It’s again time for one of those puzzling results that if they turn out to be true, would have some very important implications and upset a lot of relatively established science. The big issue of course is the “if”. The case in question relates to some results published this week in Nature by Joanna Haigh and colleagues. They took some ‘hot off the presses’ satellite data from the SORCE mission (which has been in operation since 2003) and ran it through a relatively complex chemistry/radiation model. These data are measurements of how the solar output varies as a function of wavelength from an instrument called “SIM” (the Spectral Irradiance Monitor).
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Solar spectral stumper
Cuccinelli goes fishing again
In keeping with our role as a site that tries to deal with the science of climate change rather than the politics, we have specifically refrained from commenting on various politically-motivated legal shenanigans relating to climate science. Some of them have involved us directly, but we didn’t (don’t) want to have RC become just a blog about us. However, the latest move by Ken Cuccinelli, the Attorney General of Virginia, against Mike Mann and UVa is so ridiculous it needs to be highlighted to the widest audience possible.
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Introduction to feedbacks
Guest blog by Chris Colose (e-mail: colose-at-wisc.edu)
RealClimate has recently featured a series of posts on the greenhouse effect and troposphere, articulating some of the more important physics of global warming from first principles. It is worthwhile reviewing these elements every so often with different slants just so the broad picture is not lost in the disagreement over details. This post extends on this theme to discuss one of the greatest sources of interest and uncertainty in the physical science of climate change: feedbacks. Feedbacks behave in interesting and often counter-intuitive ways, some of which can only be fully appreciated by mathematical demonstration. The previous posts at RC were criticized for being either too complex or too simple, so this post will feature two parts, with the second part providing some more of the technical details.
Warmer and warmer
Are the heat waves really getting more extreme? This question popped up after the summer of 2003 in Europe, and yet again after this hot Russian summer. The European Centre for Medium-range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), which normally doesn’t make much noise about climate issues, has since made a statement about July global mean temperature being record warm:
IPCC report card
Update: Nature has just published a thoughtful commentary on the report
The Inter-Academy Council report on the processes and governance of the IPCC is now available. It appears mostly sensible and has a lot of useful things to say about improving IPCC processes – from suggesting a new Executive to be able to speak for IPCC in-between reports, a new communications strategy, better consistency among working groups and ideas for how to reduce the burden on lead authors in responding to rapidly increasing review comments.
As the report itself notes, the process leading to each of the previous IPCC reports has been informed from issues that arose in previous assessments, and that will obviously also be true for the upcoming fifth Assessment report (AR5). The suggestions made here will mostly strengthen the credibility of the next IPCC, particularly working groups 2 and 3, though whether it will make the conclusions less contentious is unclear. Judging from the contrarian spin some are putting on this report, the answer is likely to be no.
