RealClimate

Climate science from climate scientists...

You are here: Home / Archives for Climate Science / IPCC

IPCC

And the winner is…

by

Remember the forecast of a temporary global cooling which made headlines around the world in 2008? We didn’t think it was reliable and offered a bet. The forecast period is now over: we were right, the forecast was not skillful.

Back around 2007/8, two high-profile papers claimed to produce, for the first time, skilful predictions of decadal climate change, based on new techniques of ocean state initialization in climate models. Both papers made forecasts of the future evolution of global mean and regional temperatures. The first paper, Smith et al. (2007), predicted “that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.” The second, Keenlyside et al., (2008), forecast in contrast that “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”

This month marks the end of the forecast period for Keenlyside et al and so their forecasts can now be cleanly compared to what actually happened. This is particularly interesting to RealClimate, since we offered a bet to the authors on whether the results would be accurate based on our assessment of their methodology. They ignored our offer but now the time period of the bet has passed, it’s worth checking how it would have gone.

[Read more…] about And the winner is…

References

  1. D.M. Smith, S. Cusack, A.W. Colman, C.K. Folland, G.R. Harris, and J.M. Murphy, "Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model", Science, vol. 317, pp. 796-799, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1139540
  2. N.S. Keenlyside, M. Latif, J. Jungclaus, L. Kornblueh, and E. Roeckner, "Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector", Nature, vol. 453, pp. 84-88, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06921

Debate in the noise

by

Last week there was an international media debate on climate data which appeared to be rather surreal to me. It was claimed that the global temperature data had so far shown a “hiatus” of global warming from 1998-2012, which was now suddenly gone after a data correction. So what happened?

One of the data centers that compile the data on global surface temperatures – NOAA – reported in the journal Science on an update of their data. Some artifacts due to changed measurement methods (especially for sea surface temperatures) were corrected and additional data of previously not included weather stations were added. All data centers are continually working to improve their database and they therefore occasionally present version updates of their global series (NASA data are currently at version 3, the British Hadley Centre data at version 4). There is nothing unusual about this, and the corrections are in the range of a few hundredths of a degree – see Figure 1. This really is just about fine details. [Read more…] about Debate in the noise

Global warming and unforced variability: Clarifications on recent Duke study

by

Guest Commentary from Patrick Brown and Wenhong Li, Duke University

We recently published a study in Scientific Reports titled Comparing the model-simulated global warming signal to observations using empirical estimates of unforced noise. Our study seemed to generated a lot of interest and we have received many inquires regarding its findings. We were pleased with some of coverage of our study (e.g., here) but we were disappointed that some outlets published particularly misleading articles (e.g, here, here, and here). Since there appears to be some confusion regarding our study’s findings, we would like to clarify some points (see also MM4A’s discussion).

[Read more…] about Global warming and unforced variability: Clarifications on recent Duke study

References

  1. P.T. Brown, W. Li, E.C. Cordero, and S.A. Mauget, "Comparing the model-simulated global warming signal to observations using empirical estimates of unforced noise", Scientific Reports, vol. 5, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep09957

Reflections on Ringberg

by

As previewed last weekend, I spent most of last week at a workshop on Climate Sensitivity hosted by the Max Planck Institute at Schloss Ringberg. It was undoubtedly one of the better workshops I’ve attended – it was focussed, deep and with much new information to digest (some feel for the discussion can be seen from the #ringberg15 tweets). I’ll give a brief overview of my impressions below.

[Read more…] about Reflections on Ringberg

Climate Sensitivity Week

by

Some of you will be aware that there is a workshop on Climate Sensitivity this week at Schloss Ringberg in southern Germany. The topics to be covered include how sensitivity is defined (and whether it is even meaningful (Spoiler, yes it is)), what it means, how it can be constrained, what the different flavours signify etc. There is an impressive list of attendees with a very diverse range of views on just about everything, and so I am looking forward to very stimulating discussions.

[Read more…] about Climate Sensitivity Week

Unforced variations: Nov 2014

by

This month’s open thread. In honour of today’s New York Marathon, we are expecting the fastest of you to read and digest the final IPCC Synthesis report in sub-3 hours. For those who didn’t keep up with the IPCC training regime, the Summary for Policy Makers provides a more accessible target.

Also in the news, follow #ArcticCircle2014 for some great info on the Arctic Circle meeting in Iceland.

Ocean heat storage: a particularly lousy policy target + Update

by

The New York Times, 12 December 2027: After 12 years of debate and negotiation, kicked off in Paris in 2015, world leaders have finally agreed to ditch the goal of limiting global warming to below 2 °C. Instead, they have agreed to the new goal of limiting global ocean heat content to 1024 Joules. The decision was widely welcomed by the science and policy communities as a great step forward. “In the past, the 2 °C goal has allowed some governments to pretend that they are taking serious action to mitigate global warming, when in reality they have achieved almost nothing. I’m sure that this can’t happen again with the new 1024 Joules goal”, said David Victor, a professor of international relations who originally proposed this change back in 2014. And an unnamed senior EU negotiator commented: “Perhaps I shouldn’t say this, but some heads of state had trouble understanding the implications of the 2 °C target; sometimes they even accidentally talked of limiting global warming to 2%. I’m glad that we now have those 1024 Joules which are much easier to grasp for policy makers and the public.”

This fictitious newspaper item is of course absurd and will never become reality, because ocean heat content is unsuited as a climate policy target. Here are three main reasons why. [Read more…] about Ocean heat storage: a particularly lousy policy target + Update

Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

by

Guest commentary from Richard Millar (U. Oxford)

The recent Lewis and Curry study of climate sensitivity estimated from the transient surface temperature record is being lauded as something of a game-changer – but how much of a game-changer is it really?

[Read more…] about Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

References

  1. N. Lewis, and J.A. Curry, "The implications for climate sensitivity of AR5 forcing and heat uptake estimates", Climate Dynamics, vol. 45, pp. 1009-1023, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2342-y

Limiting global warming to 2 °C – why Victor and Kennel are wrong + update

by

In a comment in Nature titled Ditch the 2 °C warming goal, political scientist David Victor and retired astrophysicist Charles Kennel advocate just that. But their arguments don’t hold water.

It is clear that the opinion article by Victor & Kennel is meant to be provocative. But even when making allowances for that, the arguments which they present are ill-informed and simply not supported by the facts. The case for limiting global warming to at most 2°C above preindustrial temperatures remains very strong.

Let’s start with an argument that they apparently consider especially important, given that they devote a whole section and a graph to it. They claim:

The scientific basis for the 2 °C goal is tenuous. The planet’s average temperature has barely risen in the past 16 years. [Read more…] about Limiting global warming to 2 °C – why Victor and Kennel are wrong + update

IPCC attribution statements redux: A response to Judith Curry

by

I have written a number of times about the procedure used to attribute recent climate change (here in 2010, in 2012 (about the AR4 statement), and again in 2013 after AR5 was released). For people who want a summary of what the attribution problem is, how we think about the human contributions and why the IPCC reaches the conclusions it does, read those posts instead of this one.

The bottom line is that multiple studies indicate with very strong confidence that human activity is the dominant component in the warming of the last 50 to 60 years, and that our best estimates are that pretty much all of the rise is anthropogenic.



The probability density function for the fraction of warming attributable to human activity (derived from Fig. 10.5 in IPCC AR5). The bulk of the probability is far to the right of the “50%” line, and the peak is around 110%.

If you are still here, I should be clear that this post is focused on a specific claim Judith Curry has recently blogged about supporting a “50-50” attribution (i.e. that trends since the middle of the 20th Century are 50% human-caused, and 50% natural, a position that would center her pdf at 0.5 in the figure above). She also commented about her puzzlement about why other scientists don’t agree with her. Reading over her arguments in detail, I find very little to recommend them, and perhaps the reasoning for this will be interesting for readers. So, here follows a line-by-line commentary on her recent post. Please excuse the length.
[Read more…] about IPCC attribution statements redux: A response to Judith Curry