About Rasmus Benestad

Guest blog by Chris Colose (e-mail: colose-at-wisc.edu)

UPDATE: This is Part 1 of two posts by Chris. Part 2 is here

RealClimate has recently featured a series of posts on the greenhouse effect and troposphere, articulating some of the more important physics of global warming from first principles. It is worthwhile reviewing these elements every so often with different slants just so the broad picture is not lost in the disagreement over details. This post extends on this theme to discuss one of the greatest sources of interest and uncertainty in the physical science of climate change: feedbacks. Feedbacks behave in interesting and often counter-intuitive ways, some of which can only be fully appreciated by mathematical demonstration. The previous posts at RC were criticized for being either too complex or too simple, so this post will feature two parts, with the second part providing some more of the technical details.

[Read more…] about Introduction to feedbacks

Are the heat waves really getting more extreme? This question popped up after the summer of 2003 in Europe, and yet again after this hot Russian summer. The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which normally doesn’t make much noise about climate issues, has since made a statement about July global mean temperature being record warm:

[Read more…] about Warmer and warmer

Update: It seems that the UNFCCC background page referred to below has changed and the link no longer works – see table of contents.

A response from Justin Wood, writing to me from Australia after my previous post (cited with permission below), has prompted me to write a follow-up on the story of the greenhouse effect (GHE).

I wonder if you’ve seen this terrible description of the greenhouse effect on a UNFCCC background page? http://unfccc.int/essential_background/feeling_the_heat/items/2903.php
It actually says that incoming solar energy is ‘reflected’ by the planet’s surface ‘in the form of a calmer, more slow-moving type of energy called infrared radiation. … Infrared radiation is carried slowly aloft by air currents, and its eventual escape into space is delayed by greenhouse gases’ (emphasis added).

Given your recent excellent explanation of the real physics on RC, I thought you might be interested! It’s downright disturbing that this silliness comes from such an important source; and I’ve found it repeated all over the place. (On that RC post, I would humbly suggest that the section on stratospheric cooling could helpfully be expanded to make that clearer?)

[Read more…] about The Key to the Secrets of the Troposphere

According to some recent reports (e.g. PlanetArk; The Guardian), the public concern about global warming may be declining. It’s not clear whether this is actually true: a poll conducted by researchers at Stanford suggests otherwise. In any case, the science behind climate change has not changed (also see America’s Climate Choices), but there certainly remains a problem in communicating the science to the public.

This makes me think that perhaps a new simple mental picture of the situation is needed. We can look at climate models, and they tell us what we can expect, but it is also useful to have an idea of why increased greenhouse gas concentrations result in higher surface temperatures. The saying “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler” has been attributed to Albert Einstein, which also makes me wonder if we – the scientists – need to reiterate the story of climate change in a different way.

Gavin has already discussed this (also see here and here), but it may be necessary to tell story over again, with a slightly different slant. So how can we explain how the greenhouse effect (GHE) work in both simple terms and with a new angle? I also want to explain why the middle atmosphere cools with increasing greenhouse gas concentrations associated with an increased GHE. Here I will try to present a conceptual and comprehensive picture of GHE, explaining both the warming in the lower part of the atmosphere as well as the cooling aloft, and where only the most central features are included. Also, it is important to provide a good background, and we need to start with some very fundamental facts.

[Read more…] about A simple recipe for GHE

This week, the “Oslo Science conference” the largest conference ever -it was claimed – was held on polar sciences at Lillestrøm, just outside Oslo. Some of the web-casts from that meeting are worth watching, and I found especially the talk by David Barber (“On Thin Ice: The Arctic and Climate Change”, video link here) both a bit alarming as well as fascinating.

Storms and snow affect sea-ice growth, since a layer of snow on top of the ice insulates against the cold atmosphere and prohibits ice growth. Winds and extra mass can lead to break-up, and the amount of multi-annual ice is lower than expected; it has decayed and ‘rotted’. A mission with the Canadian ice breaker apparently managed to break ice slabs much thicker than expected, due to weaker ice. Also more recent reversals of the Beaufort gyre, unexpected long swells, and new ice on top of clumps of old ice fooling the satellites to think there is more multi-year ice than really the case, are just part of the story. In the mean while, the sea-ice for this season from NSIDC is on a low note.

The main message that I took home from this was that the sea-ice is more important than I previously thought. It appears clearer now that it plays a role in the Arctic amplification – which clearly is really emerging.

Some claim that reduced sea-ice can explain cold winters in the northern hemisphere, but I’m not yet convinced. The cold winters are due to weak Arctic Oscillation, and hence a shift in the air masses bringing frigid polar southwards, and this air is replaced by milder air in the polar region. Hence, a shift in the wind system as well as milder temperatures may favour less Arctic sea-ice.

The Antarctic sea-ice cover has increased on average in the last 30 years, but not everywhere. Both the general increase around East Antarctica and the large decrease off West Antarctica are attributed to the ozone hole and corresponding changes in the Southern Annular Mode (SAM, or the ‘Antarctic Oscillation’), though this probably doesn’t explain what is happening in winter. There is no clear polar amplification observed over Antarctica, such as seen as in the Arctic, and one explanation for this may be that the Antarctic continent has large ice sheets with enormous thermal inertia. But ice core data suggest that there have been amplification there in the past too. Nevertheless, the Arctic is characterized by a polar ocean with retreating sea-ice in the northern hemisphere. In both cases, changing air masses and the winds are important for inter-annual to inter-decadal variations, both in explaining cold winters over Eurasia and sea-ice around Antarctica.

by Rasmus & Jim

Who would think that Internet, ideas, disease, money, birds, and climate literacy have anything in common? Recent progress on complex systems and network theory suggests that they all can be described in terms of a ‘Levy flight‘. A recent and lengthy paper with the title ‘A study on interconnections between climate related ideas in complex networks’ (Ann. Trans. ICCPRS Soc. 52(3):1647-71; subscription required) by John McVenus argues that new ideas can be traced over the Internet just like dollar bills are traced at Wheresgeorge. Our take on this is that this study muddles things more than clarifying the facts – probably because McVenus tries to explain almost everything.

[Read more…] about Climate and network connections

Who says that the climate debate is not evolving? According to the daily newspaper the Guardian, a new application (‘app‘) has been written for iPhones that provides a list of climate dissidents’ arguments, and counter arguments based on more legitimate scientific substance. The app is developed by John Cook from ‘Skeptical Science‘. It’s apparently enough to have the climate dissidents up in arms – meaning that it’s likely to have some effect? Some dissidents are now thinking of writing their own app.

Here on RC, we have developed a wiki, to which I also would like to bring the reader’s attention. Furthermore, I want to remind the readers about other useful web sites, listed at our blog roll.