Category Archives: Climate sensitivity

“Hothouse” Earth?

Posted on August 8, 2018 by

This is actually the 1000th post on this blog. I haven’t written them all, but have written many more than I had ever expected to write. I thought I might use this as an opportunity to write something about the … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Environmental change | Tagged , , , , , , | 156 Comments

No, Hansen wasn’t wrong!

Posted on June 22, 2018 by

It’s 30 years since James Hansen testified before the US Congress about climate change. In the same year, he published a paper that produced some forecasts. I wasn’t going to write about this as there are a number of articles … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Policy | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 213 Comments

low-probability, high-impact outcomes

Posted on June 11, 2018 by

There’s an interesting Earth System Dynamics Discussion paper presenting a a simple proposal to improve the contribution of IPCC WG1 to the assessment and communication of climate change risks. Essentially, one can estimate the risk of some outcome by considering … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, IPCC, Scientists, Severe Events | Tagged , , , , , , | 276 Comments

RCP8.5

Posted on May 10, 2018 by

There’s been a lengthy discussion on Twitter about RCP8.5. I think it was initiated by Roger Pielke Jr, who continues in his campaign to police the scientific community: RCP 8.5 is by far the favorite in climate impact studies (graph).I … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Policy, Research, Scientists | Tagged , , , , | 271 Comments

Lewis and Curry, again

Posted on April 27, 2018 by

I should probably say something about the new Lewis & Curry paper. It’s mostly an update to their earlier paper that I’ve discussed before. Bottom line; there are reasons to be cautious. The basic formalism is that one can use … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Judith Curry, Research, Science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 686 Comments

ECS from a modified energy balance approach

Posted on February 4, 2018 by

Andrew Dessler’s paper (technically Dessler and Forster), which he mentioned in this comment, has now appeared as a pre-print. Essentially, they use an energy balance approach to estimate equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS), but – as I mentioned in this post … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Global warming, Research, Science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , | 142 Comments

Confounding ECS estimates

Posted on January 30, 2018 by

Kate Marvel and colleagues have just published an interesting paper on how [i]nternal variability and disequilibrium confound estimates of climate sensitivity from observations. Essentially they compare three different ways of estimating Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS): atmosphere-only simulations with observed sea … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Research | Tagged , , , , , | 193 Comments