Category Archives: Global warming

How we frame extreme weather events

Posted on April 1, 2023 by ...and Then There's Physics

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 , , , , , | 14 Comments

Methane, again.

Posted on March 9, 2023 by ...and Then There's Physics

I ended up in quite an interesting Twitter discussion about methane and CO2. I got involved when someone mentioned this thread from Ken Caldeira. The point being made is that because CO2 has a long atmospheric lifetime, and because methane … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate sensitivity, Environmental change, Global warming | Tagged , , , , , | 61 Comments

The Escalator

Posted on February 2, 2023 by ...and Then There's Physics

One of the most well-known graphics from Skeptical Science is the escalator. It illustrates how contrarians tend to cherry-pick short time intervals so as to argue that there’s been no warming, while “realists” recognise the reality of long-term warming. A … Continue reading →

Posted in Global warming | Tagged , , , | 100 Comments

The Gulf Stream

Posted on January 22, 2023 by ...and Then There's Physics

Quite often in the media there will be articles claiming that global warming could cause the Gulf Stream to shutdown, or collapse. This is technically not correct, which is explained really nicely, in the video below, by Sabine Hossenfelder. Essentially, … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Global warming, Science, Severe Events | Tagged , , , | 32 Comments

Some more about Hansen et al.

Posted on January 15, 2023 by ...and Then There's Physics

I thought I would expand a bit on my previous post about the recent Hansen et al. paper. Something I did like is that the paper highlighted that there is no known paleoclimate analogues for the current anthropogenic forcing pathway. … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, Climate sensitivity, Global warming, Research | Tagged , , , | 20 Comments

Revkin and Lomborg

Posted on November 20, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

I was listening to a podcast hosted by Lex Fridman with guests Andy Revkin and Bjorn Lomborg. The podcast was billed as a Climate Debate, but it wasn’t really. It was mostly two guest who seemed to largely agree with … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Global warming, Resilience | Tagged , , , | 133 Comments

Giving up on 1.5C?

Posted on November 19, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

One of the talking points of COP27 is giving up, or compromising, on the 1.5oC target. The main reason is simply that the remaining carbon budget is very small. Essentially, to stop global warming requires getting human emissions to (net) … Continue reading →

Posted in advocacy, Climate change, Global warming, Policy | Tagged , , , , | 33 Comments

Beyond Catastrophe

Posted on October 29, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

Since some commenters on my previous post have mentioned this, I though I might comment on David Wallace-Wells’ recent article in the New York Times. It’s called Beyond Catastrophe, and argues that Thanks to astonishing declines in the price of … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Global warming, Roger Pielke Jr | Tagged , , , , | 149 Comments

No, a cherry-picked analysis doesn’t demonstrate that we’re not in a climate crisis

Posted on October 7, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

This is a repost of an article that I wrote for Skeptical Science, with help from @TheDisproof, who has been very active on Twitter debunking various climate myths. A group of Italian scientists recently published a paper in which they … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate change, ClimateBall, Global warming, physicists, Scientists, Severe Events | Tagged , , , , | 320 Comments

The ‘hot model’ problem

Posted on June 10, 2022 by ...and Then There's Physics

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