by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Rates of sea level rise along the N. American E. Coast have decelerated in recent decades (5 of 6). SLR rates were “only slightly lower” in the 1700s. Modern sea level rise rates are thus “not necessarily symptomatic of anthropogenic forcing”. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1029/2019GL085814
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At CO2 concentrations beyond four times the preindustrial value, the climate sensitivity decreases to nearly zero as a result of episodic global cooling events as large as 10 K. A self-amplifying cloud feedback mechanism cools the climate upon warming saturation.[link]
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Deep-reaching acceleration o global mean ocean circulation over the past two decades https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/6/eaax7727
Predominant regional biophysical cooling from recent land cover changes in Europe https://nature.com/articles/s41467-020-14890-0
Are UK floods becoming worse due to climate change? |http://j.mp/2HZAoQh
The incredible lightness of water vapor. A negative water vapor feedback [link]
Towards better understanding of the Ocean Carbon sink of the Southern Ocean [link]
Compound flood potential from river discharge and storm surge extremes at the global scale https://bit.ly/32xrOBE
Natural halogens buffer tropospheric ozone in a changing climate https://go.nature.com/2w6CVWg
On a regional level, aerosols could have a greater effect on extreme winter weather than greenhouse gases. [link]
The observed behavior of climatic complexity could be explained by the changes in cloud amount, and we research that possibility by investigating its evolution from a complexity perspective using data from the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project (ISCCP). [link]
Tropical forests losing their ability to remove carbon from the atmosphere [link]
reconstruction and re-evaluation of historical drought in the British Irish Isles since 1748, and the forgotten drought of 1765-1768. [link]
Geologic Heat Linked To East Coast Ocean Warming Trend [link]
Evaluating global multi-model ensemble tropical cyclone track probability forecasts (https://doi.org/10.1002/qj.3712)
Rapid Loss of CO2 From the South Pacific Ocean During the Last Glacial Termination [link]
Jet stream is not getting ‘wavier’ despite Arctic warming [link]
Mathematicians unravel the patterned chaos of turbulence in a universal law [link]
30 years of the iron hypothesis of ice ages [link]
destabilizing natural methane reserves is not a big climate risk, because the timescales are long and most gets oxidized before reaching the atmosphere. [link]
Decades of research have deepened scientists’ understanding of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation and its importance in Earth’s #climate system. [link]
Soil and soil CO2 magnify greenhouse effect [link]
Reviews and syntheses: The mechanisms underlying carbon storage in soil https://biogeosciences-discuss.net/bg-2020-49/
It turns out our estimates of how much methane comes from natural fossil leaks (seepage, mud volcanoes, etc.) might be much lower than we thought. [link]
Long-term drought reconstruction in India [link]
aerosol-induced cooling benefitted developing countries in warm climates in terms of economic impact, but harmed high-latitude developed countries. https://go.nature.com/2P4ThVY
New evidence points to asteroid as cause of dinosaur extinction [link]
Climate models overestimate Arctic warming [link]
Livestock contributed to ~23% of the total warming of 0.81°C from all sources from 1850 to 2010, despite agriculture directly contributing only 10–12% of global GHG emissions. The effects of CH₄ only last decades, but only decay if we stop emitting it! https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/gcb.13975…
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Policy & technology
Floridians would have been spared $480 million in property damage from Hurricane Irma if the state’s coastal wetlands hadn’t shrunk. [link]
Roger Pielke Jr: “Good News And Bad News As Carbon Dioxide Emissions Grow More Slowly Than Models Predict” [link]
A big shift from corporate data centers to cloud computing seems to have dramatically reduced the energy and carbon footprint of data processing [link]
How economic models treat innovation may be just as important as their assumptions about climate damages [link]
Ships could be powered by ammonia within decade [link]
Seven strategies for protecting rainforests [link]
“IPCC baseline scenarios over-project CO2 emissions and economic growth.” https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/ahsxw
The coming avocado politics: Embracing a catastrophic view of climate risk is unlikely to provoke progressive responses on the Right, but rather the opposite [link]
Minireservoirs could save farmers with sandy soils [link]
“Sequestering soil carbon effectively requires an understanding of how particulate organic matter & mineral-associated organic matter work, how human actions affect them, and how to build up both types to meet our planet’s climate and food security needs.” https://theconversation.com/soil-carbon-is-a-valuable-resource-but-all-soil-carbon-is-not-created-equal-129175
Damaging impact of warming moderated by migration of rainfed crops [link]
The next low-carbon energy source? It might be trash [link]
Why Venice is actually a textbook case for flood prevention https://phys.org/news/2020-01-venice-textbook-case.html…
explore scenario extremes as a way of understanding and preparing for an unknowable future: https://rdcu.be/b1OcE
The ‘business as usual’ story is misleading [link]
Finland will be home to the first-ever deep geological repository for spent #nuclear fuel. Other countries such as Canada, France, Sweden, and Switzerland are also making progress on facilities: https://bit.ly/2XFBW7B
Schellenberger: If they are so alarmed by climate change, why are they so opposed to nuclear? [link]
Forecasting volcanic eruptions with Artificial Intelligence [link]
Small changes in flight routes and altitude could get rid of most of the climatic impacts of contrails immediately. [link]
About science & scientists
Freeman Dyson: In Memoriam [link]
Tired of debates that go nowhere? Talk different [link]
Trump might do something genuinely good for science [link]
Why do the things that are unlikely to harm us get the most attention? [link]
Moral pollution in place of reasoned critique [link]
The scientific paper is outdated. [link]
Another unjustified firing of a tenure-track professor [link]
Back to the future: how we became victims of our own success [link]
Scientists are much more open but less agreeable than people in other professions. [link]
What is dark matter? Even the best theories are crumbling [link]