by Judith Curry
The end of year provides an opportunity to reflect on significant events of the past year.
Several blogs have compiled lists:
Eli Rabbett has compiled these lists into a votable survey:
- Super Storm Sandy
- Sandy and Sea Level Rise
- Extreme Ice Melting
- Sea ice loss changes weather
- Ice loss in Greenland
- Massive Ice Islands
- Increases in Greenhouse Gases
- It got hot
- Killer heat waves
- Deadly wildfires
- Massive droughts
- River traffic stopped
- Very, very bad storms
- Widespread tree mortality
- Biodiversity decreases
- Changes in atmospheric circulation
- Heartland implosion
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See the original posts for details. The theme of these seems to be dangerous impacts of climate change, bypassing of course the issue of attribution of these events. Maybe the big story is that a critical mass of bad weather events happened in the U.S., so we are experiencing in the U.S. another round of what we experienced post Katrina in terms of elevating concern about global warming. Based upon the Katrina experience: unless these events continue, the impact on public angst about global warming will dissipate in a few years or less.
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Joe Romm’s choice for top story of the year is extreme weather from superstorms to drought emerges as political-scientific game changer. In principle this one might be the most important, but this is more of a prediction than anything else; it will be interesting to see what happens with U.S. energy/climate change politics in 2013.
In terms of the top stories in our little corner of the world of the climate blogosphere, the top stories in terms of # of hits at Climate Etc. were:
- Gleick and Heartland
- Lindzen seminar and op-ed
- Observationally based attribution (Forest et al., Vaughan Pratt)
I haven’t seen any such lists from WUWT, etc?
So what has been genuinely important this past year? Here is my choice for the most important climate story of the year:
Your thoughts?