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Ten years of Realclimate: By the numbers

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rc10Start date: 10 December 2004

Number of posts: 914

Number of comments: ~172,000

Number of comments with inline responses: 14,277

Minimum number of total unique page visits, and unique views, respectively: 19 Million, 35 Million

Number of guest posts: 100+

Number of mentions in newspaper sources indexed by LexisNexis: 225

Minimum number of contributors and guest authors: 105

Minimum number of times RealClimate was hacked: 2

Busiest month: December 2009

Busiest day of the week: Monday

Number of times the IPCC and the NIPCC are mentioned, respectively: 357, 5

Minimum number of Science papers arising from a blog post here: 1

Minimum number of RealClimate mentions in Web Of Science references: 14

Minimum number of RealClimate mentions in theses indexed by ProQuest: 33

Posts highest ranked by Google by year:

2004 CO2 in ice cores
2005 Water vapour: feedback or forcing?
2006 Al Gore’s Movie
2007 Swindled!
2008 FAQ on climate models
2009 The CRU Hack
2010 Feedback on cloud feedback
2011 Misdiagnosis of surface temperature feedback
2012 Extremely Hot
2013 The new IPCC climate report
2014 Climate response estimates from Lewis and Curry

All numbers are estimates from latest available data, but no warranty is implied or provided so all use of these numbers is at your own risk.

Unforced variations: Nov 2014

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This month’s open thread. In honour of today’s New York Marathon, we are expecting the fastest of you to read and digest the final IPCC Synthesis report in sub-3 hours. For those who didn’t keep up with the IPCC training regime, the Summary for Policy Makers provides a more accessible target.

Also in the news, follow #ArcticCircle2014 for some great info on the Arctic Circle meeting in Iceland.

How do trees change the climate?

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Guest commentary from Abby Swann (U. Washington)

This past month, an op-ed by Nadine Unger appeared in the New York Times with the headline “To save the climate, don’t plant trees”.  The author’s main argument is that UN programs to address climate change by planting trees or preserving existing forests are “high risk” and a “bad bet”. [Ed. There is more background on the op-ed here]

However, I don’t think that these conclusions are supported by the science.  The author connects unrelated issues about trees, conflates what we know about trees from different latitudes, and fails to convey the main point: tropical trees keep climate cool locally, help keep rainfall rates high, and have innumerable non-climate benefits including maintaining habitat and supporting biodiversity.

A translation of this post in German is available here

[Read more…] about How do trees change the climate?

Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

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Guest commentary from Richard Millar (U. Oxford)

The recent Lewis and Curry study of climate sensitivity estimated from the transient surface temperature record is being lauded as something of a game-changer – but how much of a game-changer is it really?

[Read more…] about Climate response estimates from Lewis & Curry

References

  1. N. Lewis, and J.A. Curry, "The implications for climate sensitivity of AR5 forcing and heat uptake estimates", Climate Dynamics, vol. 45, pp. 1009-1023, 2014. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00382-014-2342-y