Down near the end of a long and ultimately tedious* comment thread over on Prometheus, Gavin Schmidt offered an incredibly useful little gem today.

As I’ve written before, “paleoclimate and future projections on a regional scale are critical.” This is one of the reasons I’ve been so interested in the argument Roger Pielke Sr. makes about the inadequacy of globally averaged surface temperature as a metric for climate change. I wanna know what has happened, and what we can say about what might happen in the future, right here. (And by “right here,” I actually mean in large part the oceans – ENSO and the like – which are the big regulators of what happens here.) Gavin, one of the RealClimate guys, suggests in his Prometheus comment that also is the real important piece of the hockey stick climate reconstruction:

The actual part of the reconstruction that is most interesting are the *spatial* patterns of change. This is the cutting edge for the GCMs – whether modes of variability like ENSO or the NAO have forced (and potentially predictable) components. Our own work has used the MBH reconstruction to look for patterns related to solar and volcanic forcing with some success (Schmidt et al, 2004; Shindell et al; 2001, 2004) as have others (Adams et al, 2004 for instance).

It is one of those odd ironies that the figure that everyone keeps talking about is actually the least important from the point of view of understanding climate responses to forcing.

* Sorry William and Roger, but I gave up trying to parse who’s saying what regarding how the SPM did or did not use the hockey stick to support its attribution claims.

In a convergence of two topics near and dear to my journalistic heart, the Independent reports “Blair to give his blessing to new nuclear reactors as only way to cut emissions”

Tony Blair is ready to give a new generation of nuclear power stations the go-ahead, Downing Street hinted last night.

His expert on the subject, Professor Sir David King, the Chief Scientific Advisor, who once opposed nuclear power, has told Mr Blair that the nuclear stations will be able to operate without subsidy so long as they are given lengthy contracts.

An amusing comment today from Roger Pielke Jr. about his experience as ringmaster of an on line debate over the relevance of the hockey stick climate reconstruction, placing himself squarely between warring tribes as he tried (with some success, I thought) to spark a useful discussion.

I found it amusing to find myself being attacked simultaneously on both the RealClimate website and the ClimateAudit website for being in the camp of the other. As one post said, “if you are not with us you are against us”. This perspective, which is held not only among anonymous blog commentators, but some scientists, issue advocates and politicians helps to explain why the climate debate is locked in stalemate, and everyone chooses to fight about science instead.

Roger – this is how we journalists sometimes feel.

A new paper by Jian Lu and Thomas Delworth argues tentatively for a link between greenhouse warming and drought in the Sahel.(Lu and Delworth, 2005)

This matters, of course, far more than my usual hobbyhorse of drought in the southwestern U.S. Here when our water supplies run low because of drought, we suffer economic dislocation. In the Sahel, the semiarid band across Africa on the southern border of the Sahara, famines set in, governments collapse, people die.(Glantz, 2003)
Continue reading ‘Drought in the Sahel’ »