The first somewhat comprehensive reviews of the DOE critical review are now coming online.
[Read more…] about Critiques of the ‘Critical Review’Greenhouse gases
Are direct water vapor emissions endangering anyone?
In the EPA EF reconsideration document there is a section on p62 where they attempt to make the argument that the CO2 endangerment finding would also apply to direct water vapor emissions to the atmosphere, which is (according to them) obviously absurd. But both claims are bogus.
[Read more…] about Are direct water vapor emissions endangering anyone?The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?
The EPA, along with the “Climate Working Group” (CWG) of usual suspects (plus Judith Curry and Ross McKitrick) at DOE, have just put out a document for public comment their attempt to rescind the 2009 Endangerment Finding for greenhouse gas emissions.
[Read more…] about The Endangerment of the Endangerment Finding?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 ScienceOh 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!Much ado about acceleration
There has been a lot of commentary about perceived disagreements among climate scientists about whether climate change is (or will soon be) accelerating. As with most punditry, there is less here than it might seem.
[Read more…] about Much ado about accelerationThe Scafetta Saga
It has taken 17 months to get a comment published pointing out the obvious errors in the Scafetta (2022) paper in GRL.
Back in March 2022, Nicola Scafetta published a short paper in Geophysical Research Letters (GRL) purporting to show through ‘advanced’ means that ‘all models with ECS > 3.0°C overestimate the observed global surface warming’ (as defined by ERA5). We (me, Gareth Jones and John Kennedy) wrote a note up within a couple of days pointing out how wrongheaded the reasoning was and how the results did not stand up to scrutiny.
[Read more…] about The Scafetta SagaReferences
- N. Scafetta, "Advanced Testing of Low, Medium, and High ECS CMIP6 GCM Simulations Versus ERA5‐T2m", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 49, 2022. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2022GL097716
As Soon as Possible
The latest contrarian crowd pleaser from Soon et al (2023) is just the latest repetition of the old “it was the sun wot done it” trope[1] that Willie Soon and his colleagues have been pushing for decades. There is literally nothing new under the sun.
[Read more…] about As Soon as PossibleReferences
- W. Soon, R. Connolly, M. Connolly, S. Akasofu, S. Baliunas, J. Berglund, A. Bianchini, W. Briggs, C. Butler, R. Cionco, M. Crok, A. Elias, V. Fedorov, F. Gervais, H. Harde, G. Henry, D. Hoyt, O. Humlum, D. Legates, A. Lupo, S. Maruyama, P. Moore, M. Ogurtsov, C. ÓhAiseadha, M. Oliveira, S. Park, S. Qiu, G. Quinn, N. Scafetta, J. Solheim, J. Steele, L. Szarka, H. Tanaka, M. Taylor, F. Vahrenholt, V. Velasco Herrera, and W. Zhang, "The Detection and Attribution of Northern Hemisphere Land Surface Warming (1850–2018) in Terms of Human and Natural Factors: Challenges of Inadequate Data", Climate, vol. 11, pp. 179, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/cli11090179
CMIP6: Not-so-sudden stratospheric cooling
As predicted in 1967 by Manabe and Wetherald, the stratosphere has been cooling.
A new paper by Ben Santer and colleagues has appeared in PNAS where they extend their previous work on the detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change to include the upper stratosphere, using observations from the Stratospheric Sounding Units (SSUs) (and their successors, the AMSU instruments) that have flown since 1979.
[Read more…] about CMIP6: Not-so-sudden stratospheric coolingReferences
- B.D. Santer, S. Po-Chedley, L. Zhao, C. Zou, Q. Fu, S. Solomon, D.W.J. Thompson, C. Mears, and K.E. Taylor, "Exceptional stratospheric contribution to human fingerprints on atmospheric temperature", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 120, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2300758120
New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William Kininmonth
I have a feeling that we are seeing the start of a new wave of climate change denial and misrepresentation of science. At the same time, CEOs of gas and oil companies express optimism for further exploitation of fossil energy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least here in Norway.
Another clue is William Kininmonth’s ‘rethink’ on the greenhouse effect for The Global Warming Policy Foundation. He made some rather strange claims, such as that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) allegedly should have forgotten that the earth is a sphere because “most absorption of solar radiation takes place over the tropics, while there is excess emission of longwave radiation to space over higher latitudes”.
[Read more…] about New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William Kininmonth