Unforced Variations: Jun 2021

This month’s open thread for climate science. Start of the meteorological summer, official hurricane season (outlook), the final stretches of the IPCC AR6 review process and a rare conjunction of Father’s Day and the summer solstice. Please stay on topic. The post Unforced Variations: Jun 2021 first appeared on RealClimate.

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Why is future sea level rise still so uncertain?

Three new papers in the last couple of weeks have each made separate claims about whether sea level rise from the loss of ice in West Antarctica is more or less than you might have thought last month and with more or less certainty. Each of these papers make good points, but anyone looking for coherent picture to emerge from all this work will be disappointed....

May 2021

Forced Responses: May 2021

A bimonthly open thread on climate solutions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this is always the most contentious comment thread on the site, but please try and be constructive and avoid going off on wild tangents. The post Forced Responses: May 2021 first appeared on RealClimate.

May 2021

Unforced Variations: May 2021

This month’s open thread for climate science topics. The post Unforced Variations: May 2021 first appeared on RealClimate.

May 2021

Nenana Ice Classic 2021

And…. it’s that time again. The clock stopped on the Nenana ice classic this afternoon (April 30, 12:50pm AT). This is pretty much on trend and unsurprising given the relatively slightly cool winter in Alaska. The jackpot on offer this year was $233,591 but will likely be shared among several winners. This year’s ‘break up’ is a little odd, since the...

May 2021

Two graphs show the path to 1.5 degrees

In the Paris Agreement, just about all of the world’s nations pledged to “pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”. On Saturday, the top climate diplomats from the U.S. and China, John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua, reiterated in a joint statement that they want to step up their climate mitigation...

Apr 2021

Should the official Atlantic hurricane season be lengthened?

By Jim Kossin, Tim Hall, Mike Mann, and Stefan RahmstorfThe 2020 Atlantic hurricane season broke a number of records, with the formation of an unprecedented 30 “named storms” (storms that reach wind-speed intensity of at least 18 m/s and are then given an official name). The season also started earlier than normal. In fact, when ranked by their order...

Apr 2021

Unforced Variations: Apr 2021

This month’s open thread for climate science discussions. Be nice, it’s Earth month. The post Unforced Variations: Apr 2021 first appeared on RealClimate.

Apr 2021

A potential rule of thumb for hourly rainfall?

Future global warming will be accompanied by more intense rainfall and flash floods due to increased evaporation, as a consequence of higher surface temperatures which also lead to a higher turn-around rate for the global hydrological cycle. In other words, we will see changing rainfall patterns. And if the global area of rainfall also shrinks, then...

Mar 2021

The Rise and Fall of the “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation”

Two decades ago, in an interview with science journalist Richard Kerr for the journal Science, I coined the term the “Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation” (AMO) to describe an internal oscillation in the climate system resulting from interactions between North Atlantic ocean currents and wind patterns. These interactions were thought to lead to alternating...

Mar 2021