Posted on 30 August 2017 by Ari Jokimäki
About five years ago, Skeptical Science had a weekly feature called “new research from last week” which was compiled by me. I stopped doing the posts at the end of 2012. Now I’ll start making those posts again. This time I won’t promise to have a post at a certain time every week, but only that there will roughly be one new post per week.
Below are the new papers I noticed between August 21 and August 27. The title for each paper is shown and links to its abstract. Additionally, I have included a quote from the abstract for some papers. Papers have been divided into four categories: climate change (containing climate science relating to climate change), climate change impacts (contains papers on how climate change affects different things such as biosphere and mankind), climate change mitigation (contains research on actions we can do to mitigate climate change), and other papers (contains for example papers on past climates and on general climate science).
Climate change
1. North Atlantic observations sharpen meridional overturning projections
“Our results present more evidence that AMOC likely already started slowing down.“
2. Longwave Emission Trends over Africa and Implications for Atlantic Hurricanes
“GCMs predict a continuation of the increasing OLR gradient in response to greenhouse gas forcing. Assuming a steady linear relationship between African easterly waves and tropical cyclogenesis, this result suggests a future increase in Atlantic tropical cyclone frequency by 10% (20%) at the end of the 21st century under the RCP 4.5 (8.5) forcing scenario.“
3. Evaluating the evidence of a global sea surface temperature threshold for tropical cyclone genesis
“Here, a basin-by-basin analysis of the SST distributions in the five most active ocean basins is performed, which shows that there is no global SST threshold for TC genesis. The distributions of genesis SST show substantial variations between basins.“
4. How much have California winters warmed over the last century?
“Averaged across California over 1920-2015, Tmax trends vary from -0.30 to 1.2 °C/century while Tmin trends range from 1.2 to 1.9 °C/century.“
5. Western North Pacific tropical cyclone model tracks in present and future climates
“The first is a statistically significant increase in the North-South expansion, which can also be viewed as a poleward shift, as TC tracks are prevented from expanding equatorward due to the weak Coriolis force near the Equator. The second change is an eastward shift in the storm tracks that occur near the central Pacific in one of the multi-model ensembles, indicating a possible increase in the occurrence of storms near Hawaii in a warming climate.“
6. North Atlantic polar lows and weather regimes: do current links persist in a warmer climate?
“While a relationship has been identified for the present climate, under a warmer climate, polar low favorable conditions are expected to occur less often, and the large-scale circulation variability appears to have reduced influence on stability, and thus, on polar low occurrence.“
7. Examining the Climatology of Shortwave Radiation in the Northeastern United States
“Statistically significant decreases in shortwave radiation are identified which are dominated by changes during the summer months. Because this coincides with the season of greatest insolation and the highest potential for energy production, financial implications may be large for the solar energy industry if such trends persist into the future.“
“Concerning the warming in the SFB, an examination of the observations and the heat budget in an unstructured-grid numerical model simulation suggested that the warming during the second half of 2014 and early 2016 originated in the adjacent California coastal ocean and propagated through the Golden Gate into the Bay.“
“Climate models show that the spatial variability in sea-level trends observed by tide-gauge records is dominated by the GIA contribution and the steric contribution over 1900-2015. Climate models also show that it is important to include all contributions to sea-level changes as they cause significant local deviations; for example, the groundwater depletion around India which is responsible for the low 20th century sea-level rise in the region.“
10. Extreme cyclone events in the Arctic: Wintertime variability and trends
11. Atmospheric eddies mediate lapse rate feedback and Arctic amplification
13. Towards consistent diagnostics of the coupled atmosphere and ocean energy budgets
14. Mechanisms underlying recent decadal changes in subpolar North Atlantic Ocean heat content
15. The warmer the ocean surface, the shallower the mixed layer: How much of this is true?
16. Horizontal and vertical variability of observed soil temperatures
22. Climatic variability of the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans and western US snowpack
23. The influence of topography on midlatitude cyclones on Australia’s east coast
24. Detection of Sea Level Fingerprints derived from GRACE gravity data
25. Climatology of Heavy Precipitation over Corsica in the Period 1985 – 2015
27. Variability of temperature properties over Kenya based on observed and reanalyzed datasets
28. Bathymetric control of warm ocean water access along the East Antarctic Margin
Climate change impacts
30. Promoting flood risk reduction: the role of insurance in Germany and England
“We find that in both countries FRM [Flood Risk Management] is still a reactive, event-driven process, while anticipatory FRM remains underdeveloped. However, collaboration between insurers and FRM decision-makers has already been successful, for example in improving risk knowledge and awareness, while in other areas insurance acts as a disincentive for more risk reduction action.“
31. The Role of Health in Urban Climate Adaptation: An Analysis of Six U.S. Cities
“We found that interviewees’ ability to understand the connection between climate and health was a major determinant for health adaptation implementation.“
32. The Brazilian World Cup: too hot for soccer?
“The results showed the air temperature and relative humidity data analyzed here both individually and in the form of an index indicate that the World Cup held in Brazil in 2014 did not put any of the players at risk due to extreme heat.“
33. Environmental indicators of oyster norovirus outbreaks in coastal waters
“Among the six environmental indicators, the most important three indicators, including water temperature, solar radiation and gage height, are capable of explaining 77.7% of model-predicted oyster norovirus outbreaks while the extremely low temperature alone may explain 37.2% of oyster norovirus outbreaks.“
34. Sound physiological knowledge and principles in modeling shrinking of fishes under climate change
35. A first look at factors affecting aragonite compensation depth in the eastern Arabian Sea
36. Implications of climate and outdoor thermal comfort on tourism: the case of Italy
37. Potential climate change impacts on fire intensity and key wildfire suppression thresholds in Canada
38. Simulating plant invasion dynamics in mountain ecosystems under global change scenarios
39. Humidity does not appear to trigger leaf out in woody plants
40. Tracing biogeochemical subsidies from glacier runoff into Alaska’s coastal marine food webs
41. Net community production in the bottom of first-year sea ice over the Arctic spring bloom
Climate change mitigation
42. Negative Emissions from Stopping Deforestation and Forest Degradation, Globally
“Accounting for these committed emissions, we estimate that stopping deforestation and allowing secondary forests to grow would yield cumulative negative emissions between 2016 and 2100 of about 120 PgC, globally. Extending the lifetimes of wood products could potentially remove another 10 PgC from the atmosphere, for a total of approximately 130 PgC, or about 13 years of fossil fuel use at today’s rate.” … “But if greater negative emissions are to be realized, they will require an expansion of forest area, greater efficiencies in converting harvested wood to long-lasting products and sources of energy, and novel approaches for sequestering carbon in soils. That is, they will require current management practices to change.“
43. Assessing ExxonMobil’s climate change communications (1977–2014)
“We conclude that ExxonMobil contributed to advancing climate science—by way of its scientists’ academic publications—but promoted doubt about it in advertorials. Given this discrepancy, we conclude that ExxonMobil misled the public.“
“We found that technology change indeed reduced aggregate carbon dioxide emissions, but the scale and intensity effects of technology change separately expressed positive and negative values. As a consequence, previous studies that only consider the intensity effect overestimate the impact of technology change on carbon dioxide emissions.“
“Carbon emissions due to loss of urban trees were found to be significant and unaccounted for the metro rail project.“
46. The perspectives of the urban poor in climate vulnerability assessments – The case of Kota, India
47. How Much Does Wind Power Reduce CO2 Emissions? Evidence from the Irish Single Electricity Market
Other papers
48. An 810-year history of cold season temperature variability for northern Poland
“Investigations into climate-growth relationships found year-to-year ring-width variability to be more strongly correlated to cold season temperature (November to April) prior to the growing season than summer temperatures during tree-ring formation.“
49. Late Quaternary glaciation of the northern Urals: a review and new observations
52. Investigating δ18O of Turbo sarmaticus (L. 1758) as an indicator of sea surface temperatures
53. On the spatio-temporal representativeness of observations
