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And the winner is…

17 Nov 2015 by group

Remember the forecast of a temporary global cooling which made headlines around the world in 2008? We didn’t think it was reliable and offered a bet. The forecast period is now over: we were right, the forecast was not skillful.

Back around 2007/8, two high-profile papers claimed to produce, for the first time, skilful predictions of decadal climate change, based on new techniques of ocean state initialization in climate models. Both papers made forecasts of the future evolution of global mean and regional temperatures. The first paper, Smith et al. (2007), predicted “that internal variability will partially offset the anthropogenic global warming signal for the next few years. However, climate will continue to warm, with at least half of the years after 2009 predicted to exceed the warmest year currently on record.” The second, Keenlyside et al., (2008), forecast in contrast that “global surface temperature may not increase over the next decade, as natural climate variations in the North Atlantic and tropical Pacific temporarily offset the projected anthropogenic warming.”

This month marks the end of the forecast period for Keenlyside et al and so their forecasts can now be cleanly compared to what actually happened. This is particularly interesting to RealClimate, since we offered a bet to the authors on whether the results would be accurate based on our assessment of their methodology. They ignored our offer but now the time period of the bet has passed, it’s worth checking how it would have gone.

[Read more…] about And the winner is…

References

  1. D.M. Smith, S. Cusack, A.W. Colman, C.K. Folland, G.R. Harris, and J.M. Murphy, "Improved Surface Temperature Prediction for the Coming Decade from a Global Climate Model", Science, vol. 317, pp. 796-799, 2007. http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1139540
  2. N.S. Keenlyside, M. Latif, J. Jungclaus, L. Kornblueh, and E. Roeckner, "Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector", Nature, vol. 453, pp. 84-88, 2008. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature06921

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, Instrumental Record, IPCC

Bjørn Lomborg, just a scientist with a different opinion?

31 Aug 2015 by Stefan

Bjørn Lomborg is a well-known media personality who argues that there are more important priorities than reducing emissions to limit global warming. In a recent controversy centering on him, the Australian government (known for its contradictory position on climate change) offered the University of Western Australia (UWA) $4 million to make Lomborg professor – which UWA first accepted, but then after massive protest from its staff and students refused. The Australian government was quick to label it a “freedom of speech” issue that Lomborg should get a university position, and vowed to find another university that would host him. However, free speech doesn’t guarantee everyone a university position; there are also academic qualifications required.

A translation of this post in Spanish is available here.
[Read more…] about Bjørn Lomborg, just a scientist with a different opinion?

Filed Under: Climate Science, Communicating Climate, skeptics

How long does it take Antarctica to notice the Northern Hemisphere is warming?

29 Apr 2015 by eric

Eric Steig

A series of large and abrupt climate changes occurred during the last ice age, most clearly expressed in ice cores from Greenland and other paleoclimate data from the circum-North-Atlantic region. Since the discovery of these events, we’ve been trying to pin down the timing of abrupt climate changes elsewhere on the globe. Were there corresponding events in the Southern Hemisphere? And did they occur at the same time? A new paper published this week in Nature (April 30th, 2015) provide a significantly updated answer to these questions. Many in the climate research community — both modern climate and paleoclimate — will find the results quite interesting.

The new paper is the culmination of a huge effort to develop the best-dated long ice core record from Antarctica, rivaling the GISP2 and GRIP ice cores obtained from central Greenland in the early 1990s, and the more recent NGRIP and NEEM cores from North Greenland (e.g. NEEM Community Members, 2014). The core was obtained at the West Antarctic Ice Sheet divide (WAIS Divide), led by the Desert Research Institute and the University of Nevada, with the University of New Hampshire. The new paper was written by a consortium of postdocs, faculty, and students at the Oregon State University and University of Washington: Christo Buizert, myself, and Joel Pedro (now at University of Copenhagen), with Brad Markle, Ed Brook, Jeff Severinghaus and Ken Taylor. We have more than 70 other co-authors — faculty colleagues, students, postdocs, logistics coordinators, and ice-drillers — who all made substantial contributions as well. These deep ice cores are a lot of work!

We published records from the WAIS Divide ice core in 2013, covering the last two millennia and the last 30 thousand years (Steig et al., 2013, WAIS Divide Project Members, 2013). Our new work, WAIS Divide Project Members, 2015, extends the record to the bottom of the core (nearly the bottom of the ice sheet at 3400 m depth), and an age of 68 thousand years. Details on the timescale for the core are given in the open-access paper in Climate of the Past (Buizert et al., 2015). The new paper in Nature provides a comparison of the timing of changes in Antarctic temperature with the timing of the abrupt warming and cooling events that characterize the Greenland ice core records. Note that the comparison is actually made between the records of oxygen isotope ratios (δ18O), but we have very strong evidence that these track temperature quite faithfully on the relevant timescales, so I’ll use “temperature” here for simplicity.

The abrupt events in Greenland, characterized by rapid transitions from cold “stadial” to warm “interstadial” conditions and back, and commonly known as Dansgaard-Oeschger (D-O) events, were felt across the Northern Hemisphere almost immediately, as far as we can tell. But the impact of D-O events in Antarctica has been ambiguous. We’ve known for some time that temperatures in Antarctica change more slowly, and with much smaller amplitude, than in the Northern Hemisphere. In general, the Antarctic temperatures begin to decline when Greenland warms abruptly, and to increase when Greenland cools abruptly (Blunier et al., 1998). This relationship is often called the “bipolar seesaw” and is commonly attributed to the redistribution of heat between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres via changes in the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC). We’ve also been pretty sure that each of the D-O interstadials has a corresponding warm peak in Antarctica, referred to as the “Antarctic Isotope Maximum” (AIM) events (EPICA Community Members, 2006, and Stefan Rahmstorf’s write-up in an earlier RealClimate post). But the exact phase relationship has been unknown, making it problematic to validate model simulations with confidence (see e.g. Roe and Steig, 2004, Steig, 2006).
WAIS_Divide_record

The first paper to really start to pin down the phase relationship was that of Pedro et al., 2011, who showed that the most recent of the major abrupt events in Greenland cores (the Bølling warming about 14,700 years ago and the Younger Dryas cooling about 12,880 years ago), the direction of Antarctic temperatures changed at almost exactly the same time. (Note that the Antarctic temperatures don’t change abruptly — their slow trends simply reverse sign, as shown in the figure). But the uncertainties estimated by Pedro et al. were about 200 years on either side of zero. That’s impressively good precision for something that happened more than 10,000 years ago, but not quite good enough. Our new work firms up these numbers a lot, and shows that Antarctic temperatures did not really change at the same time as the abrupt events in Greenland. Instead, when an abrupt D-O warming occurs in Greenland, it takes about 200 years until the concomitant cooling begins in Antarctica. Similarly, when an abrupt cooling occurs in Greenland, it takes about 200 years until Antarctic starts warming up. Our uncertainties are much smaller, +/-95 years*, and it is very unlikely that our numbers overlap with zero. Antarctica, in other words, almost certainly takes a century or two to notice what is happening in the Greenland.

WAIS_Divide_timing
The 200-year timescale is fascinating, because it is longer than suggested by a number of modeling studies, such as the simple “bipolar seesaw” model of Stocker and Johnson, 2003, as well as the fully-coupled transient run of a general circulation model by He et al., 2013: both show an essentially instantaneous response between the Northern Hemisphere and the Antarctic. Yet it’s also shorter than implied by many discussions of the relationship; for example, we (Steig and Alley, 2002) made the case for a 400-year lag between Greenland Antarctica, which Schmittner et al., 2003 reproduced in a climate model in which the AMOC is perturbed.

So what does the intermediate timescale of ~200 years tell us? It’s important to recognize that there are reasons why one might expect either a “fast” propagation or a “slow” propagation of the Greenland climate signal to the Antarctic. The very large sea ice changes in the North Atlantic associated with D-O events would have an impact on the atmosphere, and this should propagate global signals almost instantaneously. Indeed, this must have occurred, or we wouldn’t have the evidence that we do for abrupt changes in places as far flung as China, India, or the tropical Pacific that are in phase with Greenland temperature change. Methane variations, which are probably of tropical origin, are in phase with Greenland temperature within about 20 years (e.g., Rosen et al., 2014).

The ocean itself can propagate signals very fast, via adjustment of the upper ocean by fast Kelvin waves propagating along the ocean boundaries (e.g. Johnson and Marshall, 2002). For example, Schmittner et al. (2003), and Rind et al. (2001) both found that the North Atlantic signal in their models propagates to the South Atlantic region very quickly, appearing in subsurface waters with a time lag of only about a few decades. However, they also find a century or multi-century delay in the further southward propagation from the South Atlantic to the Antarctic across the Antarctic Circumpolar Current (ACC). Furthermore, the propagation time varies with the strength of the ACC as imposed in the model.

There are, in short, multiple parts of the ocean and atmosphere system involved, and these have different timescales. It appears that our results are right about where the physics suggests they should be. A key factor in capturing this physics properly in models seems to be how (or how well) the ACC is simulated. That’s interesting, and highly relevant to modern climate studies. How the ACC is changing now, or may change in the future, is a topic of significant interest (Fyfe and Saeko, 2005; Böning et al., 2008). And the question of how long it will take the Antarctic to catch up with the rest of the globe is of critical importance to long term projections of the response of the ice sheet to climate change — and hence the response of sea level. The D-O events and the current anthropogenic global warming are of course very different beasts, but the long timescales indicated by our results are certainly in keeping with climate model projections of the future, showing that most of Antarctic should lag the rest of the planet (recent rapid warming on the Antarctic Peninsula and West Antarctica not withstanding).

Note that our results should not be taken as demonstrating anything very specific in terms of the cause of Dansgaard-O events. To be sure, the results demonstrate a clear north-to-south direction in the propagation of the climate signal associated with abrupt D-O warming and cooling events. But that doesn’t tell us what the driving “trigger” is. To use an analogy suggested by co-author Severinghaus, suppose we didn’t know anything about the physics relating lightning to thunder. Careful measurements of their relative timing would reveal that thunder always occurs very soon (or immediately) after lightning. But hearing thunder gives you only a general prediction of when the next lightning will be observed. One would correctly deduce that lightning causes thunder. That’s progress. But it would not tell you the cause of the lightning in the first place.

For my part, I’ve long been a skeptic about the old idea that the D-O variations are ultimately driven by meltwater and/or iceberg fluxes into the North Atlantic (the Day after Tomorrow scenario, if you will). There are only 6 clearly-identified Heinrich events (that is, layers of terrestrial sediment in ocean sediment cores from the North Atlantic, evidence for massive iceberg discharges from the Laurentide ice sheet) but there are at least 23 D-O events. It more likely that there is intrinsic variability in the coupled ocean-atmosphere system, as found for example in a long simulation with the climate model CCSM4 by Peltier and Vettoretti (2014 and 2015) (though there is debate about the validity of the very low values for ocean vertical mixing used in those simulations). Iceberg discharges are then just the consequence, not the cause, of changes in ocean circulation, as argued recently by Alvarez Solaz et al. (2013) and also suggested by Barker et al. (2015) who found that on average, evidence for icebergs in the North Atlantic follow, rather than precede, the abrupt coolings at the end of some D-O events. That doesn’t mean that the huge ice and meltwater fluxes associated with Heinrich events don’t have an impact; most modeling work suggests that they would. But it may be important in this context that our results show no dependence of the ~200-year lag on whether or not a Heinrich event has occurred: that is, there is no evidence that “Heinrich stadials” (the cold periods during which Heinrich events occur) are unusual with respect to ocean “seesaw” dynamics. The role of these events in millennial scale variability therefore remains an important, and open, research question (see e.g., Margari et al., 2010).

In the meantime our precise observations of the phasing of D-O and AIM events provide an important new constraint against which to validate model simulations designed to capture the dynamics of these interesting features of the climate system.

UPDATE: The News & Views article about our article, by Tas van Ommen is worth a read. Available here (subscription based only, I’m afraid).



Notes. *The ability to obtain such small uncertainties is owing to four main things. First, we have very high resolution measurements of methane in both the WAIS Divide and the Greenland cores; methane is globally well mixed, and so abrupt changes in methane must happen at the same time (within a year) in cores from both regions. This means that we can synchronize the age of the gas trapped in the bubbles within the cores very precisely. Second, we have very high resolution measurements of the nitrogen isotope ratio (15N/14N in atmospheric N2), also trapped in the bubbles in the cores. This isotope ratio provides information on the age difference between the gas and the ice, because gravitational settling increases the 15N/14N ratio; this depends on the thickness of the firn (the permeable ice between the surface and the impermeable ice at depth where bubbles are trapped). The deeper the firn, the longer it takes to trap gases, and the larger the age difference. It’s the age of the ice that we’re actually interested in, because this, not the gas trapped within the ice, is what the δ18O measurements are made on. Fourth, this age difference is much smaller at WAIS Divide than in any other long Antarctic record; it is at most ~500 years, compared with e.g., ~4000 years at Vostok. Finally, we also have unprecedentedly high resolution measurements of δ18O, and very high quality borehole temperature measurements, which together provide a very robust measure of the temperature variations through time.

Data: The data from the paper are all available in the Supplement to the paper. The timescale and the oxygen isotope data from our lab — what most people will be interested in — are available at the National Snow and Ice Data Center, at doi:10.7265/N5GT5K41.

References:

Barker, S., J. Chen, X. Gong, L. Jonkers, G. Knorr, D. Thornalley. Icebergs not the trigger for North Atlantic cold events. Nature 520, 333–336, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14330.

Blunier, T., J. Chappellaz, J. Schwander, A. Dällenbach, B. Stauffer, T.F. Stocker, D. Raynaud, J. Jouzel, H.B. Clausen, C.U. Hammer, and S.J. Johnsen, “”, Nature, vol. 394, pp. 739-743, 1998. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/29447.

Böning, C.W., A. Dispert, M. Visbeck, S. R. Rintoul, F. U. Schwarzkop. The response of the Antarctic Circumpolar Current to recent climate change. Nature Geoscience 1, 864-869 (2008).
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo362.

Buizert, C., Cuffey, K. M., Severinghaus, J. P., Baggenstos, D., Fudge, T. J., Steig, E. J., Markle, B. R., Winstrup, M., Rhodes, R. H., Brook, E. J., Sowers, T. A., Clow, G. D., Cheng, H., Edwards, R. L., Sigl, M., McConnell, J. R., and Taylor, K. C.: The WAIS Divide deep ice core WD2014 chronology – Part 1: Methane synchronization (68–31 ka BP) and the gas age–ice age difference, Clim. Past, 11, 153-173, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-11-153-2015.

EPICA Community Members, “One-to-one coupling of glacial climate variability in Greenland and Antarctica”, Nature, vol. 444, pp. 195-198, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature05301

Fyfe, J.C. and O. A. Saenko, 2005: Human-Induced Change in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. J. Climate, 18, 3068–3073. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/JCLI3447.1

Grootes, P.M., M. Stuiver, J.W.C. White, S. Johnsen, and J. Jouzel, “Comparison of oxygen isotope records from the GISP2 and GRIP Greenland ice cores”, Nature, vol. 366, pp. 552-554, 1993. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/366552a0.

He, F., J.D. Shakun, P.U. Clark, A.E. Carlson, Z. Liu, B.L. Otto-Bliesner, and J.E. Kutzbach, “Northern Hemisphere forcing of Southern Hemisphere climate during the last deglaciation”, Nature, vol. 494, pp. 81-85, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11822.

Margari, V., L.C. Skinner, P.C. Tzedakis, A. Ganopolski, M. Vautravers, N.J. Shackleton. The nature of millennial-scale climate variability during the past two glacial periods. Nature Geoscience 3, 127 – 131 (2010) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo740.

NEEM Community Members, Eemian interglacial reconstructed from a Greenland folded ice core, Nature, vol. 493, pp. 489-494, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature11789.

Pedro, J.B., T.D. van Ommen, S.O. Rasmussen, V.I. Morgan, J. Chappellaz, A.D. Moy, V. Masson-Delmotte, and M. Delmotte, The last deglaciation: timing the bipolar seesaw, Climate of the Past, vol. 7, pp. 671-683, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.5194/cp-7-671-2011.

Peltier, W. R., and G. Vettoretti, Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillations predicted in a comprehensive model of glacial climate: A “kicked” salt oscillator in the Atlantic, Geophys. Res. Lett.,41, 7306–7313, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2014GL061413.

Rind, D., G. Russell, G. Schmidt, S. Sheth, D. Collins, P. deMemocal, J. Teller. Effects of glacial meltwater in the GISS coupled atmosphere–ocean model, 2. A bipolar seesaw in Atlantic Deep Water production. Journal Geophysical Research, 106, pp. 27,355–27,365, 2001. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2001JD000954

Roe, G.H. and E.J. Steig. Characterization of Millennial-Scale Climate Variability. J. Climate, 17, 1929–1944. http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/full/10.1175/1520-0442%282004%29017%3C1929%3ACOMCV%3E2.0.CO%3B2.

Rosen, J.L., E.J. Brook, J.P. Severinghaus, T. Blunier, L.E. Mitchell, J.E. Lee, J.S. Edwards, and V. Gkinis, An ice core record of near-synchronous global climate changes at the Bølling transition, Nature Geosci, vol. 7, pp. 459-463, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/ngeo2147.

Schmittner, A., O. Saenko, and A. Weaver, Coupling of the hemispheres in observations and simulations of glacial climate change, Quaternary Science Reviews, vol. 22, pp. 659-671, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/S0277-3791(02)00184-1.

Steig, E.J. et al., Q. Ding, J.W.C. White, M. Küttel, S.B. Rupper, T.A. Neumann, P.D. Neff, A.J.E. Gallant, P.A. Mayewski, K.C. Taylor, G. Hoffmann, D.A. Dixon, S.W. Schoenemann, B.R. Markle, T.J. Fudge, D.P. Schneider, A.J. Schauer, R.P. Teel, B.H. Vaughn, L. Burgener, J. Williams, and E. Korotkikh, “Recent climate and ice-sheet changes in West Antarctica compared with the past 2,000 years”, Nature Geosci, vol. 6, pp. 372-375, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/NGEO1778.

Steig, E.J., Climate change: The south–north connection, Nature, vol. 444, pp. 152-153, 2006. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/444152a

Stocker, T.F. and S.J. Johnsen, A minimum thermodynamic model for the bipolar seesaw, Paleoceanography, vol. 18, pp. n/a-n/a, 2003. http://dx.doi.org/10.1029/2003PA000920.

Vettoretti, G. and W.R. Peltier (2015), Interhemispheric air temperature phase relationships in the nonlinear Dansgaard-Oeschger oscillation. Geophys. Res. Lett., 42: 1180–1189. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/2014GL062898.

WAIS Divide Project Members. Onset of deglacial warming in West Antarctica driven by local orbital forcing. Nature, 500: 440-444, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature12376.

WAIS Divide Project Members. Precise interpolar phasing of abrupt climate change during the last ice age. Nature http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14401.

Filed Under: Climate Science

What’s going on in the North Atlantic?

23 Mar 2015 by Stefan

The North Atlantic between Newfoundland and Ireland is practically the only region of the world that has defied global warming and even cooled. Last winter there even was the coldest on record – while globally it was the hottest on record. Our recent study (Rahmstorf et al. 2015) attributes this to a weakening of the Gulf Stream System, which is apparently unique in the last thousand years.

The whole world is warming. The whole world? No! A region in the subpolar Atlantic has cooled over the past century – unique in the world for an area with reasonable data coverage (Fig. 1). So what’s so special about this region between Newfoundland and Ireland?

Rahmstorf_2015_1rc

Fig. 1 Linear temperature trend from 1900 to 2013. The cooling in the subpolar North Atlantic is remarkable and well documented by numerous measurements – unlike the cold spot in central Africa, which on closer inspection apparently is an artifact of incomplete and inhomogeneous weather station data.

[Read more…] about What’s going on in the North Atlantic?

Filed Under: Climate Science

A new sea level curve

14 Jan 2015 by Stefan

The “zoo” of global sea level curves calculated from tide gauge data has grown – tomorrow a new reconstruction of our US colleagues around Carling Hay from Harvard University will appear in Nature (Hay et al. 2015). That is a good opportunity for an overview over the available data curves. The differences are really in the details, the “big picture” of sea-level rise does not change. In all curves, the current rates of rise are the highest since records began.

The following graph shows the new sea level curve as compared to six known ones.

haysl1

Fig 1 Sea level curves calculated by different research groups with various methods. The curves show the sea level relative to the satellite era (since 1992). Graph: Klaus Bittermann.

All curves show the well-known modern sea level rise, but the exact extent and time evolution of the rise differ somewhat. Up to about 1970, the new reconstruction of Hay et al. runs at the top of the existing uncertainty range. For the period from 1880 AD, however, it shows the same total increase as the current favorites by Church & White. Starting from 1900 AD it is about 25 mm less. This difference is at the margins of significance: the uncertainty ranges overlap. [Read more…] about A new sea level curve

References

  1. C.C. Hay, E. Morrow, R.E. Kopp, and J.X. Mitrovica, "Probabilistic reanalysis of twentieth-century sea-level rise", Nature, vol. 517, pp. 481-484, 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nature14093

Filed Under: Climate Science, Instrumental Record, Oceans

Ten years of RealClimate: Thanks

10 Dec 2014 by group

rc10 As well as the current core team – David Archer, Eric Steig, Gavin Schmidt, Mike Mann, Rasmus Benestad, Ray Bradley, Ray Pierrehumbert, Stefan Rahmstorf – this blog has had input from many others over the years:

The 90+ guest contributors and previous team members who bring a necessary diversity of experience and expertise to the blog: Abby Swann, Alan Robock, Anders Levermann, Andrew Monaghan, Andy Baker, Andy Dessler, Axel Schweiger, Barry Bickmore, Bart Strengers, Bart Verheggen, Beate Liepert, Ben Santer, Brian Helmuth, Brian Soden, Brigitte Knopf, Caspar Ammann, Cecilia Bitz, Chris Colose, Christopher Hennon, Corrine LeQuere, Darrell Kaufman, David Briske, David Karoly, David Ritson, David Vaughan, Dim Coumou, Dirk Notz, Dorothy Koch, Drew Shindell, Ed Hawkins, Eugenie Scott, Figen Mekik, Francisco Doblas-Reyes, Frank Zeman, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Georg Feulner, Georg Hoffmann, George Tselioudis, Jacob Harold, Jared Rennie, Jason West, Jeffrey Pierce, Jim Bouldin, Jim Prall, John Fasullo, Joy Shumake-Guillemot, Juliane Fry, Karen Shell, Keith Briffa, Kelly Levin, Kevin Brown, Kevin Trenberth, Kim Cobb, Kyle Swanson, Loretta Mickley, Marco Tedesco, Mark Boslough, Martin Manning, Martin Vermeer, Matt King, Matthew England, Mauri Pelto, Michael Bentley, Michael Oppenheimer, Michael Tobis, Michelle L’Heureux, Natassa Romanou, Paul Higgins, Peter Minnett, Phil Jones, Pippa Whitehouse, PubPeer, Raimund Muscheler, Rein Haarsma, Richard Millar, Robert Rohde, Ron Lindsay, Ron Miller, Russell Seitz, Sarah Feakins, Scott Mandia, Scott Saleska, Simon Lewis, Spencer Weart, Stephen Schneider, Steve Ghan, Steve Sherwood, Sybren Drijfhout, Tad Pfeffer, Tamino, Terry Gerlach, Thibault de Garidel, Thomas Crowley, Tim Osborn, Tom Melvin, Urs Neu, Vicky Slonosky, William Anderegg, William Connolley and Zeke Hausfather;

The thousands of commenters that have enlivened the conversation and explored many issues in more depth than is possible in the main posts;

The translators of hundreds of posts into Polish, French, Czech, German, Italian, Spanish, Turkish, Mandarin etc;

Miloslav Nic for his “Guide to RC” which provides a comprehensive set of indexes to the content here;

Ryan and the internet service providers at Peer, and now Webfaction, that have helped deal with the many technical challenges and to Environmental Media Services and later, the Science Communication Network, for covering some of those costs;

A sincere thanks to all.

Filed Under: Climate Science

The most popular deceptive climate graph

8 Dec 2014 by Stefan

The “World Climate Widget” from Tony Watts’ blog is probably the most popular deceptive image among climate “skeptics”.  We’ll take it under the microscope and show what it would look like when done properly.

So called “climate skeptics” deploy an arsenal of misleading graphics, with which the human influence on the climate can be down played (here are two other  examples deconstructed at Realclimate).  The image below is especially widespread.  It is displayed on many “climate skeptic” websites and is regularly updated.

Watts_world_climate_widget

The “World Climate Widget” of US “climate skeptic” Anthony Watts with our explanations added.  The original can be found on Watts’ blog

What would a more honest display of temperature, CO2 and sunspots look like? [Read more…] about The most popular deceptive climate graph

Filed Under: Climate Science, Communicating Climate, Instrumental Record, skeptics, Sun-earth connections

The most common fallacy in discussing extreme weather events + Update

25 Mar 2014 by Stefan

Does global warming make extreme weather events worse? Here is the #1 flawed reasoning you will have seen about this question: it is the classic confusion between absence of evidence and evidence for absence of an effect of global warming on extreme weather events. Sounds complicated? It isn’t. I’ll first explain it in simple terms and then give some real-life examples.

The two most fundamental properties of extreme events are that they are rare (by definition) and highly random. These two aspects (together with limitations in the data we have) make it very hard to demonstrate any significant changes. And they make it very easy to find all sorts of statistics that do not show an effect of global warming – even if it exists and is quite large.

Would you have been fooled by this?

[Read more…] about The most common fallacy in discussing extreme weather events + Update

Filed Under: Climate Science, Communicating Climate, statistics

Going with the wind

17 Feb 2014 by group

A new paper in Nature Climate Change out this week by England and others joins a number of other recent papers seeking to understand the climate dynamics that have led to the so-called “slowdown” in global warming. As we and others have pointed out previously (e.g. here), the fact that global average temperatures can deviate for a decade or longer from the long term trend comes as no surprise. Moreover, it’s not even clear that the deviation has been as large as is commonly assumed (as discussed e.g. in the Cowtan and Way study earlier this year), and has little statistical significance in any case. Nevertheless, it’s still interesting, and there is much to be learned about the climate system from studying the details.

Several studies have shown that much of the excess heating of the planet due to the radiative imbalance from ever-increasing greenhouses gases has gone into the ocean, rather than the atmosphere (see e.g. Foster and Rahmstorf and Balmaseda et al.). In their new paper, England et al. show that this increased ocean heat uptake — which has occurred mostly in the tropical Pacific — is associated with an anomalous strengthening of the trade winds. Stronger trade winds push warm surface water towards the west, and bring cold deeper waters to the surface to replace them. This raises the thermocline (boundary between warm surface water and cold deep water), and increases the amount of heat stored in the upper few hundred meters of the ocean. Indeed, this is what happens every time there is a major La Niña event, which is why it is globally cooler during La Niña years. One could think of the last ~15 years or so as a long term “La-Niña-like” anomaly (punctuated, of course, by actual El Niño (like the exceptionally warm years 1998, 2005) and La Niña events (like the relatively cool 2011).

A very consistent understanding is thus emerging of the coupled ocean and atmosphere dynamics that have caused the recent decadal-scale departure from the longer-term global warming trend. That understanding suggests that the “slowdown” in warming is unlikely to continue, as England explains in his guest post, below. –Eric Steig

Guest commentary by Matthew England (UNSW)

For a long time now climatologists have been tracking the global average air temperature as a measure of planetary climate variability and trends, even though this metric reflects just a tiny fraction of Earth’s net energy or heat content. But it’s used widely because it’s the metric that enjoys the densest array of in situ observations. The problem of course is that this quantity has so many bumps and kinks, pauses and accelerations that predicting its year-to-year path is a big challenge. Over the last century, no single forcing agent is clearer than anthropogenic greenhouse gases, yet zooming into years or decades, modes of variability become the signal, not the noise. Yet despite these basics of climate physics, any slowdown in the overall temperature trend sees lobby groups falsely claim that global warming is over. Never mind that the globe – our planet – spans the oceans, atmosphere, land and ice systems in their entirety.

This was one of the motivations for our study out this week in Nature Climate Change (England et al., 2014)  With the global-average surface air temperature (SAT) more-or-less steady since 2001, scientists have been seeking to explain the climate mechanics of the slowdown in warming seen in the observations during 2001-2013. One simple way to address this is to examine what is different about the recent decade compared to the preceding decade when the global-mean SAT metric accelerated. This can be quantified via decade-mean differences, or via multi-decadal trends, which are roughly equivalent if the trends are more-or-less linear, or if the focus is on the low frequency changes.

[Read more…] about Going with the wind

References

  1. G. Foster, and S. Rahmstorf, "Global temperature evolution 1979–2010", Environmental Research Letters, vol. 6, pp. 044022, 2011. http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/6/4/044022
  2. M.A. Balmaseda, K.E. Trenberth, and E. Källén, "Distinctive climate signals in reanalysis of global ocean heat content", Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 40, pp. 1754-1759, 2013. http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/grl.50382
  3. M.H. England, S. McGregor, P. Spence, G.A. Meehl, A. Timmermann, W. Cai, A.S. Gupta, M.J. McPhaden, A. Purich, and A. Santoso, "Recent intensification of wind-driven circulation in the Pacific and the ongoing warming hiatus", Nature Climate Change, vol. 4, pp. 222-227, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2106

Filed Under: Climate modelling, Climate Science, El Nino, Instrumental Record, Oceans

Global temperature 2013

27 Jan 2014 by Stefan

The global temperature data for 2013 are now published. 2010 and 2005 remain the warmest years since records began in the 19th Century. 1998 ranks third in two records, and in the analysis of Cowtan & Way, which interpolates the data-poor region in the Arctic with a better method, 2013 is warmer than 1998 (even though 1998 was a record El Nino year, and 2013 was neutral).

The end of January, when the temperature measurements of the previous year are in, is always the time to take a look at the global temperature trend. (And, as the Guardian noted aptly, also the time where the “climate science denialists feverishly yell […] that global warming stopped in 1998.”) Here is the ranking of the warmest years in the four available data sets of the global near-surface temperatures (1):

Rank
NASA GISS
NOAA NCDC
HadCRUT4
Cowtan & Way
1
2010
2010
2010
2010
2
2005
2005
2005
2005
3
2007
1998
1998
2007
4
2002
2013
2003
2009
5
1998
2003
2006
2013

[Read more…] about Global temperature 2013

Filed Under: Climate Science, Instrumental Record

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