The established ground and new ideas

Science is naturally conservative and the scepticism to new ideas ensures high scientific quality. We have more confidence when different scholars arrive at the same conclusion independently of each other. But scientific research also brings about discoveries and innovations, and it typically takes time for such new understanding to receive acknowledgement...

1h

2022 updates to model-observation comparisons

Our annual post related to the comparisons between long standing records and climate models. As frequent readers will know, we maintain a page of comparisons between climate model projections and the relevant observational records, and since they are mostly for the global mean numbers, these get updated once the temperature products get updated...

5d

Unforced variations: Feb 2023

This month’s open thread for climate related topics. Please be constructive, polite, and succinct. The post Unforced variations: Feb 2023 first appeared on RealClimate.

5d

2022 updates to the temperature records

Another January, another annual data point. As in years past, the annual rollout of the GISTEMP, NOAA, HadCRUT and Berkeley Earth analyses of the surface temperature record have brought forth many stories about the long term trends and specific events of 2022 – mostly focused on the impacts of the (ongoing) La Niña event and the litany of weather...

4w

Unforced variations: Jan 2023

Starting a little slowly this new year, but here is this month’s open thread. Look out for various updates of the annual 2022 numbers over the next week or so… The post Unforced variations: Jan 2023 first appeared on RealClimate.

Jan 2023

The water south of Greenland has been cooling, so what causes that?

Sea surface temperature trend 1993 – 2018, from European Atlas of the Seas Let’s compare two possibilities by a back-of-envelope calculation. (1) Is it due to a reduced heat transport of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC)? (2) Or is it simply due to the influx of cold meltwater as the Greenland Ice Sheet is...

Dec 2022

Unforced variations: Dec 2022

This month’s open thread for climate discussions. Please be constructive and polite. The post Unforced variations: Dec 2022 first appeared on RealClimate.

Dec 2022

Serious mistakes found in recent paper by Connolly et al.

Guest post by Mark Richardson who is a Research Scientist in the Aerosol and Clouds Group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology. All opinions expressed are his own and do not in any way represent those of NASA, JPL or Caltech. Should scientists choose to believe provably false things? Even though that would mean...

Nov 2022

Unforced variations: Nov 2022

This month’s open thread. Anyone read Greta Thunberg’s book? or have an opinion about soup? Be substantive, be polite, be talking about climate. The post Unforced variations: Nov 2022 first appeared on RealClimate.

Nov 2022

The #ConcordOslo2022 workshop

In recent years, the idea of climate change adaptation has received more and more attention and has become even more urgent with the unfolding of a number of extreme weather-related calamities. I wrote a piece on climate change adaptation last year here on RealClimate, and many of the issues that I pointed to then are still relevant.  The dire...

Oct 2022