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The Future of Climate Modeling?

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There was an interesting workshop last week focused on the Future of Climate Modelling. It was run by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations (ESMO) which is part of a bewildering alphabet soup of various advisory committees that exist for mostly unclear historical reasons. This one actually does something useful – namely it helps organize the CMIP activities that many modeling groups contribute to (which inform the assessment reports like IPCC and various national Climate Assessments). They had a wide variety of people and perspectives to discuss the changing landscape of climate modeling and what people want from these models. You won’t agree with everything, but it was informative.

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The end of blog comments?

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Over the last decade, commenting has dramatically moved from specific web-sites to general social media platforms, radically changing how people interact with longer-form content (such as blogs, substacks, newspapers and journalism). No single site can compete with the breadth of audience and engagement that is found on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc. This has led to a very clear reduction in the quality of comments on more specialized sites (like RealClimate), as many of you have observed. This is not a problem that appears amenable to stricter moderation.

We are therefore leaning towards suspending comment and open threads on the blog. Feel free to comment on this decision below. If the discussion is good and substantive, it will weigh towards the continuation of the commenting facility. Contrariwise, if it is shallow and unnecessarily hostile, then it is likely to be the last comment thread on this blog. We would still post articles, but anticipate that commentary and criticism will be hosted elsewhere.

As a replacement, we are happy to explore ways to better link to relevant discussions on social media – suggestions for plugins/methods are welcome.

Future rainfall over Sahel and Sahara

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Ethiopia is praying for rain according to a recent report from the Guardian, and ReliefWeb suggests that a lack of rain may be linked to malnutrition in Tchad, as well as reduced crops in Niger. 

The African rainfall deficit appears to be widespread: the Cairo Review reports severe droughts that have been experienced across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa, and Southern Africa in 2011 and 2020. But the picture is also more complicated, as heavy rains have unleashed massive flooding across South Sudan according to the Red Cross.

A similar ambiguity can also be seen in the future prospects for this region. The recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report (Assessment Report 6, often referred to as ‘AR6’) presents maps showing projected changes in the precipitation, e.g. in Figure SPM.5 and the IPCC Atlas. 

The most recent precipitation projections reveal a remarkable dark green blob covering parts of Sahel and Sahara in addition to the Arabian peninsula, suggesting that this dry region may be blessed with more rainfall in the future (e.g. Figure 1). 

Figure 1. A map from Figure SPM.5 from IPCC AR6 slides, showing percentage change in annual mean precipitation from a historical baseline (1850-1900). These results represent the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 6 (also known as ‘CMIP6’) Global Climate Models (GCMs). 

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Another dot on the graphs (Part II)

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We have now updated the model-observations comparison page for the 2021 SAT and MSU TMT datasets. Mostly this is just ‘another dot on the graphs’ but we have made a couple of updates of note. First, we have updated the observational products to their latest versions (i.e. HadCRUT5, NOAA-STAR 4.1 etc.), though we are still using NOAA’s GlobalTemp v5 – the Interim version will be available later this year. Secondly, we have added a comparison of the observations to the new CMIP6 model ensemble.

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Another dot on the graph

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So last week was the annual release of the temperature records from NASA, NOAA and Berkeley Earth. The Copernicus ERA5 data was released a few days ago, and the HadCRUT data will follow soon. Unlike in years past, there is no longer any serious discrepancy between the records – which use multiple approaches for the ocean temperatures, the homogenization of the weather stations records, and interpolation.

Depending on the product, 2021 was either the 5th, 6th or 7th warmest year, but in all cases, it is part of the string of warm years (since 2015) that have all been more than 1ºC warmer than the late 19th C.

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“Don’t Look Up”

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The highlight of the movie season for climate science has clearly been the release on Dec 24th 2021 of “Don’t Look Up”. While nominally about a different kind of disaster – the discovery of a comet heading to Earth on a collision course – the skewering of our current science-policy dysfunction transcends the specifics and makes a powerful metaphor for climate change, and even the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

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Forced responses: Jan 2022

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A bi-monthly open thread related to climate solutions.

PS. New year, new moderation policy. Please be substantive – sniping, insults, and tedious repetition will just be culled. We want to maintain a civil and productive discourse here, but the comment threads may need to be re-evaluated if that doesn’t happen.