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Reporting on climate

Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?

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As the World Meteorological Organisation WMO has just announced that “The year 2014 is on track to be the warmest, or one of the warmest years on record”, it is timely to have a look at recent global temperature changes.

I’m going to use Kevin Cowtan’s nice interactive temperature plotting and trend calculation tool to provide some illustrations. I will be using the HadCRUT4 hybrid data, which have the most sophisticated method to fill data gaps in the Arctic with the help of satellites, but the same basic points can be illustrated with other data just as well.

Let’s start by looking at the full record, which starts in 1979 since the satellites come online there (and it’s not long after global warming really took off).

trend1Fig. 1. Global temperature 1979 to present – monthly values (crosses), 12-months running mean (red line) and linear trend line with uncertainty (blue) [Read more…] about Recent global warming trends: significant or paused or what?

A failure in communicating the impact of new findings

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I was disappointed by the recent summary for policymakers (SPM) of the intergovernmental panel on climate change (IPCC) assessment report 5, now that I finally got around to read it. Not so much because of the science, but because the way it presented the science.

The report was written by top scientists, so what went wrong?

[Read more…] about A failure in communicating the impact of new findings

Statistics and Climate

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Do different climate models give different results? And if so, why? The answer to these questions will increase our understanding of the climate models, and potentially the physical phenomena and processes present in the climate system.

We now have many different climate models, many different methods, and get a range of different results. They provide what we call ‘multi-model‘ and ‘multi-method‘ ensembles. But how do we make sense out of all this information?

[Read more…] about Statistics and Climate

A new European report on climate extremes is out

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A new report on extreme climate events in Europe is just published: ‘Extreme Weather Events in Europe: preparing for climate change adaptation‘. It was launched in Oslo on October 24th by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, and the report is now available online.

Front cover of 'Extreme Weather Events in Europe: preparing for climate change adaptation'
Front cover of ‘Extreme Weather Events in Europe:
preparing for climate change adaptation’

What’s new? The new report provides information that is more specific to Europe than the SREX report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and incorporate phenomena that have not been widely covered.

It provides some compelling information drawn from the insurance industry, and indeed, a representative from Munich Re participated in writing this report. There is also material on convective storms, hail, lightening, and cold snaps, and the report provides a background on extreme value statistics, risk analysis, impacts, and adaptation.

[Read more…] about A new European report on climate extremes is out

Should regional climate models take the blame?

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Kerr (2013) recently provided a critical review of regional climate models (“RCMs”). I think his views have caused a stir in the regional climate model community. So what’s the buzz all about?

RCMs provide important input to many climate services, for which there is a great deal of vested interest on all levels. On the international stage, high-level talks lead to the establishment of a Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) during the World Climate Conference 3 (WCC3) in Geneva 2009.

[Read more…] about Should regional climate models take the blame?

References

  1. R.A. Kerr, "Forecasting Regional Climate Change Flunks Its First Test", Science, vol. 339, pp. 638-638, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.339.6120.638

Movie review: SWITCH

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This year, the Geological Society of America is rolling out their SWITCH Energy Awareness campaign . The centerpiece of the campaign is a documentary film, SWITCH, which purports to be about the need for a transformation in the world’s energy systems. Recently, I attended the Chicago premier of the film, presented as part of the Environmental Film Series of the Lutheran School of Theology. I had high hopes for this film. They were disappointed. Given the mismatch between what the movie promises and what it delivers, it would be more aptly titled, “BAIT AND SWITCH.”
Switch Still
[Read more…] about Movie review: SWITCH

Climate change and consequences on the ground

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The link between extreme weather events, climate change, and national security is discussed in Extreme Realities, a new episode in PBS’ series Journey To Planet Earth hosted by Matt Damon.

The video features a number of extreme weather phenomena: hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, wild fires, and flooding. The discussion is about climate change and the consequences on the ground – or, how climate change may affect you.

It is important to ask what is the story behind the assertions made in the video. What scientific support is there for the link between such extremes and climate change?

[Read more…] about Climate change and consequences on the ground

Stronger regional differences due to large-scale atmospheric flow.

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A new paper by Deser et al. (2012) (free access) is likely to have repercussions on discussions of local climate change adaptation. I think it caught some people by surprise, even if the results perhaps should not be so surprising. The range of possible local and regional climate outcomes may turn out to be larger than expected for regions such as North America and Europe.

Deser et al. imply that information about the future regional climate is more blurred than previously anticipated because of large-scale atmospheric flow responsible for variations in regional climates. They found that regional temperatures and precipitation for the next 50 years may be less predictable due to the chaotic nature of the large-scale atmospheric flow. This has implications for climate change downscaling and climate change adaptation, and suggests a need to anticipate a wider range of situations in climate risk analyses.

Although it has long been recognised that large-scale circulation regimes affect seasonal, inter-annual climate, and decadal variations, the expectations have been that anthropogenic climate changes will dominate on time scales longer than 50 years. For instance, an influential analysis by Hawking & Sutton (2009) (link to figures) has suggested that internal climate variability account for only about 20% of the variance over the British isles on a 50-year time scale.
[Read more…] about Stronger regional differences due to large-scale atmospheric flow.

References

  1. C. Deser, R. Knutti, S. Solomon, and A.S. Phillips, "Communication of the role of natural variability in future North American climate", Nature Climate Change, vol. 2, pp. 775-779, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1562
  2. E. Hawkins, and R. Sutton, "The Potential to Narrow Uncertainty in Regional Climate Predictions", Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, vol. 90, pp. 1095-1108, 2009. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/2009BAMS2607.1

Embargos and confidentiality

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This post is not about climate science, but rather about the science/media interface.

As many of you may be aware, papers that are scheduled to appear in high-profile journals (Science, Nature and a few others) are often released a few days early to journalists under embargo in order to give them a chance to do a fuller story and talk to more people about it prior to filing. On balance, this works reasonably well, and the press stories that come out are on the whole better for it (there is a bigger issue with the need for a news peg for most science stories that this practice dominates, but that isn’t the focus of this post).

But Carl Zimmer and Maggie Koerth-Baker recently reported on a situation where a high profile paper was only provided to journalists under embargo if they signed a non-disclosure agreement restricting their ability to show it to other scientists for comment.

This is both very unusual and, frankly, appalling. Science and science publishing are not a branch of the PR industry but part of an open and self-critical process of inquiry. Authors and scientists who do not want their results discussed and/or criticised should not submit them for publication in the first place. As Koerth-Baker and Zimmer make clear, articles about new papers that are simply reworded official statements are not journalism at all. Indeed, the need for journalists to get an unaffiliated opinion from the author’s peers is an essential check on the occasional tendency of press releases to go over the top when pushing a particular study, and is something that should be happening more, not less.

This post is really just about putting on record that this is not a practice that ‘scientists’ are advocating for and we, like the journalists linked above, would strongly advise that if such conditions are imposed, journalists, journals and editors do not accede to them. That will help resolve the issue of whether ‘no publicity’ is indeed preferable.

Finally, while I am sort of on the topic of science journalism, can’t we please, please, please mandate the citation of the DOI tag in any online story about a new paper? Tracking down the actual paper being described is all-too-often far more difficult than it needs to be. (For example, the doi for the study referred to above took four links and a targeted google search to find. Why?).

Science journalism is going through a tough time at the moment, and practices that take the reporting of science further away from science as a process and more towards the repetition of ‘gee whiz’ factoids, should be resisted by anyone who cares about the public’s engagement with science.

References

  1. G. Séralini, E. Clair, R. Mesnage, S. Gress, N. Defarge, M. Malatesta, D. Hennequin, and J.S. de Vendômois, "RETRACTED: Long term toxicity of a Roundup herbicide and a Roundup-tolerant genetically modified maize", Food and Chemical Toxicology, vol. 50, pp. 4221-4231, 2012. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.fct.2012.08.005