Posts Tagged: graphic

This week’s top climate science links

Dive right in:

  • Climate Change: A Threat to Global Security. US & UK Defense agree. – “I am struck by how similar UK and U.S. thinking is on the national security implications of climate change. Our defense departments agree that the impact of climate change is likely to be most severe in areas where it coincides with other stresses, such as poverty, demographic growth, and resource shortages: areas through which much of the world’s trade already passes.”
  • A Superstorm for Global Warming Research – a terrible terrible piece from Der Spiegel, who are usually pretty good at science reporting. Two of the authors have previously written some very misleading and inaccurate articles on climate change. Watch this space for updates…
  • Visualizing Arctic Sea Ice Extent Trends – “If you find yourself asking “what about … or what happens when…”, it’s probably time to make another chart that directly addresses your new “compared to what” question. Don’t expect one chart to answer multiple questions.”
  • Arctic ice recovers from the great melt – Wow, a semi-decent piece by Jonathan Leake! Apart from wrongly attributing the recent ‘spurt’ in ice growth to the Arctic Oscillation (it was more likely just a response to changes in regional atmospheric circulation) it’s a measured and almost insightful piece… is something weighing on his mind perhaps?

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Visualising the gap between political and scientific reality.

Keep an eye on the Climate Scoreboard during the next two weeks… Note the dark blue curve in the graphic, this is the probability distribution, it shows the full range of temperature rise the current national emissions proposals would likely give rise to. Currently it’s 2-6 degrees with 3.8 degrees is the most likely outcome (according to their analysis, climate sensitivity etc.).

With my risk managers hat on, it’s hard not to notice that we could go way above 3.8 degrees… it looks like there’s a 5-10% of going over 5 degrees… the sting’s in the tail as they say!

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