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By Sebastian Lüning In medieval times, the priest would have declared that it would have been a punishment from God for the wicked behavior of sinners. Today's explanation is unfortunately not far from that. In mid-July 2021, prolonged heavy rain caused severe flooding in western Germany. There were many dead and missing, [...]
By Andy May This post is a result of an online conversation with Dr. Leif Svalgaard, a research physicist at Stanford University. Leif knows a great deal about the Sun and solar variability and can explain it clearly. Our disagreement is over whether long-term solar variations could be large enough to affect Earth’s climate [...]
From a post by Arnout Jaspers at clintel.org. In 2016, a headline grabbing study said that the Antarctic ice sheet is much more unstable than [previously] estimated. As a consequence, projected sea level rise in 2100 would double. Computer modelers from Deltares and KNMI scrambled back to their drawing boards to upgrade their prognoses [...]
How would you explain the complexity and uncertainty surrounding climate change plus how we should respond (particularly with regards to CO2 emissions) in five minutes? Last week I served on a panel for a summer school in Canada for engineering students. They are working on the energy transition, and their Professor wanted [...]
From The Cliff Mass Weather Blog Last week we witnessed a major failure in science communication regarding the Northwest heatwave. A failure that misinformed you and millions of others, and a failure that highlighted glaring weaknesses in the media’s ability to cover important scientific issues. And it revealed the disappointing behavior of some members [...]
Original post of Ronald Stein can be viewed here Ancient tree stumps found under glaciers in Southeast Iceland are confirmed to be roughly 3,000 years old, RUV reports. A specialist believes the remarkably well-preserved stumps were part of a massive forest that disappeared after a long period of a warm climate. It is believed [...]
By Cliff Mass Reposted from The Cliff Mass Weather Blog During the past week, the Pacific Northwest experienced the most severe heat event of the past century. All-time high-temperature records were broken throughout the region, often by large margins. Many in the media, several local and national politicians, and some activist environmental scientists have [...]
In Part 1, we introduced the concepts of climate sensitivity to CO2, often called ECS or TCR. The IPCC prefers a TCR of about 1.8°C/2xCO2 (IPCC, 2013, p. 818). TCR is the short-term, century scale, response of surface temperature to a doubling of CO2, we abbreviate the units as “°C/2xCO2.” In these posts we review lower [...]
The IPCC claims, in their AR5 report, that ECS, the long-term temperature change due to doubling the atmospheric CO2 concentration or the “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity,” likely lies between 1.5° and 4.5°C, and they provide no best estimate (IPCC, 2013, p. 85). But their average model computed ECS is 3.2°C/2xCO2. Here, “°C/2xCO2” is the temperature change [...]
Guest Post by Renee Hannon Introduction This post compares CO2 ice core measurements from Greenland to those from Antarctica over the last millennium. Paleoclimate studies typically use only Antarctic ice cores to evaluate past CO2 fluctuations. This is because the entire Greenland CO2 datasets were deemed unreliable due to chemical reactions with impurities in the ice and [...]
