Posted on 1 October 2019 by Doug Bostrom

51 articles, 20 open access

Situational awareness: "That ship has sailed." 

In a meeting of oil and gas executives this past summer, Mark Barron suggested energy companies accept that as a functional matter of politics anthropogenic climate change is fact and that their industry must deal with the reality of an under-40 US population seeing climate change as “an existential crisis that we need to address.”

A brief glance at this week's proportionality of published climate change research illustrates how— let alone its being a political reality and fait accompli-- acceptance of our influence on the climate in the broad scientific community is a ship that has sailed and sunk beneath the horizon, is well along its necessary course.

There are still interesting results to be found in the basic physical science of how our climate responds to a massive injection of CO2, but research activity increasingly lies in quantifying our future climate and Earth systems behavior based on what we already know from prior more basic results.  Exploring and creating economic scenarios from which citizens may forge informed and functional policy,and understanding how the biome will cope with upcoming changes we're imposing on the planet are areas of intense focus. As well, a substantial (alarmingly?) component of current climate-related research concerns how we will feed and house a population projected to increase by some 35% even as food production and livable space are more or less negatively impacted by heating. Most immediately, now that we know something is happening our eyes are opened; observations of changes already taking place are a substantial part of this week's roster, a notably persistent feature of Skeptical Science research news.

Researchers can explore scenarios, offer quantification of what we may expect to see but of course it's up to us to be improved by all of this work,  to help shape useful policy responses. Not all of us can be credentialed scientists or citizen scientists, yet we all of us together share responsibility for making better luck.

Juicy Open Access

The American Meteorological Society has published State of the Climate in 2018, a synopsis of Earth's climate last year. AMS has also published the "executive summary" of their more extensive report as A Look at 2018: Takeaway Points from the State of the Climate Supplement. Both are open access, free to read, highly recommended. 

We don't think real good

"One step forward, another back" comes to mind when reading Beattie et al, Conservation Spillovers: The Effect of Rooftop Solar on Climate Change Beliefs. Even as visible mitigation systems help folks to accept that climate change is real and something needing to be addressed, the same technologies may mislead us into believing we've "fixed the problem."  So the research results suggest-- your personal intuition and experience may concur with the concept.

Holistic Carbon Capture

Speaking of intuition, there's something seemingly a little off about the idea of using CO2 liberated from combustion of coal to help extract more oil and gas while simultaneously vanishing negative outcomes. But what do we know? Fukai et al make it all add up (?)  in Techno?economic assessment of carbon capture, utilization and storage for coal?fired power generation, and CO2?enhanced oil recovery in the USA: an Ohio case study

Articles: 

Physical science of anthropogenic global warming

Greenhouse gas and energy fluxes in a boreal peatland forest after clear-cutting (open access)

Trend analysis of the airborne fraction and sink rate of anthropogenically released CO2 (open access)

Observation of global warming and global warming effects

State of the Climate in 2018 (open access)

Sea Surface Temperatures: Seasonal Persistence and Trends

Changes of the tropical glaciers throughout Peru between 2000 and 2016 – mass balance and area fluctuations (open access)

Estimating Greenland tidewater glacier retreat driven by submarine melting (open access)

Analysis of long-term precipitation changes in West Bengal, India: An approach to detect monotonic trends influenced by autocorrelations

Arctic polar vortex splitting in early January: the role of Arctic sea ice loss

Modelling global warming and global warming effects

21st century ocean forcing of the Greenland Ice Sheet for modelingof sea level contribution (open access)

Near surface ocean temperature uncertainty related to initial condition uncertainty (open access)

Eastern North Pacific tropical cyclone activity in historical and future CMIP5 experiments: assessment with a model-independent tracking scheme

A refined model for the Earth’s global energy balance (open access)

Weak dependence of future global mean warming on the background climate state

Simulated future changes in ENSO dynamics in the framework of the linear recharge oscillator model

Assessment of multi-model climate projections of water resources over South America CORDEX domain

Added value of very high resolution climate simulations over South Korea using WRF modeling system

Simulation of extreme water levels in response to tropical cyclones along the Indian coast: a climate change perspective

The CMIP6 Landscape

Humans dealing with our global warming

Uncertainty analysis of a European high-resolution emission inventory of CO2 and CO to support inverse modelling and network design (open access)

Economic development, energy demand, and carbon emission prospects of China’s provinces during the 14th Five-Year Plan period: Application of CMRCGE model

Scenarios of climate adaptation potential on protected working lands from management of soils (open access)

(Mis)conceptions about modeling of negative emissions technologies (open access)

Conservation Spillovers: The Effect of Rooftop Solar on Climate Change Beliefs

Energy consumption by rural migrant workers and urban residents with a hukou in China: quality-of-life-related factors and built environment

Assigning Blame: How Local Narratives Shape Community Responses to Extreme Flooding Events in Detroit, Michigan and Waterbury, Vermont (open access)

Avoiding or mitigating flooding: Bottom-up drivers of urban resilience to climate change in the USA

Multiple-pollutant cost-efficiency: Coherent water and climate policy for agriculture (open access)

A practical framework of quantifying climate change-driven environmental losses (QuantiCEL) in coastal areas in developing countries

Energy transition, CO 2 mitigation, and air pollutant emission reduction: scenario analysis from IPAC model

Techno?economic assessment of carbon capture, utilization and storage for coal?fired power generation, and CO2?enhanced oil recovery in the USA: an Ohio case study

The effects of a linked carbon emissions trading scheme for Latin America (open access)

Decarbonizing strategies of the retail sector following the Paris Agreement

Knowledge gaps and climate adaptation policy: a comparative analysis of six Latin American countries (open access)

Carbon leakage in aviation policy (open access)

Technical characteristics of a solar geoengineering deployment and implications for governance (open access)

Dependence of economic impacts of climate change on anthropogenically directed pathways

Potential adaptive strategies for 29 sub-Saharan crops under future climate change

ICTs for delivering climate-development strategies: an informational governance framework for local climate-development organizations

Biology and global warming

Multi-decadal changes in structural complexity following mass coral mortality on a Caribbean reef (open access)

Projecting marine species range shifts from only temperature can mask climate vulnerability

Global vegetation biomass production efficiency constrained by models and observations

Divergent carbon cycle response of forest and grass?dominated northern temperate ecosystems to record winter warming

Terrestrial N2O emissions and related functional genes under climate change: A global meta?analysis

Limitations of Trait?Based Approaches for Stressor Assessment: the Case of Freshwater Invertebrates and Climate Drivers

Integrating patterns of thermal tolerance and phenotypic plasticity with population genetics to improve understanding of vulnerability to warming in a widespread copepod

Effects of rising atmospheric CO 2 , climate change, and nitrogen deposition on aboveground net primary production in a temperate forest (open access)

Soil microbes that may accompany climate warming increase alpine plant production

Ecological consequences of parasite host shifts under changing environments: More than a change of partner

Forecasting global coral bleaching

Special:

A Look at 2018: Takeaway Points from the State of the Climate Supplement (open access)

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