Stefan

For those who’d like to get the basics of climate change explained first-hand by a climate scientist, here are two video lectures.

In the first, I show some of the basic data sets and findings about global warming, including some comments on historic land marks of our science.

The second lecture deals with the impacts of climate change (with a focus on extreme events and sea-level rise) and the possibilities for holding global warming below 2°C.

These lectures form part of a broader lecture course called World in Transition. It includes 11 themes, presented by the members of the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU). This is a body of experts appointed by the German government and advising it on global change issues. The lecture series, for which international students can enrol and earn credit points, is based on the WBGU flagship report World in Transition – A Social Contract for Sustainability. This report describes how the transition to a sustainable, climate-friendly global economy and life style can be achieved.

Last week the science community was shocked by the claim that 42% of the sea-level rise of the past decades is due to groundwater pumping for irrigation purposes. What could this mean for the future – and is it true?

The causes of global sea level rise can be roughly split into three categories: (1) thermal expansion of sea water as it warms up, (2) melting of land ice and (3) changes in the amount of water stored on land. There are independent estimates for these contributions, and obviously an important question is whether their sum is consistent with the total sea level rise actually observed.

foto (c) Stefan Rahmstorf 2012
[Read more…] about What makes sea-level rise?

A group of colleagues has all but solved one of the greatest remaining puzzles in climate science. But the story is not one of scientific triumph – rather, it is so embarrassing that we had controversial discussions in our group whether to break this to a wider public at all.

The puzzle is known amongst climatologists as the “wrong sign paradox” – our regular readers will probably have heard about it. Put simply, it is about the fact that a whole number of things in climate science would fit very nicely together, if only the sign were reversed. If only plus were minus. [Read more…] about ‘Wrong sign paradox’ finally resolved?

By Stefan Rahmstorf and Dim Coumou

One claim frequently heard regarding extreme heat waves goes something like this: ”Since this heat wave broke the previous record by 5 °C, global warming can’t have much to do with it since that has been only 1 °C over the 20th century”. Here we explain why we find this logic doubly flawed.

One can ask two different questions about the influence of global warming on heat waves (Otto et al. 2012), and we take them in turn.

1. How much hotter did global warming make this heat wave? [Read more…] about Extremely hot

This week, PNAS published our paper Increase of Extreme Events in a Warming World, which analyses how many new record events you expect to see in a time series with a trend. It does that with analytical solutions for linear trends and Monte Carlo simulations for nonlinear trends.

A key result is that the number of record-breaking events increases depending on the ratio of trend to variability. Large variability reduces the number of new records – which is why the satellite series of global mean temperature have fewer expected records than the surface data, despite showing practically the same global warming trend: they have more short-term variability.

Another application shown in our paper is to the series of July temperatures in Moscow. We conclude that the 2010 Moscow heat record is, with 80% probability, due to the long-term climatic warming trend. [Read more…] about The Moscow Warming Hole