Week in review – science edition

Judith Curry has curated a great collection of articles to review .  Judith is the President (co-owner) of Climate Forecast Applications Network (CFAN).  Previously, she was Professor and Chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

 

Week in review – science edition by Judith Curry

A few things that caught my eye this past week.

The longest homogeneous series of grape harvest dates, 1354–2018, and its significance for the understanding of past and present climate [link]

Uncertainties in shoreline change reconstructions and projections [link

The Cold Transit of Southern Ocean Upwelling”. By projecting Southern Ocean water masses into T/S space we show that the conversion of deep to intermediate water relies on the seasonal cycle of air-ice-sea fluxes and mixing. [link

Researchers say “natural climate solutions” — low-tech changes to farm and land management — could cancel out a fifth of U.S. emissions. [link]

Heat Waves in Florida: Climatology, Trends, and Related Precipitation Events [link]  

A high-definition spatially explicit modelling approach for national greenhouse gas emissions from industrial processes: reducing the errors and uncertainties in global emission modelling [link]

Estimates of ocean warming have been revised substantially upward – by around 40% – in the years since the IPCC 5th Assessment Report [link]  

Comparing the spatial patterns of climate change in the 9th and 5th millennia BP from TRACE-21 model simulations [link]

Impact of Indian Ocean warming on increasing trend in pre-monsoon rainfall and Hadley circulation over Bay of Bengal [link]

The onset of neoglaciation in Iceland and the 4.2 ka event [link

100 years of progress in polar meteorology [link]

Contribution of atmospheric moisture transport to winter Arctic warming [link]

Reconstructing ocean heat content change back to the 19th Century [link

Where deep water comes from, where it goes, and how it affects decadal, centennial, and millennial-scale climate variability. [linksee also [link]

A terrifying sea level prediction now looks less likely [link]

Hydrothermal heat enhances abyssal mixing in the Antarctic Circumpolar Current [link]

California’s horrific had nothing to do with climate change. Public safety demands better understanding of the science. [link]

New record shows the last 240,000 yrs of Saharan dust variations track summer insolation, with much less influence from glacial-interglacial changes than previously thought. [link]

How accurately should we model ice shelf melt rates? [link]

In the Northern Hemisphere, the contribution of greenhouse gases to tropical expansion remains difficult to detect even by the end of the 21st century – due to large natural variability [link

An earthquake will destroy a big portion of the coastal Northwest. The only question is when: [link]

The southeast US got much wetter over the past century. It’s almost all in the fall season and is due to enhanced wind circulation around the North Atlantic Subtropical High: [link]

Social science, technology and policy

Evidence-Based Policy – Older than Advertised and Weaker than We Could Wish [link]

Revkin in NatGeo: “Proactive adaptation initiatives—including changes to policies, business operations, capital investments, and other steps—yield benefits in excess of their costs in the near term, as well as over the long term.” [link]

LA Times investigation found the city’s electric buses stalled on hills, required service calls much more frequently than older buses & had unpredictable driving ranges below advertised distances, which were impaired by heat, cold & the way drivers braked. [link]

China: No Wind Or Solar If It Can’t Beat Coal On Price [link]

Largest ever oil and gas resource found in the U.S. [link]

Ten charts show how the world is progressing on clean energy [link]

Plants are surprisingly bad at p#hotosynthesis. New research shows how to make them up to 40% better – and that could help feed a growing world [link]

About science and scientists

Taking census of physics: “Over the past decades, the diversity of areas explored by physicists has exploded, encompassing new topics from biophysics and chemical physics to network science.” [link]

When condensed matter physics became king [link]

A feminist ‘takedown’ of Richard Feynman [link]

Podcast: Roger Penrose on Spacetime, Consciousness, and the Universe [link]

What is needed is a place where serious scholars can pursue questions that don’t fit the progressive orthodoxy at today’s most prestigious institutions of higher learning:  An Ivory Tower of our own [link]

How the decides whether to hold ’em or fold ’em [link]

There are no laws of physics – there is only the landscape [link]  Physicists used to search for a single, self-consistent set of laws. They’ve found a vast landscape of possibility.

Why complexity is different [link]

Congratulations on the promotion.  But did science get a demotion?  Biases associated with careerism in academia [link]

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