Category Archives: Attribution

by Judith Curry

“Our results also serve to highlight the importance of Atlantic multidecadal variability in mediating the rate of global warming, and they suggest that these variations deserve more explicit consideration in twentieth century climate simulations and in attribution studies based on recent observations of the rate of change of [global mean surface temperature]. — Wu et al. (2012)

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by Judith Curry

If Booth and colleagues’ results can be corroborated, then they suggest that multidecadal temperature fluctuations of the North Atlantic are dominated by human activity, with natural variability taking a secondary role. This has many implications. Foremost among them is that the AMO does not exist, in the sense that the temperature variations concerned are neither intrinsically oscillatory nor purely multidecadal.

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by Judith Curry

Nature’s exuberant smashing of daily high temperature records [in the U.S.] in recent weeks can only be described as “Meteorological March Madness”. Conditions more fitting of June than March prevailed east of the Rocky Mountains since the start of the month.  NOAA’s National Climate Data Center reported that over 7000 daily record high temperatures were broken over the U.S. from 1 March thru 27 March. 

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by Judith Curry

“Climate dice”, describing the chance of unusually warm or cool seasons relative to climatology, have become progressively “loaded” in the past 30 years, coincident with rapid global warming. The distribution of seasonal mean temperature anomalies has shifted toward higher temperatures and the range of anomalies has increased. 

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by DocMartyn

This is the first of a three part presentation where I will attempt to explain the climate of the last 800,000 thousand years, drawing on the role of the biosphere’s response to interstellar dust.

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by Judith Curry

Roger Pielke Sr has a fascinating, even mind-boggling, post that draws from an article by Paul Voosen in Greenwire entitled “Provoked scientists try to explain lag in global warming.”

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by Judith Curry

[I]n the past year, climate researchers in the United States and Britain have formed a loose coalition under the banner ‘ACE’ — Attribution of Climate-related Events — and have begun a series of coordinated studies designed to lay the foundations for a systematic weather-attribution programme.

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by Judith Curry

Seth Borenstein at AP published an article  entitled “Nature’s extremes worse than usual in US this year.”  I have a quote in the article:

by Judith Curry

The hypothesized link between a warming climate and increased frequency and magnitude of floods goes something like this:  a warmer climate is associated with more water vapor in the atmosphere, which means more rainfall and more floods.  Is there any observational support for this link?

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by Judith Curry

The thread on the recent Loehle and Scafetta paper (here and WUWT) have spawned the term “cyclomania” in the context of searches for natural cycles that can explain 20th century climate change and potentially predict climate change in the 21st century.

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by Judith Curry

This article aims to portray and communicate the important role played by natural variability in our evolving climate. Understanding and acknowledging these variations is important for society and policymakers. Much of this variability is chaotic and unpredictable but some significant fraction is potentially predictable, providing an opportunity to narrow the uncertainty in climate predictions of the coming decade.

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by Judith Curry

Two key questions in the climate debate are:

• How much of the recent warming can be attributed to natural variability versus anthropogenic forcing?
• Is the rate of warming in the latter half of the 20th century unusual or unprecedented?

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by Judith Curry

A new paper has been published in PNAS entitled “Reconciling anthropogenic climate change with observed temperature 1998-2008.”

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by Judith Curry

The title for this post comes from a post at Pew Climate, highlighting a big three-part series featured on ScientificAmerican.com  to explain the link between climate change extreme weather.

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by Judith Curry

Last October, I introduced this topic in Part I and followed up with Part II and Part III, which formed an early draft of an argument I was using in a paper entitled “Climate Science and the Uncertainty Monster.”  I’ve gotten the reviews back on my paper, this post is a draft of the revised version of that particular section.

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by Judith Curry

Yale Environment 360 has just posted  a  forum with the same title as this post. I along with 7 other scientists provided a 250 word response to the question:

Do you think there is growing evidence that human-caused global warming is contributing to an increased incidence of extreme weather ?

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by Judith Curry

With the tragic damage and loss of life in Joplin, the tornado madness continues unabated.   Here is the latest from Roy Spencer, Bill McKibben, and Joe Romm.

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by Judith Curry

I’ve been pretty clear about where I stand with regards to the attribution of extreme events to global warming, e.g. see this thread.  The recent tornado outbreak in the southeast U.S. has spawned a number of statements and articles about the cause of the outbreak including, inevitably, global warming.

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