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Update on 2005 temperatures

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Translations: (Français) (English)

Further to our post about whether 2005 will be a year of record warmth, Jim Hansen has put out a brief discussion on the Washington Post report and some of the subsequent discussion. One minor clarification to his statements is that the reporter involved (Juliet Eilperin) did in fact leave messages for the relevant people at GISS (including me) prior to publication, but sometimes people can just be difficult to track down. Oh….and for those who are counting, with the preliminary October data in, 2005 has pulled ahead of 1998 in both the GISS land based met. station index (0.76 to 0.73°C) and the GISS land-ocean index (0.59 to 0.58°C). All previous caveats still apply….

Lawson vs. the IPCC

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Nigel Lawson, one of Britain’s Chancellors of the Exchequer during the Thatcher Era (Secretary of the Treasury for those needing a US translation) and more recently known as the father of Nigella Lawson (a UK cooking diva), has weighed into the climate debate with a recent broadside calling for the abolition of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). Based on a curious report by the UK House of Lords Economics Affairs committee (in which they made clear that they had no scientific expertise), Lawson demands that the only global scientific assessment process on climate change be shut down, and replaced with ….well what exactly? [Read more…] about Lawson vs. the IPCC

Chaos and Climate

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By James Annan and William Connolley

In this post, we will try to explain a little about chaos theory, and its relevance to our attempts to understand and forecast the climate system. The chaotic nature of atmospheric solutions of the Navier-Stokes equations for fluid flow has great impact on weather forecasting (which we discuss first), but the evidence suggests that it has much less importance for climate prediction.

[Read more…] about Chaos and Climate

Shameless Self Promotion

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Vote for RealClimate!

No, we’re not going to abandon our policy of steering clear of political commentary, but yes, you can nonetheless vote for us!

Some of you may have noticed the new logos up in the upper right hand corner of the RC webpage. As a followup to our selection last month for the “Science & Technology Web Awards 2005” by Scientific American, we are pleased to have now made it to the final round of Deutsche Welle’s 2005 Weblog Awards (for those of you not familiar with them, Deutsche Welle is sort of the German equivalent of Britain’s BBC World Service). [Read more…] about Shameless Self Promotion

Hockey sticks: Round 27

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Two more teams in the seemingly endless jousting over the ‘hockey-stick’ have just made their entry onto the field. In the first two (of four) comments on the original McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) (MM05) paper in GRL, von Storch and Zorita, and Huybers have presented two distinct critiques of the work of M&M.

The two comments focus on the ‘PC normalisation’ issue raised in MM05 which we discussed previously. Specifically, von Storch and Zorita show that in a GCM model emulation of the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (MBH) method, changing the PC normalisation technique makes no difference to the eventual reconstruction (i.e. it is not the normalisation that creates the ‘hockeystick’), consistent with earlier conclusions. Huybers comments that neither of the two suggested normalisations are actually optimal, and proposes a third method which looks like it gives results halfway between MBH and MM05. However, given the von Storch result, this too is unlikely to matter in the final reconstruction. [Read more…] about Hockey sticks: Round 27

Q & A: Global Warming

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There was an interesting piece that appeared in the October 12 edition of the Seattle Times, “Q&A: Global warming — a world of evidence”. This follows up on a previous article by journalist Sandi Doughton in the October 9 issue of the Times, “The Truth About Global Warming”.

In the Q&A, a group of University of Washington scientists, including atmospheric scientist and climate researcher J. Mike Wallace, weigh in with answers to questions fielded from the paper’s readers. Many of the questions, such as “Isn’t it true that scientists in the 1970s said the earth was cooling?” are quite similar to those we’ve addressed here at RealClimate (see “The Global Cooling Myth”). [Read more…] about Q & A: Global Warming

Global warming on Earth

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Translations: (Français) (English)

The Washington Post picked up on the latest update to the 2005 temperature anomaly analysis from NASA GISS. The 2005 Jan-Sep land data (which is adjusted for urban biases) is higher than the previously warmest year (0.76°C compared to the 1998 anomaly of 0.75°C for the same months, and a 0.71°C anomaly for the whole year) , while the land-ocean temperature index (which includes sea surface temperature data) is trailing slightly behind (0.58°C compared to 0.60°C Jan-Sep, 0.56°C for the whole of 1998). The GISS team (of which I am not a part) had predicted that it was likely the 2005 would exceed the 1998 record (when there was a very large El Niño at the beginning of that year) based on the long term trends in surface temperature and the estimated continuing large imbalance in the Earth’s radiation budget.

In 1998 the last three months of the year were relatively cool as the El Niño pattern had faded. For the 2005 global land-ocean index to exceed the annual 1998 record, the mean anomaly needs to stay above 0.51°C for the next three months. Since there was no El Niño this year, and the mean so far is significantly above that, this seems likely. [Read more…] about Global warming on Earth

Global warming on Mars?

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Translations: (Français) (English)

Guest contribution by Steinn Sigurdsson.

Recently, there have been some suggestions that “global warming” has been observed on Mars (e.g. here). These are based on observations of regional change around the South Polar Cap, but seem to have been extended into a “global” change, and used by some to infer an external common mechanism for global warming on Earth and Mars (e.g. here and here). But this is incorrect reasoning and based on faulty understanding of the data.

[Read more…] about Global warming on Mars?

Happy Birthday to Us

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Just recently, RealClimate topped 500,000 visits (and well over a million page views) since starting in December 2004. And by happy coincidence, a present arrives in the form of RealClimate being selected for the “Science & Technology Web Awards 2005” by Scientific American, with the citation:

A refreshing antidote to the political and economic slants that commonly color and distort news coverage of topics like the greenhouse effect, air quality, natural disasters and global warming, Real Climate is a focused, objective blog written by scientists for a brainy community that likes its climate commentary served hot. Always precise and timely, the site’s resident meteorologists, geoscientists and oceanographers sound off on all news climatalogical, from tropical glacial retreat to “doubts about the advent of spring.”