{"id":30000,"date":"2018-01-22T08:00:17","date_gmt":"2018-01-22T13:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30000"},"modified":"2018-01-22T08:00:17","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T13:00:17","slug":"new-study-on-climate-sensitivity-not-what-poor-media-headlines-deniers-are-saying","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=30000","title":{"rendered":"New study on climate sensitivity not what poor media headlines, deniers are saying"},"content":{"rendered":"

New study on climate sensitivity not what poor media headlines, deniers are saying<\/a><\/h3>\n
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Courtesy Skeptical Science<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

One swallow doesn’t make a spring, and nor does one scientific paper change a whole body of evidence. But you could be mistaken for thinking so after the poor media coverage last week of a new piece of climate research.<\/p>\n

A study published last week in Nature<\/i>(“Emergent constraint on equilibrium climate sensitivity from global temperature variability”<\/a>) claims to tighten the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), range for (short-term) Estimated Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the amount of warming to be expected from a doubling of carbon dioxide\u00a0 (CO2) in the atmosphere.
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\nThe study puts its best guess at 2.8C, which is pretty squarely in the middle of what scientists have thought all along. It also affirms that the best-case scenario of little-to-no warming, which deniers point to as justification for inaction, is unlikely, as are the worst-case, \u201cblack swan\u201d scenarios.<\/p>\n

But because the AFP write-up was framed around the worst-case scenarios being \u201cnot credible,\u201d deniers are celebrating the study as some sort of win.<\/p>\n

Now this study, and particularly AFP\u2019s coverage, isn\u2019t particularly helpful from either a scientific or a communications standpoint. For one thing, it\u2019s based on recent short-term variation, not thousands of years of temperature data, like other paleo-climate based ECS studies<\/b>. Plus, it uses a brand new modeling methodology<\/b>–not exactly a tried-and-true approach. But apparently those who rail against climate models as hopelessly inaccurate will eagerly believe model outputs if they think it supports their denial.<\/p>\n

Then there\u2019s the whole \u201csingle-study-syndrome\u201d<\/b> issue, so we should take the findings with a grain of salt, especially given other recent studies putting ECS at the higher end of what\u2019s likely. This new modeling exercise doesn\u2019t take tipping points into account,<\/b> meaning that \u2013 oops \u2013 those worst-case scenarios are still very much on the table if steady warming triggers rapid changes in glacier melt or ocean circulations or any other unexpected surprises.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

New study on climate sensitivity not what poor media headlines, deniers are saying Courtesy Skeptical Science One swallow doesn’t make a spring, and nor does one scientific paper change a whole body of evidence. But you could be mistaken for thinking so after the poor media coverage last week of a new piece of climate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[141,7439,1517,18064,5161,440,512],"class_list":["post-30000","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-climate-change","tag-climate-code-red","tag-climate-denial","tag-climate-sensitivity","tag-intergovernmental-panel-on-climate-change","tag-ipcc","tag-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30000","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30000"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30000\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":30002,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30000\/revisions\/30002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30000"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30000"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30000"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}