Atmospheric

We may idealize the last century but natural forces have always caused climate on Earth to fluctuate - sometimes quite a bit. But science is about controlling nature and not letting random behavior control our destinies and since we know that some periods were good and some awful, we'd like to avoid the awful. We can't control everything - the earth is still going to orbit the sun and such orbital forcing of climate change happens over thousands of years and brings ice ages and warming periods.  A new paper finds that some of the same forces as today were at play 1.4 billion years…

The activity of the Sun is an important factor in the complex interactions that control our climate. We don't really even understand the impacr of the sun - it is not constant over time, but has greater significance when the Earth is cooler, according to a new paper in Geology. There has been discussion as to whether variations in the strength of the Sun have played a role in triggering climate change in the past, but more and more research results clearly indicate that solar activity - i.e. the amount of radiation coming from the Sun - has an impact on how the climate varies over time. In…

The recent slowdown in climate warming is due to natural oscillations in the climate, according to a team of climate scientists, who add that these oscillations represent variability internal to the climate system. They do not signal any slowdown in human-caused global warming.  The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) describes how North Atlantic sea-surface temperatures tend to oscillate with a periodicity of about 50 to 70 years. The Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) varies over a broader range of timescales. The researchers looked only at the portion of the PDO that was…

Everyone loves to talk about the weather, and this winter Mother Nature has served up a feast to chew on. Few parts of the US have been spared her wrath. Severe drought and abnormally warm conditions continue in the west, with the first-ever rain-free January in San Francisco; bitter cold hangs tough over the upper Midwest and Northeast; and New England is being buried by a seemingly endless string of snowy nor’easters. Yes, droughts, cold and snowstorms have happened before, but the persistence of this pattern over North America is starting to raise eyebrows. Is climate change at work here?…

Attacks on institutions that keep records of global temperatures, such as NASA, the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the UK Met Office, and Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, continue to appear in the press. Recent articles have raised concerns about the temperature record in Paraguay and the Arctic. The Australian newspaper has published a series of articles on similar concerns about the Australian Bureau of Meteorology’s temperature data. The thrust of these articles is that data adjustments, made to correct for biases caused by changes in location, exposure or…

Some of the coldest air of the 2014-2015 winter season is settling over the eastern two-thirds of the U.S., an Arctic air mass that brought wind chills from below zero to the single numbers from the Midwest to the Mid-Atlantic. It is certainly cold on the surface, but infrared NASA satellite imagery revealed even colder temperatures in cloud tops associated with the air mass. NOAA's GOES-East satellite provided a visible and infrared picture of the clouds associated with the Arctic air mass, as they stretched from the eastern Dakotas to the Mid-Atlantic region. Underneath that cloudy blanket…

The folks in Boston might feel like they are having a run of bad weather now, but it's nothing like the intense hurricanes, fueled by warmer oceans, that frequently pounded the region during the first millennium, from the peak of the Roman Empire into the height of the Middle Ages, according to a new study. A new record of sediment deposits from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, shows evidence that 23 severe hurricanes hit New England between the years 250 and 1150 - a severe storm about once every 40 years on average. Many of these hurricanes were likely more intense than any that have hit the…

The rate of global warming that had been predicted in the 1990s did not come to pass. In the 21st century, warming has been significantly slower than all the models had predicted, leading to claims that the models contained systematic errors. Not so, according to a new analysis, it is just random variation. Jochem Marotzke, Director at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, and Piers M. Forster, a professor at the University of Leeds in the UK, did a statistical analysis and found that the models do not generally overestimate man-made climate change and so global warming is…

A new study finds that most climate models may have wiggles that undermine accuracy - but they are likely underestimating the degree of decade-to-decade variability occurring in mean surface temperatures as Earth's atmosphere warms. The models also provide inconsistent explanations of why this variability occurs in the first place and such discrepancies undermine the models' reliability for projecting the short-term pace as well as the extent of future warming, the study's authors warn. As such, we shouldn't over-interpret recent temperature trends, no matter what blizzard his New York City…