: 2023, CERES, ERA5

Operationalizing Climate Science

17 Nov 2024 by Gavin

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 Science

Filed Under: Aerosols, Climate impacts, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record, IPCC Tagged With: CMIP6, CMIP7

Science is not value free

18 Oct 2024 by Gavin

An interesting commentary addressing a rather odd prior commentary makes some very correct points.

[Read more…] about Science is not value free

Filed Under: Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Featured Story, Scientific practice Tagged With: activism, advocacy

  • Page 1
  • Page 2
  • Page 3
  • Interim pages omitted …
  • Page 40
  • Go to Next Page »

Primary Sidebar

Search

Search for:

Email Notification

get new posts sent to you automatically (free)
Loading

Recent Posts

  • Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Are direct water vapor emissions endangering anyone?
  • The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • National Climate Assessment links
  • Ocean circulation going South?
  • Melange à Trois

Our Books

Book covers
This list of books since 2005 (in reverse chronological order) that we have been involved in, accompanied by the publisher’s official description, and some comments of independent reviewers of the work.
All Books >>

Recent Comments

  • Barry E Finch on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Yebo Kando on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • Tomáš Kalisz on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Barry E Finch on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Barton Paul Levenson on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Barton Paul Levenson on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Barton Paul Levenson on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Barton Paul Levenson on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • Barton Paul Levenson on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • Ron R. on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Fact Checker on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • Fact Checker on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • David on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • David on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • David on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
  • David on National Climate Assessment links
  • Paul Pukite (@whut) on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • MA Rodger on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Silvia Leahu-Aluas on Unforced Variations: Aug 2025
  • Pedro Prieto on The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?

Footer

ABOUT

  • About
  • Translations
  • Privacy Policy
  • Contact Page
  • Login

DATA AND GRAPHICS

  • Data Sources
  • Model-Observation Comparisons
  • Surface temperature graphics
  • Miscellaneous Climate Graphics

INDEX

  • Acronym index
  • Index
  • Archives
  • Contributors

Realclimate Stats

1,374 posts

11 pages

245,478 comments

Copyright © 2025 · RealClimate is a commentary site on climate science by working climate scientists for the interested public and journalists.