My Pet Climate Project

5 Comments

So I’ve been reading the IPCC reports over the last few days.

In spite of the appearance that my bet with Chris having been settled by the admission that the raw climate data is pinned to its perch, I’m genuinely interested what the research has to say.

I’d like to crowdsource a small research project with the intent of putting together two things – an influence diagram and a checklist of datasets and models cited so that we can in turn explore the availability and state of them.

To do that, I needed a set of papers; I wanted to pick a sample, so I chose a chapter from the latest IPCC report –

IPCC Historical Overview

– and pulled a set of papers that seemed relevant from it – 20 papers in total.


 

Full
cite

Short
cite

1

Barnett, T.P., et al.,
1999: Detection and attribution of recent climate change: A status report. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc., 80, 2631-2660.

Barnett et al., 1999

2

Brohan P., et al., 2006:
Uncertainty estimates in regional and global

observed temperature
changes: A new data set from 1850. J.
Geophys.Res., 111,
D12106, doi:10.1029/2005JD006548.

Brohan et al., 2006

3

Francey, R.J., and G.D.
Farquhar, 1982: An explanation of C-13/C-12 variations in tree rings. Nature, 297,
28-31.

Francey
and Farquhar, 1982

4

Hasselmann, K., 1997:
Multi-pattern fingerprint method for detection and attribution of climate
change. (purchase) Clim. Dyn., 13, 601-612.

Hasselmann, 1997

5

Hegerl, G.C., et al.,
1996: Detecting greenhouse-gas-induced climate

change with an optimal fingerprint
method. J. Clim., 9, 2281-2306.

Hegerl et al., 1996

6

Hegerl, G.C., et al.,
1997: Multi-fingerprint detection and attribution of greenhouse-gas and
aerosol-forced climate change. Clim.
Dyn., 13, 613-634.

Hegerl et al., 1997

7

Hegerl, G.C., et al.,
2000: Optimal detection and attribution of climate

change: Sensitivity of
results to climate model differences. Clim.
Dyn.,16,
737-754.

Hegerl et al., 2000

8

Jones, P.D., et al.,
1990: Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air
temperature over land. Nature, 347, 169-172.

Jones et al., 1990

9

Keeling, C.D., 1961: The
concentration and isotopic abundances of carbon

dioxide in rural and
marine air. Geochim. Cosmochim. Acta, 24, 77-298.

Keeling,
1961

10

Keeling, C.D., 1998:
Rewards and penalties of monitoring the Earth. Annu.Rev. Energy Environ., 23, 25-82.

Keeling,
1998

11

Peterson, T.C., et al.,
1999: Global rural temperature trends. Geophys.
Res.Lett., 26,
329-332.

Peterson et al., 1999

12

Petit, J.R., et al.,
1999: Climate and atmospheric history of the past 420,000 years from the
Vostok ice core, Antarctica. (purchase) Nature, 399, 429-436.

Petit et al., 1999

13

Santer, B.D., et al.,
1995: Towards the detection and attribution of an anthropogenic effect on
climate. Clim. Dyn., 12, 77-100.

Santer et al., 1995

14

Santer, B.D., J.S. Boyle,
and D.E. Parker, 1996a: Human effect on global climate? Reply. Nature, 384, 524 .

Santer et al., 1996a

15

Santer, B.D., T.M.L.
Wigley, T.P. Barnett, and E. Anyamba, 1996b:

Detection of climate
change, and attribution of causes. In: Climate

Change 1995: The
Science of Climate Change [Houghton,
J.T., et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom
and New York, NY, USA, pp. 407-443.

Santer et al., 1996b

16

Santer, B.D., et al.,
1996c: A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the
atmosphere. Nature, 382, 39-46.

Santer et al., 1996c

17

Stanhill, G., 2001: The
growth of climate change science: A scientometric study. (purchase)Clim. Change,
48, 515-524.

Stanhill,
2001

18

Stott, P.A., et al., 2000:
External control of 20th century temperature by natural and anthropogenic
forcings. Science, 290, 2133-2137.

Stott et al., 2000

19

Tett, S.F.B., et al.,
1999: Causes of twentieth century temperature change. (purchase)Nature, 399,
569-572.

 

 

Tett et al., 1999

20

Stott, P.A., et al.,
2000: External control of 20th century temperature by natural and
anthropogenic forcings. Science, 290, 2133-2137.

Stott et al., 2000

21

Willett, H.C., 1950:
Temperature trends of the past century. In: CentenaryProceedings of the Royal Meteorological Society. Royal Meteorological Society, London. pp. 195-206.

Willett
(1950)

Take a look at the list and the chapter and tell me if you think I missed any of import.

Then I want to assemble a simple

datasheet

in the hopes that people will pick a paper and fill out a datasheet on it.

Again, we are not trying to judge the quality of the papers or research – I won’t pretend to be qualified to do so.

But what I’d like to do is see what core data is used throughout, what models are used, and what root papers are cited. That way we can build an influence map of the people, papers, data and models. I’m not sure what – if anything – it’ll show. But I can’t help thinking it’ll be interesting.
–

5 thoughts on “My Pet Climate Project”

  1. The Wegman report did an analysis of the relationships between authors using citations and co-authoring, so that may be of interest here.

    Reply

  2. This from the Barnett paper:

    _At present, it is debatable whether there is enough temperature proxy data to be representative of hemispheric, let alone global, climate changes given the lack of large spatial scale coherence in the data. *Yet the few good records that are available serve as strong checks on efforts to model natural climate variability (Jones et al. 1998)*_

    Emphasis mine. I was under the impression that Jones’ work was one of many sources of historic temp data, not one of the few. And of course this particular paper uses Jones.

    At first blush- there are clearly a fair number of climate models and certainly plenty of studies, but the actual _historic datasets_ that these models and studies are based on are few.

    I’m in on the project AL, lets see just what percentage of the time these studies are using Jones compared to others.

    Reply

  5. The authors’ remarks on page 107 peak my curiosity. First, the authors pay homage to the work of paleoclimatologists, admitting that their paleoclimate “proxy” observations indicate that there were rapid fluctuations in the climate in the past — but then the authors say “ignore the man behind the curtain” because 21st Century climate change will be different.

    First the homage:
    “The emerging picture of an unstable ocean-atmosphere system has opened the debate of whether human interference through greenhouse gases and aerosols could trigger such events (Broecker, 1997)”

    And then the disconnect:
    “The Working Group I (WGI) WGI FAR noted that past climates could provide analogues. Fifteen years of research since that assessment has identified a range of variations and instabilities in the climate system that occurred during the last 2 Myr of glacial-interglacial cycles and in the super-warm period of 50 Ma. These past climates do not appear to be analogues of the immediate future, yet they do reveal a wide range of climate processes that need to be understood when projecting 21st-century climate change (see Chapter 6).”

    I guess I have to read Chapter 6 to find out *why* “past climates do not appear to analogues of the immediate future.”

    –beo

    Reply

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