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about Gavin Schmidt

Gavin Schmidt is a climate modeler, working for NASA and with Columbia University.

New journal: Nature 2023?

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[Last update Dec 6, 2024] There were a number of media reports today [May 11, 2024] related to Yuan et al. (2024), for instance, New Scientist, The Guardian etc. However, this is really just the beginning of what is likely to be a bit of a cottage industry in the next few months relating to possible causes/influences on the extreme temperatures seen in 2023. So to help people keep track, we’ll maintain a list here to focus discussions. Additionally, we’ll extract out the key results (such as the reported radiative forcing) as a guide to how this will all eventually get reconciled.

[Read more…] about New journal: Nature 2023?

References

  1. T. Yuan, H. Song, L. Oreopoulos, R. Wood, H. Bian, K. Breen, M. Chin, H. Yu, D. Barahona, K. Meyer, and S. Platnick, "Abrupt reduction in shipping emission as an inadvertent geoengineering termination shock produces substantial radiative warming", Communications Earth & Environment, vol. 5, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s43247-024-01442-3

More solar shenanigans*

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Going back a few months, I spent a bit of time pointing out the strategy and nonsense in the various Willie Soon and company’s efforts to blame current warming on solar activity. I specifically pointed out their cultish devotion to a single solar activity reconstruction (Hoyt and Schatten, 1993) (HS93); with an update from Scaffeta (2023), and their increasingly elaborate efforts to create temperature series that correlate to it.

Well, Theodosios Chatzistergos has just published a deep dive into the HS93 reconstruction (Chatzistergos, 2024) (C24) and… let’s say the results will not be surprising to regular readers.

[Read more…] about More solar shenanigans*

References

  1. D.V. Hoyt, and K.H. Schatten, "A discussion of plausible solar irradiance variations, 1700‐1992", Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, vol. 98, pp. 18895-18906, 1993. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/93JA01944
  2. N. Scafetta, "Empirical assessment of the role of the Sun in climate change using balanced multi-proxy solar records", Geoscience Frontiers, vol. 14, pp. 101650, 2023. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.gsf.2023.101650
  3. T. Chatzistergos, "A Discussion of Implausible Total Solar-Irradiance Variations Since 1700", Solar Physics, vol. 299, 2024. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11207-024-02262-6

Not just another dot on the graph? Part II

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Annual updates to the model-observation comparisons for 2023 are now complete. The comparisons encompass surface air temperatures, mid-troposphere temperatures (global and tropical, and ‘corrected’), sea surface temperatures, and stratospheric temperatures. In almost every case, the addition of the 2023 numbers was in line with the long term expectation from the models.

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Annual GMSAT predictions and ENSO

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For the last few years (since at least 2016), I’ve shared predictions for the next annual global mean surface air temperature (GMSAT) anomaly based on the long term trend and the state of ENSO at the start of the year. Generally speaking, this has been quite skillful compared to persistence or just the long term trend alone – the eventual anomaly was consistently within the predicted bounds. Until 2023.

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Clauser-ology: Cloudy with a chance of meatballs

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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

The Scafetta Saga

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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

As Soon as Possible

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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