Attribution

We argue for a redesign of climate change mitigation policies to be ‘anti-fragile’ with respect to scientific uncertainty. – Otto et al.

by Judith Curry
Jim Hansen’s new paper, and his PR strategy, are raising a whole host of issues that are arguably a backfire for his objectives.

Last week, several media articles appeared about an alarming new paper by Jim Hansen, that was just being submitted to a journal and was not yet publicly available:

by Judith Curry
The conclusion is that the oscillatory mode (mostly due to the AMO) is significantly more important than the monotonic mode (mostly due to increasing atmospheric CO2) in explaining the 1980–2000 U.S. temperature increase.  – Bruce Kurtz

by Judith Curry
And how might these controversies be resolved?

by Judith Curry
The Washington Post has this dramatic headline:  Global warming is now slowing down the circulation of the ocean with potentially dire consequences.

by Judith Curry
Two new papers were published last week of relevance to the hiatus.

For background, see my invited presentation to the American Physical Society on this topic: Causes and implications of the pause.
First, lets take a look at the ‘spin’ surrounding this issue and these papers:

by Judith Curry
Seeking once again to clarify the problems in communicating the IPCC climate change attribution statements.

by Judith Curry
So, what’s going on in the world of research on the climate dynamics of clouds?

In two words: not much.
In the past decade, cloud-climate research has been focused on the aerosol indirect effect (aerosol-cloud interactions), improving climate model parameterizations of clouds, and evaluating new satellite cloud observing systems.  What exactly do I mean about the climate dynamics of clouds?  Here are some key questions that I see:

by Matt Skaggs
For years, climate scientists have followed reasoning that goes from climate model simulations to expert opinion, declaring that to be sufficient. But that is not how attribution works.

by Judith Curry
New research suggests that the upper layer of the ocean has warmed more than had been thought previously while the deeper ocean has cooled rather than warmed in recent years.

Context
Kevin Trenberth summed up the problem in his famous statement that it’s a “travesty” that we can’t find the missing heat.  Climate scientists have been inferring (mainly from models) that the missing heat (during the pause) is hiding in the deep ocean.  For background, see these previous Climate Etc. posts: