There’s a new set of long-term climate change data out, this one for Europe over the last 500 years, and once again it’s shaped like a hockey stick:

Continue reading ‘A Shiny New Hockey Stick’ »

A new UN report may signal the death knell for the Kyoto treaty by giving Russian treaty opponents the ammunition they’ve been looking for, according to a piece today by Paul Webster in Science (subscription required). The problem, according to Webster, is that previous UN calculations that seemed to show the Russians would have carbon credits to sell may be wrong, having failed to take into account burgeoning new Russian economic activity. Russia is key, because Kyoto doesn’t come into effect until countries representing 55 percent of the world’s carbon emissions sign on. With the U.S. out, as Webster and others note, Russia is pretty much the key. But the only way the Russians can win the political support internally is if Russia can make money selling carbon credits – essentially selling off its reductions in carbon use to other countries that want to use more (this carbon credit market is a central feature of Kyoto). If Russia doesn’t have any to sell, political support there will likely evaporate.

The insurance market seems to have noticed global climate change, according to this story:

The world’s second-largest reinsurer, Swiss Re, warned on Wednesday that the costs of natural disasters, aggravated by global warming, threatened to spiral out of control, forcing the human race into a catastrophe of its own making.

In a report revealing how climate change is rising on the corporate agenda, Swiss Re said the economic costs of such disasters threatened to double to $150 billion a year in 10 years, hitting insurers with $30-40 billion in claims, or the equivalent of one World Trade Center attack annually.

(Thanks to Greg Mello for pointing this out.)

Dang but it’s hard to keep up with the climate blogging thing without David Appell for inspiration. But one must soldier on, most recently with a new paper from Martin Beniston in the latest Geophysical Research Letters on the summer of 2003 in Europe.

Model results suggest that under enhanced atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations, summer temperatures are likely to increase by over 4?C on average, with a corresponding increase in the frequency of severe heat waves. Statistical features of the 2003 heat wave for the Swiss site of Basel are investigated and compared to both past, 20th century events and possible future extreme temperatures based on model simulations of climatic change. For many purposes, the 2003 event can be used as an analog of future summers in coming decades in climate impacts and policy studies.

Continue reading ‘The 2003 Outlier’ »