by Judith Curry
A few things that caught my eye this past week.
Normalized hurricane damage in the continental United States 1900–2017 [link]
Pacific Decadal Oscillation and recent oxygen decline in the eastern tropical Pacific Ocean [link]
RMSS: The troposphere has not warmed quite as fast as most climate models predict. [link]
Radiosondes Show That After Decades of Cooling, the Lower Stratosphere Is Now Warming [link]
Human pollution did not terminate the Little Ice Age [link]…
New data set: 500 million years of #CO2! [link]
Essex and Tsonis: Model falsifiability and climate slow modes [link]
A good paper from CLIVAR that clearly lays out the challenges for climate science, including natural internal variability. [link]
Lancet report on health and climate change [link]
100-year review of advances in extratropical cyclone research [link] …
Excess winter deaths in England and Wales highest since 1976 [link]
Nonlinear glacier response to calving, Jakoshavn Greenland [link]
Quantifying the irreducible uncertainty in near‐term climate projections [link]
Skill of seasonal Arctic sea ice extent predictions using the North American multi-model ensemble [link]
Response of Arctic ozone to sudden stratospheric warmings [link ]
Dennis Hartmann paper on cloud radiative effect of tropical anvil clouds [link]
The Influence of Atmospheric Circulation Patterns on Cold Air Outbreaks in the Eastern United States [link]
4th U.S. National Climate Assessment Executive summary [link]
The different stratospheric influence on cold extremes in Europe and North America [link]
Before dinosaurs came to dominate the planet, an elephant-sized distant cousin of ours traipsed around Triassic Poland. [link]
Scientists discover bacteria in the Pacific Ocean that absorbs CO2 and turns itself into FOOD for sea creatures. [link]
RealClimate: The long story of constraining ocean heat content [link]
Global multidecadal variability missing in climate models; global stadium wave [link]
climatic impact of a large amount of freshwater from fast melting Antarctica: [link]
Why extreme rains are gaining strength as the climate warms [link]
Polar amplification: forcing in low & mid-lats leads to near uniform warming, while arctic forcing leads to polar amplified warming. [link] …
Decadal Ocean Heat Redistribution Since the Late 1990s and Its Association with Key Climate Modes [link] …
An interdecadal change in the interannual variability of boreal summer tropical cyclone genesis frequency over the western North Pacific around the early 1990s [link]
“Antarctic surface hydrology and impacts on ice-sheet mass balance” [link]
Large-scale Antarctic ice sheet melt could slow the rate of global warming. [link] …
Improvements to aerosol processes and effective radiative forcing inlatest state‐of‐the‐art UK Earth system model [link]
Atmospheric aerosol in changing Arctic [link]
The Influence of Interannual Climate Variability on Regional Violent Crime Rates in the United States [link]
Calving glaciers and ice shelves [link]
The mechanisms of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation slowdown induced by Arctic sea ice decline [link]
Global column water vapor trends and variability in atmospheric reanalyses and GPS observations [link]
Review: Radiative forcing by light-absorbing particles in snow [link]
The discovery of a giant crater in Greenland suggests a large asteroid hit Earth as recently as 12,800 years ago: [link]
Why 536 was ‘the worst year to be alive’ [link]
Many reservoirs aim to alleviate water shortages, but they can paradoxically make them worse. [link] …
Natural variability associated with an Arctic high pressure system can cause strong summer sea ice melt. [link] …
Exploration of Antarctic Ice Sheet 100-year contribution to sea level rise and associated model uncertainties using the ISSM framework [link]
The importance of stratospheric initial conditions for winter North Atlantic Oscillation predictability and implications for the signal‐to‐noise paradox: [link] …
The onset and rate of Holocene Neoglacial cooling in the Arctic [link]
Pinatubo volcanic eruption exacerbated an abrupt coral mortality event in 1991 summer [link]
Fire expert Stephen Pyne: what is causing the devastating fires in California. [link]…
Cascading transitions in the climate system [link] …
Social science & policy
“The centralized, top-down power grid is outdated. Time for a bottom-up redesign.” [link]
Electricity is more like transportation than telecom, so grid vs. off-grid is the wrong debate. [link]
Palm oil was supposed to save the planet. Instead it unleashed a catastrophe [link]
IER on the NCA 10% hit to GDP [link]
Reiner Grundman: Which policy design for climate change? Commentators often take ozone layer protection or smoking bans as template. Here I show why the ozone analogy does not work: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1Y5jQ5otDYXzdd …
A superb evaluation by former US Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz of where we are on route to deep decarbonisation [link]
Why the social cost of carbon will always be disputed [link] …
The Pros and Cons of Carbon Taxes and Cap and Trade Systems [link] …
“natural climate solutions” — better management of forests, grasslands, soils, etc. — could help offset as much as 21% of current US emissions. [link]
Empirical study of difficulties in measuring public opinion on #climate change [link]
Niskanen Center: The policymaker’s guide for emerging technologies [link]
We should stop teaching students to equate GHG emissions reductions with business risk management Here’s why. [link] …
About science and scientists
The new evolution deniers [link]
Why we stopped trusting elites [link]
What constitutes bullying, why are so many accusations arising and what impact is it having on research? [link]
“Many students are unprepared for contentious conversation… Instead of dealing with the symptoms we see on campus, colleges should work with K-12 to address the underlying problem.” [link] …
Hosting abusive comments damages the perceived credibility of journalists, as well as of the newspaper itself. Further evidence of how freeing up online discussion often degrades debate rather than improving it [link]
What if the Placebo Effect Isn’t a Trick? [link]
There are no natural resources. The human mind is the ultimate resource [link]
“Statistics was developed to root out error, appraise evidence, quantify uncertainty & generally to keep us from fooling ourselves. Increasingly often, it is used instead to aid and abet weak science” [link]
In peer review we (don’t) trust: How peer review’s filtering poses a systemic risk to science [link]