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.
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.
"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.
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
Physical science of anthropogenic global warming
Greenhouse gas and energy fluxes in a boreal peatland forest after clear-cutting (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
Estimating Greenland tidewater glacier retreat driven by submarine melting (open access)
Arctic polar vortex splitting in early January: the role of Arctic sea ice loss
Modelling global warming and global warming effects
Near surface ocean temperature uncertainty related to initial condition uncertainty (open access)
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
Humans dealing with our global warming
(Mis)conceptions about modeling of negative emissions technologies (open access)
Conservation Spillovers: The Effect of Rooftop Solar on Climate Change Beliefs
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)
The effects of a linked carbon emissions trading scheme for Latin America (open access)
Decarbonizing strategies of the retail sector following the Paris Agreement
Carbon leakage in aviation policy (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
Biology and global warming
Projecting marine species range shifts from only temperature can mask climate vulnerability
Global vegetation biomass production efficiency constrained by models and observations
Terrestrial N2O emissions and related functional genes under climate change: A global meta?analysis
Soil microbes that may accompany climate warming increase alpine plant production
Forecasting global coral bleaching
Special:
A Look at 2018: Takeaway Points from the State of the Climate Supplement (open access)
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Posted by Doug Bostrom on Tuesday, 1 October, 2019
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