Tag: Arctic sea ice

Sensitivity and consensus; theory and practice

97So Cook et al ((Yes, that Cook — the one from Skeptical Science and The Climate Show. Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature, John Cook et al 2013 Environ. Res. Lett. 8 024024
doi:10.1088/1748-9326/8/2/024024)) confirms that there really is a consensus in climate science: 97% of the peer-reviewed literature over the last 20 years supports the fact that humans are responsible for the warming. It’s a solid result, confirming the earlier work of Oreskes and others, but its importance lies in the fact that public perceptions of that consensus lag behind reality. As John puts it:

Quite possibly the most important thing to communicate about climate change is that there is a 97% consensus amongst the scientific experts and scientific research that humans are causing global warming. Let’s spread the word and close the consensus gap.

Indeed. Count this as my small contribution. Meanwhile, another recent paper very nicely demonstrates that the existence of a consensus on the basic facts of warming does not mean that scientists have to agree about everything. Continue reading “Sensitivity and consensus; theory and practice”

TDB today: Watching the ice melt

My column at The Daily Blog this week is all about ice — specifically the start of the melt season in the Arctic, and what that means for the climate of the northern hemisphere.

What’s going on in the Arctic is rapid climate change, and it’s happening now. It’s changing the weather that most of the world experiences. It’s the most important and most visible of the multitude of climate impacts we’re forcing on the planet, and it’s worth watching every day. Will this year set a new record summer low for sea ice? It’s too early to call, but one thing is certain. Northern hemisphere climate has already changed, and will continue to change in ways we’re only beginning to fathom.

The continuing Arctic melt gives the lie to the “no warming since (pick a date)” meme being pushed by the usual suspects. In fact it does more than show Monckton and his sad supporters to be wrong — it shows them to be burying their heads so far into the septic sand that their arses are disappearing. I shall be returning to this theme as the Arctic summer progresses…

Monckton in NZ: tells lies on radio, threatens academics and journalists

The Monckton has landed in New Zealand, and he’s up to his usual tricks. In a desperate display of attention-seeking behaviour, the discount Viscount has lashed out at his critics, threatened libel actions against a scientist and a journalist, and attacked the good standing of Victoria University of Wellington. To make matters worse, in a talkback session with Leighton Smith on Newstalk ZB earlier today, he was given free rein to tell lies and misrepresent the state of our understanding of climate science.

Unfortunately a full recording of Monckton’s radio performance is not (yet) available on the web ((A video of the first 8 minutes of the 90 minute session has been posted by the radio station here.)), but in a brief section discussing Arctic and Antarctic sea ice, he made the following astonishing and counterfactual claims:

  • During the 1920s and 1930s there was probably less Arctic sea ice than now
  • The Arctic sea ice has only declined for a few weeks in summer
  • Arctic sea ice set a new record high only two weeks ago
  • Increases in Antarctic sea ice make up for half of the loss in the Arctic
  • There’s no way water can get under the Antarctic ice sheet

Here’s the facts:

Continue reading “Monckton in NZ: tells lies on radio, threatens academics and journalists”

Cold wind to Valhalla: Arctic ice loss brings spring snow to UK and Europe

It’s been a cold and snowy end to winter in Britain and much of Europe. The worst March snowfall for 30 years (according to The Telegraph) caused significant disruption to much of the UK, and lead to heavy loss of sheep and lambs in Wales. The UK Met Office reports that March is likely to have been the coldest since 1962, with temperatures running 3ºC below average. The weather pattern that brought the cold outbreak from the east looks set to continue, with only a hint of a return to more normal westerlies and temperatures by the middle of April.

Over the last few years I’ve made more than a few references to the emerging relationship between warming in the Arctic and the loss of sea ice to changes in the patterns of Northern Hemisphere weather. Take a look at this map, plotted at NOAA’s ESRL site using NCEP/NCAR reanalysis data (click on the image to see the original plot):

Continue reading “Cold wind to Valhalla: Arctic ice loss brings spring snow to UK and Europe”

The year the earth bit back: top climate stories of 2012

2012Amidst the blizzard of year-end roundups, here’s one you have to read in full — a joint effort put together by a diverse group of bloggers and scientists: Angela Fritz, Eli Rabett, Emilee Pierce, Greg Laden, Joe Romm, John Abraham, Laurence Lewis, Leo Hickman, Michael Mann, Michael Tobis, Paul Douglas, Scott Mandia, Scott Brophy, Stephan Lewandowsky, Tenney Naumer and yours truly. Lead author Greg Laden explains:

A group of us, all interested in climate science, put together a list of the most notable, often, most worrying, climate-related stories of the year, along with a few links that will allow you to explore the stories in more detail. We did not try to make this a “top ten” list, because it is rather silly to fit the news, or the science, or the stuff the Earth does in a given year into an arbitrary number of events. (What if we had 12 fingers, and “10” was equal to 6+6? Then there would always be 12 things, not 10, on everyone’s list. Makes no sense.) We ended up with 18 items, but note that some of these things are related to each other in a way that would allow us to lump them or split them in different ways. See this post by Joe Romm for a more integrated approach to the year’s events. Also, see what Jeff Masters did here. We only included one non-climate (but related) item to illustrate the larger number of social, cultural, and political things that happened this year. For instance, because of some of the things on this list, Americans are more likely than they were in previous years to accept the possibility that science has something to say about the Earth’s climate and the changes we have experienced or that may be in the future; journalists are starting to take a new look at their own misplaced “objective” stance as well. Also, more politicians are starting to run for office on a pro-science pro-environment platform than has been the case for quite some time.

A failing of this list is that although non-US based people contributed, and it is somewhat global in its scope, it is a bit American based. This is partly because a few of the big stories happened here this year, but also, because the underlying theme really is the realisation that climate change is not something of the future, but rather, something of the present, and key lessons learned in that important area of study happened in the American West (fires) the South and Midwest (droughts, crop failures, closing of river ways) and Northeast (Sandy). But many of the items listed here were indeed global, such as extreme heat and extreme cold caused by meteorological changes linked to warming, and of course, drought is widespread.

Continue reading “The year the earth bit back: top climate stories of 2012”