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Water vapour: feedback or forcing?

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Whenever three or more contrarians are gathered together, one will inevitably claim that water vapour is being unjustly neglected by ‘IPCC’ scientists. “Why isn’t water vapour acknowledged as a greenhouse gas?”, “Why does anyone even care about the other greenhouse gases since water vapour is 98% of the effect?”, “Why isn’t water vapour included in climate models?”, “Why isn’t included on the forcings bar charts?” etc. Any mainstream scientist present will trot out the standard response that water vapour is indeed an important greenhouse gas, it is included in all climate models, but it is a feedback and not a forcing. From personal experience, I am aware that these distinctions are not clear to many, and so here is a more in-depth response (see also this other attempt).

Eine Übersetzung in deutsch finden Sie hier.
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Doubts about the Advent of Spring

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A “consensus view” amongst climate scientists holds that the Northern Hemisphere will be warming this month, as spring is coming. This is thought to be due to the Earth’s orbit around the sun and the inclination of the Earth’s axis, tilting the Northern Hemisphere progressively towards the sun throughout March and April and increasing the amount of solar radiation received at northern latitudes.

In a new novel, State of Euphoria, bestselling author Michael Crikey uncovers major flaws in this theory and warns against false hopes for the arrival of spring.
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Worldwide glacier retreat Recul mondial des glaciers

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One of the most visually compelling examples of recent climate change is the retreat of glaciers in mountain regions. In the U.S. this is perhaps most famously observed in Glacier National Park, where the terminus of glaciers have retreated by several kilometers in the past century, and could be gone before the next century (see e.g. the USGS web site, here, and here). In Europe, where there is abundant historical information (in the form of paintings, photographs, as well as more formal record-keeping), retreat has been virtually monotonic since the mid 19th century (see e.g. images of the glaciers at Chamonix). These changes are extremely well documented, and no serious person questions that they demonstrate long term warming of climate in these regions. New work published in Science (“Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records”) highlights these results, and uses them to make a new estimate of global temperature history since about 1600 A.D., which agrees rather well with previous, independent temperature reconstructions.

Par Eric Steig (traduit par Claire Rollion-Bard)

Un des exemples les plus irrésistibles visuellement du récent changement climatique est le recul des glaciers dans les régions montagneuses. Aux Etats-Unis, c’est peut-être ce qui est le plus fameusement observé au Glacier National Park où les terminus des glaciers se sont retirés de quelques kilomètres au cours du dernier siècle (voir e.g. le site web de USGS, ici, and ici)ici et ici). En Europe, où il y a des informations historiques importantes (sous la forme de peintures, photographies, aussi bien que sous forme d’enregistrements plus formels), le recul a été virtuellement monotone depuis le milieu du 19ème siècle (voir e.g. images de glaciers à Chamonix). Ces changements sont extrêmement bien documentés si bien qu’aucune personne sérieuse ne doute que cela démontre le réchauffement à long terme du climat dans ces régions. Un travail récent publié dans Science (“Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records”) souligne ces résultats et les utilise pour faire une nouvelle estimation de l’histoire globale des températures depuis environ 1600 A.D., et qui est en assez bon accord avec les précédentes reconstructions indépendantes de la température.
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How long will global warming last? Pendant combien de temps le réchauffement global persistera-t-il ?

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Guest commentary from David Archer (U. Chicago)

The notion is pervasive in the popular and scientific literature that the lifetime of anthropogenic CO2 released to the atmosphere is some fuzzy number measured most conveniently in decades or centuries. The reality is that the CO2 from a gallon out of every tank of gas will continue to affect climate for tens and even hundreds of thousands of years into the future.


Commentaire invité par David Archer (Univ. Chicago) (traduit par Thibault de Garidel)

La notion que la durée de vie du CO2 émis dans l’atmosphère par l’action humaine se situe entre quelques décennies � quelques siècles, est omniprésente dans les revues de vulgarisation scientifique ainsi que celles spécialisées. La réalité est que chaque litre de pétrole que nous utilisons en faisant le plein de notre voiture continuera � affecter le climat pendant les prochaines dizaines et mêmes centaines de milliers d’années.

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IPCC in action: Part II

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The primary purpose of the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) is to assess the available scientific knowledge about climate change, not to initiate new research. The next IPCC report (Assessment Report 4, or AR4) is due in 2007, and in order to update of the state of knowledge it will only consider papers published in peer-review scientific journals between 2000 and papers submitted by May 1st 2005 (must be accepted before December 2005). It is essential that the papers be published in scientific quality journals in order to ensure the credibility of the results. Nevertheless the IPCC reports undergo several additional reviews and revisions involving a large number of independent referees. Thus, the IPCC reports undergo a more stringent review process than common papers in the scientific literature.

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IPCC in action: Part I

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This is the first of two pieces on the recent IPCC workshop in Hawaii, This brought together independent researchers from all over the world to analyse computer model simulations of the last 150 years and to assess whether they are actually any good.

Guest commentary from Natassa Romanou (Columbia University)

During the first 3 days of March 2005, balmy downtown Honolulu in Hawaii was buzzing with agile scientists conversing, chatting, announcing, briefing and informing about IPCC assessment reports, climate models, model evaluations, climate sensitivities and feedbacks. These were the participants of the Climate Model Evaluation Project workshop (CMEP) and came here from most (if not all) the major, most prestigious climate research laboratories of the world, including; The US labs National Center for Atmospheric Research, the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, the British Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction, the German Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis, the French Centre National de Recherches Meteorologiques and the IPSL/LMD/LSCE, the Australian CSIRO Atmospheric Research, the Chinese Institute of Atmospheric Physics, the Russian Institute for Numerical Mathematics and the Japanese Meteorological Research Institute. This meeting was sponsored by the benevolent NSF, NOAA, NASA and DOE.

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Will spring 2005 be a bad one for Arctic ozone? Le printemps 2005 comptera-t-il parmi les mauvais pour l’ozone arctique ?

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Guest Commentary by Drew Shindell (NASA GISS)

The current winter and early spring have been extremely cold in the Arctic stratosphere, leading to the potential for substantial ozone depletion there. This has been alluded to recently in the press (Sitnews, Seattle Post Intelligencer), but what’s the likely outcome, and why is it happening?

Par Drew Shindell, NASA, GISS (traduit par Pierre Allemand)

L’hiver actuel et le début du printemps ont été extrêmement froids dans la stratosphère arctique, ce qui est un facteur de réduction substantielle de l’ozone dans cette région. La presse a récemment fait allusion à ce phénomène, (Sitnews, Seattle Post Intelligencer),mais quels sont, en fait, les résultats, et qu’est-ce qui fait que cela arrive ?

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How rapid-response works

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Nature this week published a letter from Dr. Huang (U. Mich) highlighting how this ‘brave new world’ of science blogging works. He writes:

I was concerned to find that … [a figure] included an outdated and erroneous reconstruction of borehole data. … In my view, the website should have used a later version … To be fair, the authors of the website added a correction after I drew their attention to this.

In an early post, we used a figure that contained a minor error regarding how a borehole temperature reconstruction had been scaled. This mistake had been properly corrected in the literature, and so this was indeed an oversight on our part. Dr Huang was kind enough to remind us of this and we amended the caption immediately to point this out and direct readers to the correction should they be interested. Since this mistake was not central to the point being made in the post, we left the original figure in place.

The Internet is nothing if not flexible, and unlike in journals where mistakes can persist an awfully long time, we are able to correct such problems very quickly. In this respect, Dr. Huang’s letter seems to indicate that things are actually working quite well here.

We would like to take this opportunity to re-iterate our commitment to getting the science right, and as importantly, getting it right in real-time. We welcome all corrections or clarifications and we will endeavour to fix any errors, great or small, as quickly as we can.

RealClimate

Why looking for global warming in the oceans is a good idea Voici pourquoi rechercher le réchauffement global dans les océans est pertinent

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A lot of press and commentary came out this week concerning a presentation and press release from Tim Barnett and Scripps colleagues presenting at the AAAS meeting (The Independent, John Fleck ,(and again) David Appell…etc). Why did this get so much attention given that there is no actual paper yet?
par Gavin Schmidt (traduit par Pierre Allemand)

Un grand nombre d’articles de presse et de commentaires sont sortis cette semaine concernant une présentation et un communiqué de presse de Tim Barnett, Scripps et collègues au congrès de l’AAAS (American Society for the Advancement of Science), (The Independent, John Fleck ,(et de nouveau ici) David Appell…etc. (NdT : sites en anglais). Pourquoi cela a-t-il donné lieu à autant d’attention, alors qu’aucune publication n’est encore disponible ?

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