by Judith Curry
A few things that have caught my eye these past weeks.
In a somewhat futile attempt at information management, I’m doing some ‘house cleaning’ of my online files, so that I have a fresh start for the new year. New Year’s resolution is not to let more than two weeks pass between reviews!
Best wishes to all for the New Year! I’ll try to put together a ‘looking forward’ post for tomorrow.
Climate science
Nonlinear response of mid-latitude weather to the changing Arctic [link] …
A multivariate estimate of the cold season atmospheric response to North Pacific SST variability [link]
Cooling in northern Asia–defying global trend–now linked to longer-lasting weak spells in #PolarVortex [link]
Greenland’s ice is melting, but it might not raise sea levels as quickly as some models have suggested. Why? The word of the day is “moulin.” [link]
Climate connection: unraveling the surprising ecology of dust [link]
A long view of global wildfire. [link] … We find that global biomass burning declined from AD 1 to ∼1750, before rising sharply between 1750 and 1870. Global burning then declined abruptly after 1870.
News from ECMWF: Shaping the future of supercomputing in numerical weather prediction [link]
Contribution of deformation to sea-ice mass balance: a case study from an N-ICE2015 storm. The fastest and most efficient process of gaining sea ice volume is through the mechanical redistribution of mass as a consequence of deformation events. [link]
7 New (2017) Papers predict forthcoming solar minima [link] …
12 New Papers: Regions in North Atlantic, Pacific, And Southern Oceans Are Cooling As Glaciers Thicken, Gain Mass [link]
The Maunder minimum & the Little Ice Age: an update from recent reconstructions & climate simulations [link]
Snow cover and vegetation-induced decrease in global albedo from 2002 to 2016 [link]
New #atmospheric science paper shows that the diurnal #cloud cycle is incorrectly represented in models leading to uncertainty in projections [link]
Ocean surface temperature variability: Large model-data differences at decadal and longer periods [link]
Impact of Volcanic Eruptions on Decadal to Centennial Fluctuations of Arctic Sea Ice Extent during the Last Millennium and on Initiation of the Little Ice Age [link]
Geothermal heat flux and its influence on ocean abyssal circulation [link]
Mechanisms of interannual- to decadal-scale winter Labrador Sea ice variability [link]
New Paper: Humans Caused Central U.S. To Cool By -0.35°C Since The 1940s As Crop Yields Soared [link]
Jakarta’s subsidence crisis. [link] … Subsidence there is orders of magnitude faster than sea-level rise.
Special issue of Advances in Atmospheric Sciences presents new research towards a predictive understanding of #Arctic climate change and its linkage with Eurasian mid-latitude weather [link]
Samwell Tarly has released his long-awaited paper on the climate system of the Game of Thrones world in “The Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of King’s Landing.” [link] …
“Observational evidence of European summer weather patterns predictable from spring” – [link] …
Scientists stunned by massive snowfall increases among Alaska’s highest peaks [link] …
Autumn Cooling of Western East Antarctica Linked to the Tropical Pacific [link]
Svensmark in Nature: Increased ionization supports growth of aerosols into cloud condensation nuclei [link]
Documenting 120 years history of 350 Greenlandic glaciers. Changes in peripheral glaciers linked to NAO [link]
25 Papers: Natural Forcing Explains Why The Globe’s Oceans Have Been Recently Warming AND Cooling [link]
Sunspot Number Second Differences as a Precursor of the Following 11-year Sunspot Cycle [link] …
Time of observation adjustments to daily station precipitation may introduce undesired statistical issues [link]
A twisted path to equation-free prediction for complex dynamical systems [link]
Decrease of tropical cyclone genesis frequency in the western North Pacific since 1960s [link]
This is really interesting. Science Under the Ice [link]
Now in NatureClimate – The far reach of ice-shelf thinning in Antarctica [link]
2017 paper on Arctic ice variability over the past 10 thousand years. Polar bears lived through all of these natural variations and it seems unlikely are much affected by recent man made ones. [link] …
A reminder that natural climate change can have substantial impacts. How climate change and disease helped the fall of Rome [link]
5 New Papers: Climate And Weather Events Become LESS Erratic And Severe During Warming Periods [link]
Better land management could get us over 1/3 of the way to a 2 degree climate target.[link]
Tamsin Edwards: How soon will the ice apocalypse come? [link]
Bi-decadal solar influence on climate, mediated by near tropopause ozone [link]
Read this compilation of some of the forefront ideas in western boundary current research and the influence on carbon [link] …
Volcano and ship tracks indicate excessive aerosol-induced cloud water increases in climate model [link]
EXTREMELY INTERESTING. Causal feedbacks in climate change [link]
New Antarctic temperature reconstruction shows consistently higher values in first millennium. Nothing unusual in recent values. [link]
Oceans may produce twice as much organic carbon material as usually measured: re-examining a critical part of the global carbon cycle [link]
The melting Antarctic ice stream that is currently adding most to sea-level rise may be more resilient to change than previously recognised. [link]
20 years ago ECMWF started using the 4D-Var data assimilation technique. Find out how it works and why this was such an important step.[link] …
Examining our eyes in the sky. A recent paper in Reviews of Geophysics explored the challenges of validating data collected from Earth observation satellites. [link]
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Social science & policy
“The forests of North Carolina, Louisiana, and Mississippi — as well as those in Europe — are being destroyed to sustain a European fantasy about renewable energy.” Fred Pearce on biomass [link]
Virtually every scenario for staying below 2°C now relies on a technology that barely exists. [link]
What is so wicked about wicked problems? [link]
Rethinking policy ‘impact’: four models of research-policy relations [link] …
Richard Tol: Economic impacts of climate change. Climate change will reduce the economic burden of cold winters, but this benefit will soon be dominated by other, negative impacts of climate change. [link]
Andrea Saltelli: What is wrong with evidence-based policy making and how can it be improved?[link]
Ross McKitrick: the case for a review of the science behind the Endangerment Finding begins with what the EPA Inspector General found in 2011. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/454662/epa-clean-power-plan-basis-rules-may-be-faulty …
Best overview yet of why CO2 buildup in humanity’s #GreatAcceleration isn’t solvable by pricing emissions or other drivers of clean-energy shift – & what’s happening with CO2 *removal* technologies. Huge issues there imagining gigaton/year scale. [link]
Inequality in nature and society: similarity between inequality in nature and society – chance alone drive 1% of the individuals to control 50% of the resources – mechanism: random fluctuations in gains/losses (stocks, weather, etc) blow up to create extreme inequality http://www.pnas.org/content/114/50/13154.full.pdf …
Before Warming A Bit, Antarctica Underwent 1,900 Years Of Cooling https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/study-before-warming-a-bit-antarctica-underwent-1900-years-of-cooling/ …
Rival Framings: A Framework for Discovering How Problem Formulation Uncertainties Shape Risk Management Tradeoffs… [link]
About science & scientists
Why do intellectuals seem so disproportionately attracted to “progressive” political views and government-centric means of remedying social ills? http://j.mp/2l1zabk
Suffering for the love of birds. A scientist’s battle to save birds — and now her career. [link]
In celebration of Freeman Dyson’s 94th birthday — Infinite in All Directions https://buff.ly/2AHbsI8