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You are here: Home / Archives for Climate Science / Arctic and Antarctic

Arctic and Antarctic

The most recent climate status

12 May 2025 by rasmus 9 Comments

Fjords and mountains in Northern Norway
Fjords and mountains in Northern Norway

The Arctic Council’s Arctic Monitoring and assessment Programme (AMAP) recently released a Summary for PolicyMakers’ Arctic Climate Change Update 2024. 

[Read more…] about The most recent climate status

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate impacts, Climate Science, Featured Story, Reporting on climate

Cold extremes do in fact decrease under global warming

6 Oct 2024 by Gavin

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 warming

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Instrumental Record Tagged With: Arctic amplification, extreme events, replication, reproduction

Not just another dot on the graph? Part II

16 Jan 2024 by Gavin

Annual updates to the model-observation comparisons for 2023 are now complete. The comparisons encompass surface air temperatures, mid-troposphere temperatures (global and tropical, and ‘corrected’), sea surface temperatures, and stratospheric temperatures. In almost every case, the addition of the 2023 numbers was in line with the long term expectation from the models.

[Read more…] about Not just another dot on the graph? Part II

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Instrumental Record, Model-Obs Comparisons, Oceans Tagged With: CMIP3, CMIP5, CMIP6, MSU, SAT, SSU, TMT

Not just another dot on the graph?

12 Jan 2024 by Gavin

As the climate monitoring groups add an additional dot to their graphs this week, there is some disquiet among people paying attention about just how extraordinary 2023 really was.

[Read more…] about Not just another dot on the graph?

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate modelling, Climate Science, El Nino, Featured Story, Instrumental Record, Oceans

Old habits

26 Sep 2023 by rasmus

Media awareness about global warming and climate change has grown fairly steadily since 2004. My impression is that journalists today tend to possess a higher climate literacy than before. This increasing awareness and improved knowledge is encouraging, but there are also some common interpretations which could be more nuanced. Here are two examples, polar amplification and extreme rainfall.

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Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Featured Story, hydrological cycle, Reporting on climate

Unforced variations: Sep 2023

1 Sep 2023 by group

This month’s open thread on climate science topics. It’s been a warm summer, dontcha know? Expect ERA5, the satellite data and then the surface data products to confirm this in the next week or so. Sea ice minimum in the Arctic will also occur soon, as will a record low maximum in the Antarctic. El Niño still building in the tropical Pacific. Interesting times…

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate impacts, Climate Science, Open thread, Solutions

Why is future sea level rise still so uncertain?

12 May 2021 by Gavin

Three new papers in the last couple of weeks have each made separate claims about whether sea level rise from the loss of ice in West Antarctica is more or less than you might have thought last month and with more or less certainty. Each of these papers make good points, but anyone looking for coherent picture to emerge from all this work will be disappointed. To understand why, you need to know why sea level rise is such a hard problem in the first place, and appreciate how far we’ve come, but also how far we need to go.

[Read more…] about Why is future sea level rise still so uncertain?

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate Science, Sea level rise

Don’t climate bet against the house

3 Feb 2021 by Gavin

Decades ago (it seems) when perhaps it was still possible to have good faith disagreements about the attribution of current climate trends, James Annan wrote a post here summarizing the thinking and practice of Climate Betting. That led to spate of wagers on continued global warming (a summary of his bets through 2005 and attempts to set up others is here).

There were earlier bets, the most well known perhaps was the one for $100 between Hugh Ellsaesser and Jim Hansen in 1989 on whether there would be a new temperature record within three years. There was (1990), and Ellsaesser paid up in January 1991 (Kerr, 1991). But these more recent bets were more extensive.

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References

  1. R.A. Kerr, "Global Temperature Hits Record Again", Science, vol. 251, pp. 274-274, 1991. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.251.4991.274

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate Science, Instrumental Record, skeptics, statistics

2020 Hindsight

15 Jan 2021 by Gavin

Yesterday was the day that NASA, NOAA, the Hadley Centre and Berkeley Earth delivered their final assessments for temperatures in Dec 2020, and thus their annual summaries. The headline results have received a fair bit of attention in the media (NYT, WaPo, BBC, The Guardian etc.) and the conclusion that 2020 was pretty much tied with 2016 for the warmest year in the instrumental record is robust.

[Read more…] about 2020 Hindsight

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate Science, El Nino, In the News, Instrumental Record

Denial and Alarmism in the Near-Term Extinction and Collapse Debate

20 Aug 2020 by group

Guest article by Alastair McIntosh,  honorary professor in the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow in Scotland. This is an excerpt from his new book, Riders on the Storm: The Climate Crisis and the Survival of Being

cover art for Riders on the StormMostly, we only know what we think we know about climate science because of the climate science. I have had many run-ins with denialists, contrarians or climate change dismissives as they are variously called. Over the past two years especially, concern has also moved to the other end of the spectrum, to alarmism. Both ends, while the latter has been more thinly tapered, can represent forms of denial. In this abridged adaptation I will start with denialism, but round on the more recent friendly fire on science that has emerged in alarmism.
[Read more…] about Denial and Alarmism in the Near-Term Extinction and Collapse Debate

Filed Under: Arctic and Antarctic, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Solutions

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