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Archives for 2021

Realclimate redesign

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After more than 15 years with basically the same layout, the Realclimate website – while still functional – has become increasing anachronistic both in appearance and ‘under the hood’. In order to take advantage of more up to date web-site designs and new features that have been developed since the early 2000s (!), we need to upgrade the site, and while we are at it, update the theme and design, while maintaining an aesthetic link to the original.

With this post, we can reveal the new layout.

The differences are not related to content but to appearance – all of the material is still here – but the new layout is much fresher and includes much better support for people reading the site on their phones or iPads. We are using larger typefaces, cleaner menus and a more content-focused presentation for posts.

All of this is intended to improve the reader/commenter experience, but it’s inevitable that we have missed some aspects and/or some of the design features may be suboptimal for some. We will endeavor to fix any issues or problems that you find. So please comment below if you like it or hate it, if you find anything that’s broken or if you have any specific requests for tweaks. We’ll try and iterate over the next few days to get it right.

Thanks!

Unforced Variations: Aug 2021

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This month is IPCC month – the Sixth Assessment Report from Working Group 1 is out on Monday August 9. We’ll have some detailed comments once it’s out, but in the meantime, feel free to speculate widely (always considering that IPCC is restricted to assessing existing literature…).

Open thread – please stick to climate science topics.

Climate adaptation should be based on robust regional climate information

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Climate adaptation steams forward with an accelerated speed that can be seen through the Climate Adaptation Summit in January (see previous post), the ECCA 2021 in May/June, and the upcoming COP26. Recent extreme events may spur this development even further (see previous post about attribution of recent heatwaves). 

To aid climate adaptation, Europe’s Climate-Adapt programme provides a wealth of resources, such as guidance, case studies and videos. This is a good start, but a clear and transparent account on how to use the actual climate information for adaptation seems to be missing. How can projections of future heatwaves or extreme rainfall help practitioners, and how to interpret this kind of information? 

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Rapid attribution of PNW heatwave

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Summary: It was almost impossible for the temperatures seen recently in the Pacific North West heatwave to have occurred without global warming. And only improbable with it.

It’s been clear for at least a decade that global warming has been in general increasing the intensity of heat waves, with clear trends in observed maximum temperatures that match what climate models have been predicting. For the specific situation in the Pacific NorthWest at the end of June, we now have the first attribution analysis from the World Weather Attribution group – a consortium of climate experts from around the world working on extreme event attribution. Their preprint (Philip et al.) is available here.

Trends in Tmax globally
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Why is future sea level rise still so uncertain?

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Three new papers in the last couple of weeks have each made separate claims about whether sea level rise from the loss of ice in West Antarctica is more or less than you might have thought last month and with more or less certainty. Each of these papers make good points, but anyone looking for coherent picture to emerge from all this work will be disappointed. To understand why, you need to know why sea level rise is such a hard problem in the first place, and appreciate how far we’ve come, but also how far we need to go.

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Forced Responses: May 2021

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A bimonthly open thread on climate solutions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this is always the most contentious comment thread on the site, but please try and be constructive and avoid going off on wild tangents.