Week in review – science edition

by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week

UK Met Office on the Australian fires [link]
Attribution science and the Australian fires [link]
Pielke Jr: The inconvenient facts on Australian bushfires [link]
Another take on Australian bush fires [link]
Michael Mann on the Australian fires [link]
Climate change not driving California fires, say experts [link]
Sun bombing spacecraft uncovers secrets of the solar wind [link]
New study suggest ozone depleting chemicals caused half of late 20th century Arctic  warming https://nature.com/articles/s41558-019-0677-4
Overhyping Hurricane Florence: A pre-hurricane climate change analysis gets major revision after the storm https://arstechnica.com/?post_type=post&p=1638197…
Is there warming in the pipeline? A multi-model analysis of the zero emission commitment from CO2 https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-2019-492
The Greenland sea level projections from ISMIP6 are now out for discussion  https://the-cryosphere-discuss.net/tc-2019-319/tc-2019-319.pdf…
Importance of wind and meltwater for observd chemical and physical changes for the Southern Ocean [link]
Causes of higher climate sensitivity in CMIP6 models [link]
Seasonal tropospheric cooling in Northeast China associated with cropland expansion [link]

Demonstrating GWP*: a means of reporting warming-equivalent emissions that captures the contrasting impacts of short- and long-lived climate pollutants [link]
North American weather regimes and the stratosphere [link]
Four thoughts on climate change and catastrophe risk [link]
Pielke Jr and Maue: Tropical Cyclone Landfalls Around The World Over The Past 50 Years [link]
Pielke Jr:  Three rules for accepting climate ‘event attribution’ studies [link]
An emergent constraing on TCR from simulated historical warming in CMIP models [link]
Ocean acidification does not impair the behavior of coral reef fishes [link]
The latest generation of climate models is running hotter—here’s why [link] https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2019GL085782
North Atlantic (NA) sea level rose +3.9 mm/yr between 1993-2004. From 2005-2016, NA sea level plummeted -7.1 mm/yr. https://nature.com/articles/s41598-018-37603-6.pdf…
New report by the California Air Resources Board finds that ride-hailing services like Uber/Lyft emit 50% more CO2 per passenger mile than regular cars — even though they use more efficient vehicles — because they travel passenger-less much of the time: https://ww2.arb.ca.gov/sites/default/files/2019-12/SB%201014%20-%20Base%20year%20Emissions%20Inventory_December_2019.pdf
Papers on Indian Ocean Dipole and climate change [link]
“What Keeps Europe Warm in the Winter?” https://nicklutsko.github.io/blog/2020/01/07/What-Keeps-Europe-Warm-In-Winter…
Antarctica shock: Scientists’ groundbreaking discovery 400ft below ice revealed.. What this is telling us is that temperatures were three to four, maybe even five degrees above present. [link]
the ocean’s temperature during the Last Interglacial using ice core gases. https://rdcu.be/bZ3mc
Large regions of the ocean are cooling, but the warming regions slightly offset it. https://tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/16000870.2018.1471911
In contrast to general belief, more leads (open water from cracks in Arctic sea ice) during Arctic winter are resulting in less clouds not more. Interesting. https://nature.com/articles/s41467-019-14074-5… https://phys.org/news/2020-01-arctic-sea-ice-clouds.html…

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Coral reconstructions of central tropical Pacific climate suggest a 25% increase in recent #ENSO intensity. Read more: https://usclivar.org/research-highlights/coral-reconstructions-central-tropical-pacific-climate-suggest-25-increase…

Policy & Technology
Consumption based accounting of CO2 emissions [link]
How much is a climate solution ‘worth’? [link]
Economy-Wide Estimates of the Implications of Climate Change: Sea Level Rise https://ideas.repec.org/p/fem/femwpa/2004.96.html
Is climate change inconvenient or existential?  Only supercomputers can do the math [link]
Can a carbon tax be a generational win-win? [link]
Implications of current policies scenarios diverging from RCP8.5: https://wsj.com/articles/a-clearer-climate-picture-emerges-11579530420…
Gernot Wagner:  Why oil giants figured out carbon costs firsts [link]
McKitrick and Michaels:  Climate sensitivity, agricultural productivity and the social cost of carbon in fund [link]
Pielke Jr: The best news on climate you’ve never heard. We may have reached peak CO2 emissions per person [link]
2020: 10 trends driving the US power sector [link]
“We have lost the biological function of soils. We have got to reverse that,” “If we do it, we are turning the land into the big part of the solution for climate change.” [link]
European chemists have found a new use for depleted #uranium normally left as #RadioactiveWaste from nuclear power stations [link]
Methane hydrates could supply thousands of years of global energy demand and transform the future of energy geopolitics [link]
From 2011-2020 (10 years) Germany’s nuclear phase-out has resulted in ~10,000 deaths (1,100 per year) & $33 billion Jarvis et al. 2019. The Private and External Costs of Germany’s Nuclear Phase-Out http://papers.nber.org/tmp/45610-w26598.pdf
The very difficult choices that need to made around how to expand solar energy development: [link]
About science & scientists
Let’s Go Back to Calling It Global Warming “Climate change” is vague and doesn’t convey enough urgency. [link]
Pielke Jr: How Billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg Corrupted Climate Science [link]
A Brown U. Professor took on big pharma.  His university pulled him from the classroom [link]
Conflicts of interest in nutrition research [link]
It turns out that calling out catastrophists on the media is a much more target-rich environment than calling out sceptics: http://rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-bbc-and-climate
Oreskes:  Don’t fact-check scientific judgment calls [link]

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