Climate Abyss
Weather and climate issues with John Nielsen-Gammon
Introducing the Climate Change National Forum
I’m a contributor to a new web site that’s publicly launching today: the Climate Change National Forum. It’s a site that will (I hope) develop into a home for expert discussions and debate about science and policy issues related to climate change. I’m not aware of any existing web sites that fit that bill. Most, […]
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Texas Cold in Perspective
There’s cold, and then there’s cold. Down here in Texas, lots of thin-skinned folks are complaining about the cold wave, while some other parts of the country have been experiencing seriously cold weather. Earlier I wrote about the two intense December cold waves, in 1983 and 1989. The 1989 cold wave was cold enough to […]
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How Cool Was That?
Texas, along with much of the rest of the country, had a rather chilly start to December. I, for one, was breaking out my cold weather gear for the first time in a long while. Admittedly, though, Texas has a different sense of “cold” than most other parts of the country. In the southern half […]
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And Now, a Positive Voice on Climate Issues
[Update, Dec. 3, 2013: A response by the authors of the CFACT piece has been added at the bottom. - John N-G] From their web site: http://www.cfact.org/about/ “In 1985, the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) was founded to promote a positive voice on environment and development issues…Today, this Washington DC-based group is a highly […]
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All-Time Record-Low Reservoir Levels or Drought-Busting Hurricane?
The reservoir water storage gap in Texas is approaching an all-time record low, but a slow-moving tropical cyclone might make landfall early next week and turn into a serious drought-buster.
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Learning More From the Hiatus
This is a followup post to “Learning From the Hiatus”, which focused on a paper by Kosaka and Xie (2013, KX13 hereafter). In this post, I address some questions raised by my previous analysis, and in the process revise my conclusions. Specifically, my revised estimate for TCR from this study is 1.05 C (0.6-1.9C) and my revised estimate of the natural contribution to the 1975-2002 warming is 16%, but with lots of uncertainty.
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Learning From the Hiatus
This blog post describes two recent papers on the relatively slow increase of global temperatures over the past decade and a half. It focuses on a paper by Kosaka and Xie, and further analyzes the data from Kosaka and Xie to explore issues of model accuracy and climate sensitivity. The evidence points toward transient climate response being slightly weaker than the CMIP5 model average. Natural variability appears to have caused the recent hiatus but appears not to have contributed significantly to the previous period of rapid warming.
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Being Noncommittal About Sea Level Rise
A recent study by Levermann et al. (PNAS 2013) simulates the response of glaciers and ice sheets to rising global temperatures. Unlike studies that try to infer near-term sea-level rise, they look at the long-term response of the ice. I don’t have any complaints with the simulations, but the paper emphasizes an unfortunate choice of words. We are no more committed to 2.3 m/K of sea level rise than we are committed to using internal combustion engines for the next 2,000 years.
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