Blog Profile / RealClimate
| URL : | http://www.realclimate.org/ | |
|---|---|---|
| Filed Under: | Issues & Causes / Climate Change | |
| Posts on Regator: | 385 | |
| Posts / Week: | 1.6 | |
| Archived Since: | November 10, 2008 | |
Blog Post Archive
Extremely hot
By Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou One claim frequently heard regarding extreme heat waves goes something like this: ”Since this heat wave broke the previous record by 5 °C, global warming can’t have much to do with it since that has been only 1 °C over the 20th century”. Here we explain why we find [...]
Data presentation: A trend lesson
I just came across an interesting way to eliminate the impression of a global warming. A trick used to argue that the global warming had stopped, and the simple recipe is as follows: Cut off parts of the measurements and only keep the last 17 years. Plot all the months of these 17 years to [...]
Updating the CRU and HadCRUT temperature data
The latest incarnation of the CRUTEM land surface temperatures and the HadCRUT global temperatures are out this week. This is the 4th version of these products, which have undergone a number of significant changes over that time and so this is a good opportunity to discuss how and why data products evolve and what that [...]
Sherwood Roland, CFCs, ozone depletion and the public role of scientists
Many of you will have read the obituaries of the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Sherwood Roland (Nature, BBC) who sadly died over the weekend. DotEarth has a good collection of links to papers, videos and tributes. We have sometimes commented on the connections between the issue of CFC-driven ozone depletion and anthropogenic global warming. In both [...]
Misrepresentation from Lindzen
Richard Lindzen is a very special character in the climate debate – very smart, high profile, and with a solid background in atmospheric dynamics. He has, in times past, raised interesting critiques of the mainstream science. None of them, however, have stood the test of time – but exploring the issues was useful. More recently [...]
Unforced Variations: March 2012
This month’s open thread – for appetizers we have: William Nordhaus’s extremely impressive debunking in the NY Review of Books of the WSJ 16 letter and public polling on the issue of climate change. Over to you…
Bickmore on the WSJ response
Guest commentary from Barry Bickmore (repost) The Wall Street Journal posted yet another op-ed by 16 scientists and engineers, which even include a few climate scientists(!!!). Here is the editor’s note to explain the context. Editor’s Note: The authors of the following letter, listed below, are also the signatories of“No Need to Panic About Global [...]
Free speech and academic freedom
In a recent interview for a Norwegian magazine (Teknisk Ukeblad, 0412), the IPCC chair Rajendra Kumar Pachauri told the journalist that he had received death threats in connection with his role as a head for the IPCC. There have also been recent reports of threats and harrasment of climate scientists for their stance on climate [...]
2011 Updates to model-data comparisons
And so it goes – another year, another annual data point. As has become a habit (2009, 2010), here is a brief overview and update of some of the most relevant model/data comparisons. We include the standard comparisons of surface temperatures, sea ice and ocean heat content to the AR4 and 1988 Hansen et al [...]
Global Temperatures, Volcanic Eruptions, and Trees that Didn’t Bark
My co-authors and I have just published an article in Nature Geoscience (advance online publication here; associated press release here) which seeks to explain certain enigmatic features of tree-ring reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere (NH) temperatures of the past millennium. Show More Summary
So What’s A Teacher to Do?
Guest Commentary by Eugenie Scott, National Center for Science Education Imagine you’re a middle-school science teacher, and you get to the section of the course where you’re to talk about climate change. You mention the “C” words, and two students walk out of the class. Or you mention global warming and a hand shoots up. [...]
Unforced Variations: February 2012
This month’s open thread. Current topics are focused on the laughingly bad Daily Mail article by David Rose, the fallout from the Wall Street Journal’s latest regurgitation of why no-one should ever do anything ever. And perhaps someone might want to audit some of David Whitehouse’s arithmetic and reading comprehension… Or anything else. Within reason.
The AR4 attribution statement
What the IPCC AR4 attribution statement meant for the anthropogenic contribution to recent global warming.
The “Vision Prize”
A group of researchers at Carnegie Mellon University is trying to get a better understanding of the views of earth scientists regarding various climate change topics. They have set up an ongoing poll to do this, called the Vision Prize. It’s a short (10 question) poll, covering topics like the rate of CO2 increase, predicted [...]
The dog is the weather
A TV series that ran on Norwegian TV (NRK) last year included a simple and fun cartoon that demonstrates some important concepts relative to weather and climate: In the animation, the man’s path can be considered as analogous to a directional climatic change, while the path traced by his dog’s whimsical movements represent weather fluctuations, [...]
Open Climate 101 Online
Almost 3000 non-science major undergraduates at the University of Chicago have taken PHSC13400, Global Warming: Understanding the Forecast, since Ray Pierrehumbert and I (David Archer) first developed it back in 1995. Since the publication of the textbook for the class in 2005 (and a much-cleaned-up 2nd edition now shipping), enrollment has gone through the roof, [...]
An online model of methane in the atmosphere
I’ve put together an easy-to-play-with online model of methane in the atmosphere. I’m going to use it for teaching along with the rest of the Understanding the Forecast webmodels, but it was designed to be relevant to the issue of abrupt new methane burps as we’ve been ruminating about lately on Realclimate. The model runs [...]
An Arctic methane worst-case scenario
Let’s suppose that the Arctic started to degas methane 100 times faster than it is today. I just made that number up trying to come up with a blow-the-doors-off surprise, something like the ozone hole. We ran the numbers to get an idea of how the climate impact of an Arctic Methane Nasty Surprise would [...]
Much ado about methane
Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas, but it also has an awesome power to really get people worked up, compared to other equally frightening pieces of the climate story. What methane are we talking about? The largest methane pools that people are talking about are in sediments of the ocean, frozen into hydrate or clathrate [...]
Unforced variations: Jan 2012
First open thread of 2012, so perhaps some discussion of the highlights and lowlights of 2011 are in order? Top 5 lists welcome…