Has a newly identified human-caused signal emerged from the background of climate noise? This is the claim by Santer et al in a paper just published in Science. The signal is increased seasonal range of tropospheric temperatures observed in mid-latitudes. Santer et al. say that most such AGW “fingerprint” studies rely on comparing climate model […]

No one knows how long this divergence of surplus ice will persist, but for now 2018 Arctic ice extent resembles a hockey stick.  Presently the ice is 525.000 km^2 above 11 year average (2007 to 2017 inclusive) and  ~1M km^2 greater than 2007. More detailed report from July 14 below. In June 2018, Arctic ice […]

As July 17th comes to a close, the sun has been blank for 21 straight days–a remarkable 3 weeks without sunspots. To find an equal stretch of spotless suns in the historical record, you have to go back to July-August 2009 when the sun was emerging from a century-class solar minimum. We are now entering […]

Unearthed new evidence (Mangerud and Svendsen, 2018) reveals that during the Early Holocene, when CO2 concentrations hovered around 260 ppm, “warmth-demanding species” were living in locations 1,000 km farther north of where they exist today in Arctic Svalbard, indicating that summer temperatures must have been about “6°C warmer than at present”. Proxy evidence from two other […]

Potential effects of volcanic warming on ice-sheet melting and sea level rise still to be determined Tracing a chemical signature of helium in seawater, an international team of scientists funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the United Kingdom’s (U.K.) Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) has discovered a previously unknown volcanic hotspot beneath the […]

Global Sea Ice extent 1,000,000 km2 higher than last year on this day. Source: Sunshine Hours

The headlines say “Antarctica loses three trillion tonnes of ice in 25 years.” They add that it’s shedding ice at an accelerating rate. Sounds a lot, perhaps it will be gone soon? Actually it amounts to only 0.011 percent of total Antarctic ice. If that is, anything is being lost at all.   An analysis […]

Last week a team of researchers from the UK Met Office, the University of East Anglia, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Southern Queensland and the Sorbonne published in the journal Science Advances an interesting paper showing that the recent much debated and researched 21st century “slowdown” in global surface temperatures was real and […]