Climate science from climate scientists...
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.
[Read more…] about “Don’t Look Up”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.
This month’s open thread on climate science topics. Note that summaries of annual climate data from 2021 will start to appear in a couple of weeks, and updates to the model/observations comparisons will appear a week or so after that.
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.
The CMIP6 multi-model ensemble is a unique resource with input from scientists and modeling groups from around the world. [CMIP stands for the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, and it is now in its 6th Phase]. But as we’ve discussed before (#NotAllModels) there are some specific issues that require users to be cautious in making predictions. Fortunately, there are useful ‘best practices’ that can help avoid the worst pitfalls.
A new paper by McCrystall et al that has just appeared in Nature Communications illustrates these issues clearly by having some excellent analyses of the changes in Arctic precipitation regimes at different global warming levels, and examining the sensitivity of their metrics to both local and Arctic warming, but unfortunately relying on the CMIP6 multi-model mean for their headline statements and press release.
[Read more…] about Making predictions with the CMIP6 ensembleAt the COP26 gathering last week much of the discussion related to “Net-Zero” goals. This concept derives from important physical science results highlighted in the Special Report on 1.5ºC and more thoroughly in the last IPCC report that future warming is tied to future emissions, and that warming will effectively cease only once anthropogenic CO2 emissions are balanced by anthropogenic CO2 removals. But some activists have (rightly) pointed out that large-scale CO2 removals are as yet untested, and so reliance on them to any significant extent to balance out emissions is akin not really committing to net zero at all. Their point is that “net-zero” is not zero and hence will serve as a smokescreen for insufficient climate action. To help sort this out some background might be helpful.
[Read more…] about Net Zero/Not ZeroA bi-monthly open thread related to climate solutions. This month will start off with COP-26 and many targets and plans and mechanisms will be proposed and discussed. Look out for the updated impacts of the evolving NDCs such as this one from Climate Resource, suggesting that the world could be on track for just a little less than 2ºC warming (relative to the pre-industrial) (if everyone does what they pledge and we are lucky with respect to climate sensitivity). Please be respectful and constructive.
This month’s open thread. The first two weeks will be dominated by COP-26, and various science updates that will be announced there, including this year’s Global Carbon Project report. Curiously, there is some archival interest in the climategate affair possibly in connection to COP-26 (a BBC dramatization “The Trick“, a BBC radio series on the security aspects “The Hack that Changed the World”, and a couple of months ago, a podcast episode of “Cheat!”). Please stick to science-related topics on this thread.
All countries in the world urgently need to adapt to climate change but are not yet in a good position to do so. It’s urgent because we are not even adapted to the present climate. This fact is underscored by recent weather-related calamities, such as flooding in Central Europe and heatwaves over North America. It’s also urgent because the oceans act like a flywheel, making sure that cuts in emission of greenhouse gases will have a lagged effect on global warming.
Climate change adaptation was addressed in the Paris Agreement from 2015, the Climate Adaptation Summit in January 2021, and will be one of four key priorities during the upcoming COP26. Proper climate adaptation of course needs meteorological and climatological data for mapping weather-related risks to prepare us for future extreme weather. However, I would argue that the climate research community has not had a visible presence during any of these meetings. Instead the summits have been dominated by politicians and NGOs.
[Read more…] about A science-based move to climate change adaptation
As many of you will know, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh died on Oct 12, 2021, and in the last week a number of very touching tributes have appeared. Notably, a lovely obituary in the NY Times by Henry Fountain, a segment on the BBC’s Inside Science from Roland Pease, a piece on Bloomberg News by Eric Roston and, of course, an appreciation from his colleagues at World Weather Attribution (including Friederike Otto, the co-recipient of the TIME 100 award to Geert earlier this year).
Geert’s work had been featured often at RealClimate (notably the rapid attribution work for the Pacific North West heat wave earlier this year), and we have made frequent reference to Climate Explorer, the tool he built to provide easier access to many sources of climate data. He also provided us with annual updates for the comparison between a 1981 climate projection to subsequent observations.
He let us know earlier this year that this was likely the last update. Moge hij rusten in vrede.