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Climate Science

Clauser-ology: Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

18 Nov 2023 by Gavin

John Clauser’s theory of climate explained.

Some of you will have heard of John Clauser because he was an awardee of the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics for his role in the experimental verification of quantum entanglement. Some of you will have heard of him because the first thing that he did after winning the Nobel was join a climate denial organization and make some rather odd claims about climate science. And some of you will never have heard of him (in which case, feel free to skip this post!).

At no point in his long and, by all accounts, successful, career has he ever published a paper on climate[1]. He has not penned an article, nor even a blog post or a tweet on the topic, and so any scientific basis for his opinions (if any) has been opaque… until recently. In the last few months he has given two interviews in which he goes into to detail about what he describes as a ‘missing element’ in climate science and what he imagines the consequences are for climate change. The first interview was for the Epoch Times (a far right-wing newspaper and media organization affiliated with Falun Gong). The second was a podcast with the somewhat troubled Chris Smith, an Australian journalist. (The material is somewhat similar in each). And more comprehensively, it was repeated in a recent video lecture as well.

And what is this supposed ‘missing element’? Clouds.

[Read more…] about Clauser-ology: Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Featured Story, In the News, Instrumental Record, IPCC, skeptics Tagged With: Clauser, Nobel prize

A distraction due to errors, misunderstanding and misguided Norwegian statistics

11 Nov 2023 by rasmus

A friend asked me if a discussion paper published on Statistics Norway’s website, ‘To what extent are temperature levels changing due to greenhouse gas emissions?’, was purposely timed for the next climate summit (COP28). I don’t know the answer to his question.

[Read more…] about A distraction due to errors, misunderstanding and misguided Norwegian statistics

Filed Under: Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Featured Story, skeptics

Unforced Variations: Nov 2023

1 Nov 2023 by group

This month’s open thread on climate topics.

Filed Under: Climate Science, Open thread, Solutions

The 5th International Conference on Regional Climate

4 Oct 2023 by rasmus

The fifth international conference on regional climate (ICRC 2023), organised by World Climate Research Programme’s (WCRP) coordinated downscaling experiment (CORDEX), has just completed. It was a hybrid on-site/online conference with hubs in both Trieste/Italy (hosted by the International Centre on Theoretical Physics, ICTP) and Pune/India.

The hybrid set-up, with video links between the two hubs and digital attendence through zoom, was a change from previous ICRCs held in ICTP (2011), Brussels (2013), Stockholm (2016), and Beijing (2019). It worked impressively well, and the CORDEX ICRC 2023 streaming is available from the WCRP CORDEX YouTube channel.

It seems as an eternity since the previous ICRC before the COVID pandemic, so I was curious to see how things have progressed since then. It was also interesting to compare my impressions from this conference with my blog posts here on RealClimate from the first ICRC in Trieste, the second in Brussels, the third ICRC in Stockholm, I see that questions concerning uncertainty and added value are still being debated.

ICRC 2023
A panel discussion at the ICRC 2023 at ICTP
[Read more…] about The 5th International Conference on Regional Climate

Filed Under: Climate conference report, Climate modelling, Climate Science, climate services, Communicating Climate, downscaling, Featured Story

Unforced variations: Oct 2023

1 Oct 2023 by group

This month’s open thread on climate topics. Please try to stay on topic and refrain from posting tedious, oft-debunked nonsense. Look out for more reports of ridiculously high global temperatures and intense rainfall, and more confident predictions of the budding El Niño event and annual temperature rankings…

Filed Under: Climate Science, Open thread, Solutions

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.

[Read more…] about Old habits

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

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

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

The AMOC: tipping this century, or not?

25 Aug 2023 by Stefan

A few weeks ago, a study by Copenhagen University researchers Peter and Susanne Ditlevsen concluded that the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC) is likely to pass a tipping point already this century, most probably around mid-century. Given the catastrophic consequences of an AMOC breakdown, the study made quite a few headlines but also met some skepticism. Now that the dust has settled, here some thoughts on the criticisms that have been raised about this study.

[Read more…] about The AMOC: tipping this century, or not?

Filed Under: Climate Science, Featured Story Tagged With: AMOC, climate change

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