Overselling k-scale? Hmm

Guest commentary from Paul Bates, Peter Bauer, Tim Palmer, Julia Slingo, Graeme Stephens, Bjorn Stephens, Thomas Stocker and Georg Teutsch Gavin Schmidt claims that the benefits of k-scale climate models (i.e. global climate models with grid spacing on the order of 1 km) have been “potentially somewhat oversold” in two recent Nature Climate Change...

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Mmm-k scale climate models

Ocean eddy visualization (Karsten Schnieder) Two opinion pieces (Slingo et al., and Hewitt et al.) and a supportive Nature Climate Change editorial were published this week, extolling the prospects for what they call “k-scale” climate modeling. These are models that would have grid boxes around 1 to 2 km in the horizontal – some 50 times smaller...

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Unforced variations: June 2022

This month’s open thread. New commenting rules (as described last month) remain in effect. Basically, be substantive, one comment a day, remain polite. The post Unforced variations: June 2022 first appeared on RealClimate.

Jun 2022

Unforced Variations: May 2022

Sorry for delay posting this month, but we’ve been considering how (or if) to go forward with open threads and comments. Looking at the multitude of constructive comments on the “End of blog comments” thread, it’s clear that many people appreciate the possibility of comments here, but that too often it disappoints by devolving into tedious bickering....

May 2022

River Ice break-up trends 2022

As in previous years, the spring break-up of river ice on the Tanana River at Nenana and the Yukon River at Dawson City in Canada (new! h/t Ed Wiebe), is a great opportunity to highlight phenology that indicates that the planet is in fact reacting to the ongoing global warming. As we’ve done in previous years, the Nenana dates can be plotted and show...

May 2022

Digital Twinge

A couple of weeks ago the EU announced that they were funding a project called DestinE (Destination Earth) to build ‘digital twins’ of the Earth System to support policy making and rapid reaction to weather and climate events. While the term ‘digitial twin’ has a long history in the engineering world, it’s only recently been applied to Earth...

Apr 2022

The modern demarcation problem

Defining (and enforcing) a clear line between information and mis-information is impossible, but that doesn’t mean misinformation doesn’t exist or that there is nothing to be done to combat it. I found myself caught in an ‘interesting’ set of exchanges on twitter a few weeks ago (I won’t link to it to spare you the tedium, but you could probably...

Apr 2022

Issues and Errors in a new Scafetta paper

Earlier this week, a new paper appeared in GRL by Nicola Scafetta (Scafetta, 2022) which purported to conclude that the CMIP6 models with medium or high climate sensitivity (higher than 3ºC) were not consistent with recent historical temperature changes. Since there have been a number of papers already on this topic, notably Tokarska et al (2020), which...

Mar 2022

The Future of Climate Modeling?

There was an interesting workshop last week focused on the Future of Climate Modelling. It was run by the World Climate Research Program (WCRP) Core Project on Earth System Modelling and Observations (ESMO) which is part of a bewildering alphabet soup of various advisory committees that exist for mostly unclear historical reasons. This one actually...

Mar 2022

The end of blog comments?

Over the last decade, commenting has dramatically moved from specific web-sites to general social media platforms, radically changing how people interact with longer-form content (such as blogs, substacks, newspapers and journalism). No single site can compete with the breadth of audience and engagement that is found on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit etc....

Mar 2022