Is Prince Charles Correct?

In an interview recorded before the recent Paris massacre Prince Charles has recently told Sky News that he thinks that Climate Change is one causal factor in the ongoing Syrian situation. Rejecting him out of hand does not seem sound to me based on the available evidence.

Northern Hemisphere Blocking.

Over at Neven's Sea Ice Blog, Steve Bloom posted a link to some data on Northern Hemisphere blocking, I've got to work on the data Steve linked to, but haven't really got to the bottom of the matter. This data holds some exciting detail. I've not reached a firm conclusion on this, I need to read some more papers on blocking. But this post summarises where I've got to.

Drought again...

Due to events in the Arctic this will be a short post, no need to click 'more', there isn't any more.

Stuart Staniford, on his "Early Warning" blog, has done a typically excellent post on Aiguo Dai's latest paper, the post is here. I've previously blogged on the issue of drought and Hansen's Climate Dice, here and here. Dai's paper is published around the same time as Hansen's Climate Dice new paper is also published, that's discussed here, the actual paper is available here. It's basically a re-run of the Climate Dice whitepaper Hansen released last November, this time peer reviewed and published.

Aiguo Dai's paper, "Increasing Drought under Global Warming in Observations and Models" is available here, that link brings up an html version of the paper for me - no paywall. It revisits earlier work and finds that the lack of drought signature in the US had been due to climatic variability, specifically the Pacific Interdecadal Oscillation, as that impact is now reducing and the warming is continuing, the match between models and observations this century has improved. But rather than me re-produce Stuart's post go read it.

Actually, it strikes me that Al Qaeda have been following the wrong path all along. Instead of suicide bombings, the way to destroy the USA would be to set up an Islamic theocracy somewhere where there's loads of oil, get the US addicted to it by selling it for less than it's really worth, and let the climate system do the hard work. Hang on...

Arctic Methane: A Cause for Concern.

In the previous two posts I've outlined why I don't see observed methane release from the East Siberian Shelf (ESAS) to be the start of a fast process of catastrophic release. This is not to say I don't think this is a danger, however I see the danger as being more nuanced than some commentators and bloggers are claiming. Methane emissions from the Arctic region and ESAS may have the power to take our initial perturbation of CO2 emissions (being the largest single anthropogenic forcing, and the anthropogenic forcing with the greatest potential for future increase), amplify that perturbation, and perhaps even take AGW substantially out of our control. While we may not have enough fossil fuel to take us into the high-end IPCC scenarios, methane from the Arctic and the ESAS may just be able to take up the slack as our emissions fall this century due to geological constraints on fossil fuel production.

Hansen's Climate Dice.

I'm facing another battle with scepticism. Previously when I was a sceptic of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) I just wasn't thinking critically. Now I think I'm thinking more critically, and the battle I face now is with the issue; Just how bad is AGW going to be?

Australia's Big Dry and AGW.

The Big Dry in South East Australia is a classic case of the complexity with which AGW affects climate. I've chosen to write about it because the linkage is more subtle even than just an AGW interaction with a mode of variability in the atmosphere. Yet the AGW role is as clear as it has proven devastating for South East Australia.