Category Archives: Gavin Schmidt

How we frame extreme weather events

To maybe move the discussion on from the origins of Covid, I thought I’d write a post about detection and attribution. It is somewhat motivated by a brief dicsussion withTed Nordhaus, from the Breakthrough Institute, who suggested that a good … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Gavin Schmidt, Global warming, Philosophy for Bloggers | Tagged , , , , , | 162 Comments

Considering Catastrophe

There’s been quite a lot of recent coverage of a paper suggesting that climate endgames, such as global societal collapse or human extinction, have been dangerously unexplored. For those who recall the contentious RCP8.5 debate, this may seem a surprising … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Gavin Schmidt, Policy, Research, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , | 92 Comments

The ‘hot model’ problem

Zeke Hausfather and colleagues recently wrote a Nature comment with suggestions about how to deal with what is called the ‘hot model’ problem. The issue is that some of the latest group of climate models have somewhat higher than expected … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Gavin Schmidt, Global warming, Research, The philosophy of science | Tagged , , , , | 208 Comments

The importance of reducing methane emissions

Since I’ve written quite a lot about methane, I thought I would promote Realclimate’s definitive CO2/CH4 comparison post. It highlights that the large relative rise in atmospheric methane concentrations means that methane has made a significant contribution to modern warming. … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, Gavin Schmidt | Tagged , , , , | 14 Comments

Zharkova et al. – retracted

Just a quick post to highlight that the Zharkova et al. paper, that I’ve discussed in a couple of previous posts, has now been retracted. The retraction notice is here. There’s a Retraction Watch post, which also includes a link … Continue reading

Posted in Gavin Schmidt, Global warming, Philosophy for Bloggers, Sound Science (tm), The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , , | 118 Comments

RCP8.5 – another update

In case anyone is interested, Zeke Hausfather and Glen Peters have a Nature comment about the whole RCP8.5 issue. Unfortunately, they used misleading in the title, which seems to have produced an unfortunate headline on a BBC article. Otherwise, Zeke … Continue reading

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Gavin Schmidt, Michael Mann, Research, Scientists, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , | 67 Comments

Climate sensitivity in CMIP6 GCMs

Anyone who is aware of what’s going on in climate science should have heard that the latest generation of climate models, known as CMIP6, seem to be suggesting a somewhat higher climate sensitivity than suggested by the previous CMIP5 models. … Continue reading

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Gavin Schmidt, Research, Scientists, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , | 63 Comments

Climategate

Climategate is a topic I’ve rarely discussed on this blog. Mostly because it’s clear that it’s not possible to have a constructive discussion with those who have different views about its significance. However, since I watched the BBC show about … Continue reading

Posted in ClimateBall, Contrarian Matrix, Gavin Schmidt, Sound Science (tm), Steven McIntyre, The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , , , | 140 Comments

There was no “pause” in global warming!

There are a couple of new papers that essentially analyse the various analyses of the supposed “pause” in global warming. One, lead by James Risbey considers fluctuation[s] in surface temperature in historical context: reassessment and retrospective on the evidence. The … Continue reading

Posted in Climate sensitivity, ClimateBall, Gavin Schmidt, IPCC, Policy, Research, The philosophy of science, The scientific method | Tagged , , , , , | 293 Comments

Carbon budgets and the impacts of climate change

I’m somewhat stealing this from Stoat, but it’s an interesting topic, and it really originates from a tweet by Gavin Schmidt anyway 😉 I think this is correct. There's no connection to speak of between the impacts of carbon emissions … Continue reading

Posted in Carbon tax, Climate change, Gavin Schmidt, Policy | Tagged , , , , | 82 Comments