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Greenhouse gases

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

Oh My, Oh Miocene!

28 Aug 2024 by Gavin

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!

Filed Under: Carbon cycle, Climate modelling, Climate Science, Greenhouse gases, Paleoclimate Tagged With: ECS, ESS, Miocene, paleo-CO2, replication

Much ado about acceleration

4 Apr 2024 by Gavin

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 acceleration

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, El Nino, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Hurricanes, Instrumental Record, IPCC Tagged With: acceleration, climate change, CMIP6

The Scafetta Saga

21 Sep 2023 by Gavin

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 Saga

References

  1. 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

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record, Model-Obs Comparisons, Scientific practice, skeptics Tagged With: CMIP6, greenhouse warming, Scafetta

As Soon as Possible

6 Sep 2023 by Gavin

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 Possible

References

  1. 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

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record, Scientific practice, Sun-earth connections Tagged With: misinformation, Nicola Scafetta, solar activity, urban heating, Willie Soon

CMIP6: Not-so-sudden stratospheric cooling

21 May 2023 by Gavin

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 cooling

References

  1. 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

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record, Sun-earth connections Tagged With: CMIP6, SSU

New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William Kininmonth

1 Oct 2022 by rasmus

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

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Greenhouse gases, IPCC, Scientific practice, skeptics Tagged With: climate change, co2, greenhouse warming

A CERES of fortunate events…

18 Sep 2022 by Gavin

The CERES estimates of the top-of-atmosphere radiative fluxes are available from 2001 to the present. That is long enough to see that there has been a noticeable trend in the Earth’s Energy Imbalance (EEI), mostly driven by a reduction in the solar radiation reflected by the planet, while the outgoing long wave radiation does not appear to contribute much. But what can be causing this?

A paper last year (Goode et al., 2021) also reported on a two decade estimate of Earthshine measurements which appear to confirm a small decrease in albedo (and decrease in reflected short wave (SW) radiation). While the two measurements are subtly different due to the distinct geometries, they do show sufficient coherence to give us some confidence that they are real.

Comparison of CERES SWup trends (blue) with inferred changes in Earthshine (black).

Similarly, Loeb et al. (2021) show that the trends in the EEI derived from CERES match what you get from the changes in ocean heat content.

Satellite-derived trends in EEI compared to estimates from changes in ocean heat (updated by Schmidt et al, 2023).

A few people have started to interpret the dominance of the SW trends to imply that the overall trends in climate are not (despite copious evidence) being driven by the rise in greenhouse gases (for instance, the rather poorly argued and seemingly un-copyedited Dübal and Vahrenholt (2021)) but these simplistic interpretations are seriously confused.

We can explore the issues and pitfalls of this using the ‘simple model’ of the greenhouse effect we explored back in 2007. At that time, we said:

You should think of these kinds of exercises as simple flim-flam detectors – if someone tries to convince you that they can do a simple calculation and prove everyone else wrong, think about what the same calculation would be in this more straightforward system and see whether the idea holds up. If it does, it might work in the real world (no guarantee though) – but if it doesn’t, then it’s most probably garbage.

[Read more…] about A CERES of fortunate events…

References

  1. P.R. Goode, E. Pallé, A. Shoumko, S. Shoumko, P. Montañes‐Rodriguez, and S.E. Koonin, "Earth's Albedo 1998–2017 as Measured From Earthshine", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 48, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2021GL094888
  2. N.G. Loeb, G.C. Johnson, T.J. Thorsen, J.M. Lyman, F.G. Rose, and S. Kato, "Satellite and Ocean Data Reveal Marked Increase in Earth’s Heating Rate", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 48, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2021GL093047
  3. H. Dübal, and F. Vahrenholt, "Radiative Energy Flux Variation from 2001–2020", Atmosphere, vol. 12, pp. 1297, 2021. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/atmos12101297

Filed Under: Aerosols, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record Tagged With: CERES, EEI, energy imblance

Climate impacts of the #IRA

17 Aug 2022 by Gavin

With the signing of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) on Tuesday Aug 16, the most significant climate legislation in US federal history (so far) became law.

Despite the odd name (and greatly overused TLA), the IRA contains a huge number of elements, totalling roughly $350 billion of investment, in climate solutions over the next ten years. This is an historic effort though it falls short of the broader ‘Green New Deal‘ goals that were proposed in 2019, and doesn’t include all of the elements that were in the proposed 2021 reconcilliation package (the American Jobs Plan in “Build Back Better“) that ultimately floundered.

[Read more…] about Climate impacts of the #IRA

Filed Under: Climate impacts, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Solutions Tagged With: Inflation Reduction Act, IRA

The CO2 problem in six easy steps (2022 Update)

10 Jul 2022 by Gavin

One of our most-read old posts is the step-by-step explanation for why increasing CO2 is a significant problem (The CO2 problem in 6 easy steps). However, that was written in 2007 – 15 years ago! While the basic steps and concepts have not changed, there’s 15 years of more data, updates in some of the details and concepts, and (it turns out) better graphics to accompany the text. And so, here is a mildly updated and referenced version that should be a little more useful.

[Read more…] about The CO2 problem in six easy steps (2022 Update)

Filed Under: Aerosols, Climate impacts, Climate Science, Featured Story, Greenhouse gases, Instrumental Record, IPCC, Oceans Tagged With: co2

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