The Skeptical Science audience largely were not monitoring my new research of last week feature during last year (this is painfully obvious from the visitor counts ofmy blog), so I think a glimpse of that might be in order. One of the points highlighting some selected papers of last week is to show that climate science is cool. Therefore I decided to make a selection of cool climate papers of last year. While I'm browsing through new climate related science and looking at certain research paper, I frequently think that this is cool. Below you can see some of the studies from last year I thought were cool. There is one paper for each week and I have subjectively decided which is the coolest paper of that week. I won't listen to complaints but you are welcome to show your own selections.

I should note that in some occasions these studies show results that are not very nice, so I'm not suggesting that those results are cool, but that the science of the study is cool. Sometimes I had to leave out some very cool studies because there were some other study in the same week I wanted to include. I would also like to note that generally all science is cool but these are kind of papers that highlight it.

Week 1:Jezek et al.used radar measurements to study Jakobshavn Glacier sliding in Greenland.

Week 2:Bar-Or et al.note that it is actually quite difficult to find cloud-free pixels from MODIS data.

Week 3:Pongratz et al.show that historic wars and epidemics did not have strong enough effect to Earth's carbon cycle so that they would be detected in ice core carbon dioxide records.

Week 4:Bernier et al.estimated the climate impact of black spruce forest turning to lichen-spruce woodlands in North-America.

Week 5:Kucharski et al.model simulations suggest that Atlantic warming causes eastern tropical Pacific to cool.

Week 6:Turtle et al.have observed that even if Titan, the moon of Saturn, has very weird weather system, it seems to have seasonal changes, which seem to occur in the tropospheric methane clouds.

Week 7:Yamano et al.found that Japan temperate area corals are expanding polewards at high speed - 14 km per year.

Week 8:Roquet et al.have equipped elephant seals with data loggers to measure ocean temperature and salinity.

Week 9:Therrell& Trotteranalysed the weather and climate information in native american pictographic winter calendars.

Week 10:Schweger et al.studied why Holocene forests differ from those of previous interglacials and suggest that one important factor that wasn't present in previous interglacials is mankind burning stuff.

Week 11:D’Arrigo et al.studied NAO and ENSO reconstructions back in time and suggested that the anomalously cold winter 1783-1784 was not caused by the erution of volcano Laki, but that it was caused by similar combination of NAO-ENSO phases that made winter 2009-2010 so severe in some places of Northern Hemisphere. By the way, a recent study showed that eruption plume of Laki probably didn't reach stratosphere and therefore probably didn't cause the cold winter 1783-1784.

Week 12:Bokhorst et al.used infrared heating lamps and soil warming cables to simulate week-long extreme winter warming events in sub-arctic heathland to find out that winter warming events cause considerable plant damage by melting insulating snow.

Week 13:Kosintsev et al.used intestinal contents of a baby mammoth to reconstruct the environment where this mammoth called Lyuba lived over 40000 years ago.

Week 14:Webb et al.noted that grapes in Australian vineyards are attaining maturity earlier than before, so this must be one of the positive sides of global warming.

Week 15:Ding et al.suggest based on observational data that West Antarctic warming actually originates from central tropical Pacific.

Week 16:Caccianiga et al.studied ecosystems on the surface of glacier.

Week 17:Retallackstudied fossil preservation through ages and argued that GHG-driven climate changes might help in fossil preservation. So, it seems that at least we leave lot of study material for future generations.

Week 18:Andersonreviewed the evidence on how important celebrities are in climate change communication.

Week 19:De Boeck& Verbeeckshowed that while climate affects drought conditions, drought also affects climate.

Week 20:Rea et al.suggest that Earth's climate doesn't have a stationary state to which it returns after climate events.

Week 21:Roy& Peltierstudied Earth's rotation parameters and suggested that global warming has affected Earth's rotation.

Week 22:Csank et al.made a tree ring based climate reconstruction that covers 250 years of Early Pliocene (4-5 millions of years ago).

Week 23:Lee& Sohnshowed that dust events in Mongolia have increased and that they "appear to be caused by degraded surface vegetation and reduced soil moisture associated with intensified drought conditions".

Week 24:Mims et al.showed an alternative for those who think that water vapor measurements from those expensive satellite projects are not to be trusted - you can simply point a cheap IR thermometer to the sky and measure away.

Week 25:Kourtev et al.studied bacteria in cumulus clouds and found that: "Cloud water bacterial communities appeared to be dominated by members of the cyanobacteria, proteobacteria, actinobacteria and firmicutes".

Week 26:Park et al.note that in future warm climate there will still be cold surges and that living things that have adapted to the warmer climate will suffer from the cold surges.

Week 27:Ballenger et al.reviewed the evidence to see if Younger Dryas climate chenge affected mankind of that time and find that there are significant cultural changes that coincide with the YD event.

Week 28:Camuffo& Bertolinpresent earliest temperature observations in the world - the Medici network (1654-1670).

Week 29:Kurtén et al.show that when a burst of methane is emitted to the atmosphere, it is not enough to just calculate its radiative forcing, but you also need to consider the feedbacks relating to the methane chemistry in the atmosphere.

Week 30:Jeong et al.suggest that future greening in the circumpolar high-latitude regions amplifies surface warming in the growing season because there will be more absorption of sunlight.

Week 31:Pleijel& Uddlingfound that wheat grain yield might or might not increase with elevated carbon dioxide but there will be less protein in wheat grain at any case.

Week 32:Muto et al.made borehole firn temperature measurements in East Antarctica and found a warming trend.

Week 33:Wanner et al.studied Holocene temperature and precipitation records and found no clear cyclicity in climate events and also that the events behaved spatially differently.

Week 34:Gao et al.found many reasons why the surface area of Lake Chad has decreased by more than 90%.

Week 35:Guirguis et al.showed that in climate appearances can be deceiving. They reported that last two winters were anomalously warm in Northern Hemisphere even if the cold events in some parts gained headline space.

Week 36:Gatebe et al.used airborne radiation measurements to show that ship wakes can increase ocean reflectance by more than 100%. They also calculated that the cooling effect from increased reflectance from ship wakes globally would be about 0.14 milliwatts per square meter.

Week 37:Arrigo& van Dijkenshowed another example of things you can do with satellites by measuring daily changes in Arctic Ocean phytoplankton. It seems that as soon as ocean gets free of ice, phytoplankton primary production increases.

Week 38:Diamond et al.suggested that tropical ants have lower warming tolerances than temperate ants despite greater increases in temperature at higher latitudes.

Week 39:Wik et al.spent some time counting gas bubbles in an Arctic lake ice and while studying the results they decided it might not tell much about the methane flux of the lake.

Week 40:VanCurenstudied how albedo modification by building cool roofs would affect climate.

Week 41:Matuszkostudied the effect of clouds on solar radiation and found that the greatest amount of solar radiation can be detected on Earth's surface when sky is partly cloudy.

Week 42:Haywood et al.note that while water vapor is strong greenhouse gas, it also causes dimming to sunlight.

Week 43:Inauen et al.found that glacier forefield plants increase their root biomass and decrease their above-ground biomass when carbon dioxide concentration increases.

Week 44:Macnab& Barberstudy shows that fish might be in for some bad times because it seems that fish parasites grow faster in warmer water.

Week 45:Attanasio et al.use Granger causality analysis to global temperature and get clear signal from greenhouse gases while getting no signal from natural forcing.

Week 46:Fyfe et al.show that climate model predicts decadal temperature trends skillfully.

Week 47:Rautiainen et al.show that the devil is in the details and make an analysis (with spectral measurements and such) the albedo of Scots pine shoots.

Week 48:Nesje et al.have studied ancient reindeer hunting artefacts, which is cool by itself, but these particular ones were recovered when ice in southern Norway, that had covered them for hundreds of years, melted. The artefacts were then used to gain information of past climate.

Week 49:Graven& Gruberdetermine radiocarbon emissions from nuclear power industry and estimate how they affect atmospheric radiocarbon concentration globally.

Week 50:Svensson et al.use new methodology and reveal previously unseen annual layers from Eemian interglacial in Greenland NGRIP ice core.

Week 51:Junkermann et al.demonstrate that technologies cleaning up coal power plant emissions might come with side effects to the climate, especially regionally.

Week 52:Chen et al.have made a tree ring reconstruction of temperatures back to 1850 in southeast China. Yes, I know that this doesn't sound particularly cool but these are winter temperatures they reconstructed.

The Escalator, originally created as a simple debunking to the myth "Global warming stopped in [insert date]", turned out to be a very popular graphic. Going Down the Up Escalator, Part 1recently surpassed 20,000 pageviews,Part 2has an additional 4,000+ views, and the graphic itself has been used countless times in other blogs and media articles.  Due to its popularity, we have added a link to The Escalator in the right margin of the page, and it also has its own short URL,sks.to/escalator.

The popularity of the graphic is probably due to the fact that (1) it's a simple, stand-alone debunking of the "global warming stopped" myth, and (2) that particular myth has become so popular amongst climate denialists.  As The Escalator clearly illustrates, it's easy to cherry pick convenient start and end points to obtain whatever short-term trend one desires, but the long-term human-caused global warming trend is quite clear underneath the short-term noise.

The original Escalator was based on the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) data, which incorporates more temperature station data than any other data set, but is limited to land-only data; additionally the record terminates in early 2010.  We originally created the graphic in response to the specificmyth that the BEST data showed that global warming had stopped.

It is interesting to apply the same analysis to a current global (land-ocean) temperature record to determine whether short term trends in the global data can be equally misleading. A global version of the Escalator graphic has therefore been prepared using the NOAA NCDC global (land and ocean combined) data through December 2011 (Figure 1).

Figure 1: Short-term cooling trends from Jan '70 to Nov '77, Nov '77 to Nov '86, Sep '87 to Nov '96, Mar '97 to Oct '02, and Oct '02 to Dec '11 (blue) vs. the 42-year warming trend (Jan '70 to Dec '11; red) usingNOAA NCDC land-ocean data.

The Predictable Attacks

On 31 January 2012, John Cook emailed me about several recent uses of The Escalator, including an inquiry from Andrew Dessler, requesting to use it in one of his lectures.  In the email, John suggested that the graphic had gained so much popularity, it would likely soon be the target of attacks from fake skeptics.

As if eavesdropping on our conversation, the first such attack on the escalator came the very next day, on 01 February 2012.  The graphic had been publshed nearly 3 months earlier, and John predicted the fake skeptic response within a day's margin. 

The Escalator was recently used by a number of sources in response tothe denialist plea for climate inactionpublished in the Wall Street Journal, includingMedia Matters,Climate Crocks,Huffington Post, andPhil Plait at Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy. Statistician William Briggstook issue with Phil Plait's use of the graphic.  Specifically, he criticized the lack of error bars on the data used in The Escalator, making some rather wild claims about the uncertainty in the data.

"...the models that gave these dots tried to predict what the global temperature was. When we do see error bars, researchers often make the mistake of showing us the uncertainty of the model parameters, about which we do not care, we cannot see, and are not verifiable. Since the models were supposed to predict temperature, show us the error of the predictions.

I’ve done this (on different but similar data) and I find that theparameter uncertaintyis plus or minus a tenth of degree or less. But theprediction uncertaintyis (in data like this) anywhere from 0.1 to 0.5 degrees, plus or minus."

Astaminohas pointed out, calculating an area-weighted average global temperature can hardly be considered a "prediction" and as he andGreg Ladenboth pointed out, BEST has provided the uncertainty range for their data, and it is quite small (see it graphically hereandhere).  Plait has also responded to Briggshere.

The Escalating Global Warming Trend

Briggs takes his uncertainty inflation to the extreme, claiming that we can't even be certain the planet has warmed over the past 70 years.

"I don’t know what the prediction uncertainty is for Plait’s picture. Neither does he. I’d be willing to bet it’s large enough so that we can’t tell with certainty greater than 90% whether temperatures in the 1940s were cooler than in the 2000s."

It's difficult to ascertain what Briggs is talking about here.  We're not using the current trend to predict (hindcast) the global temperature in 1940.  We have temperature station measurements in 1940 to estimate the 1940 temperature, and data since then to estimate the warming trend.  Once again, we're producing estimates, not predictions here. 

Moreover, the further back in time we go and the more data we use, the smaller the uncertainty in the trend.  For example,see this post by tamino, which shows that the global warming trend since 1975 is roughly 0.17 +/- 0.04°C per decade in data from NASA GISS (Figure 2).  The shorter the timeframe, the larger the uncertainty in the trend.  This is why it's unwise to focus on short timeframes, as the fake skeptics do in their "global warming stopped in [date]" assertions.  As tamino's post linked above shows, when we limit ourselves to a decade's worth of data, the uncertainty in the trend grows to nearly +/- 0.2°C per decade (Figure 2).

Figure 2: The estimated global temperature trends through July 2011 (black dots-and-lines), upper and lower limits of the 95% confidence interval (black dashed lines), and the estimated trend since 1975 (red dashed line) using GISS land and ocean temperature data (created by tamino)

Foster and Rahmstorf (2011)also showed that when the influences of solar and volcanic activity and the El Niño Southern Oscillation are removed from the temperature data, the warming trend in the NCDC data shown in the updated Escalator is 0.175 +/- 0.012°C per decade.  Quite simply, contrary to Briggs' claims, the warming trend is much larger than the uncertainty in the data.  In fact, when applying the Foster and Rahmstorf methodology, the global warming trend in each of the major data sets isstatistically significant since 2000, let alone 1940.

Ultimately Briggs completely misses the point of The Escalator.

"...just as theWSJ‘s scientists claim, we can’t say with any certainty that the temperatures have been increasing this past decade."

This is a strawman argument.  The claim was not that we can say with certainty that surface temperatures have increased over the past decade (althoughglobal heat content has).  The point is that focusing on temperatures over the past decade (as the fake skeptics constantly do) is pointless to begin with, and that we should be examining longer, statistically significant trends.

Briggs' post was of course hailed by the usual climate denial enablers (i.e.hereandhere), despite the rather obvious inflation of the data uncertainty, and utter lack of support for that inflation.  Despite the fake skeptic struggles to go the wrong way down, The Escalator unfortunately continues ever-upward.

In response tothe latest denialist plea for climate inactionpublished in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ), the WSJ has published a response letter from a number ofactual climate scientists, which is re-printed below.

Do you consult your dentist about your heart condition? In science, as in any area, reputations are based on knowledge and expertise in a field and on published, peer-reviewed work. If you need surgery, you want a highly experienced expert in the field who has done a large number of the proposed operations.

You published"No Need to Panic About Global Warming"(op-ed, Jan. 27) on climate change by the climate-science equivalent of dentists practicing cardiology. While accomplished in their own fields, most of these authors have no expertise in climate science. The few authors who have such expertise are known to have extreme views that are out of step with nearly every other climate expert. This happens in nearly every field of science. For example, there is a retrovirus expert who does not accept that HIV causes AIDS. And it is instructive to recall that a few scientists continued to state that smoking did not cause cancer, long after that was settled science.

Climate experts know that the long-term warming trend has not abated in the past decade. In fact, it was the warmest decade on record. Observations show unequivocally that our planet is getting hotter. And computer models have recently shown that during periods when there is a smaller increase of surface temperatures, warming is occurring elsewhere in the climate system, typically in the deep ocean. Such periods are a relatively common climate phenomenon, are consistent with our physical understanding of how the climate system works, and certainly do not invalidate our understanding of human-induced warming or the models used to simulate that warming.

Thus, climate experts also know what one of us, Kevin Trenberth, actually meant by the out-of-context, misrepresented quote used in the op-ed. Mr. Trenberth was lamenting the inadequacy of observing systems to fully monitor warming trends in the deep ocean and other aspects of the short-term variations that always occur, together with the long-term human-induced warming trend.

The National Academy of Sciences of the U.S. (set up by President Abraham Lincoln to advise on scientific issues), as well as major national academies of science around the world and every other authoritative body of scientists active in climate research have stated that the science is clear: The world is heating up and humans are primarily responsible. Impacts are already apparent and will increase. Reducing future impacts will require significant reductions in emissions of heat-trapping gases.

Research shows that more than 97% of scientists actively publishing in the field agree that climate change is real and human caused. It would be an act of recklessness for any political leader to disregard the weight of evidence and ignore the enormous risks that climate change clearly poses. In addition, there is very clear evidence that investing in the transition to a low-carbon economy will not only allow the world to avoid the worst risks of climate change, but could also drive decades of economic growth. Just what the doctor ordered.

Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D.

Distinguished Senior Scientist

Climate Analysis Section National Center for Atmospheric Research

La Jolla, Calif.

Kevin Trenberth, Sc.D, Distinguished Senior Scientist, Climate Analysis Section, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Richard Somerville, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

Katharine Hayhoe, Ph.D., Director, Climate Science Center, Texas Tech University

Rasmus Benestad, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, The Norwegian Meteorological Institute

Gerald Meehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Michael Oppenheimer, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences; Director, Program in Science, Technology and Environmental Policy, Princeton University

Peter Gleick, Ph.D., co-founder and president, Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment, and Security

Michael C. MacCracken, Ph.D., Chief Scientist, Climate Institute, Washington

Michael Mann, Ph.D., Director, Earth System Science Center, Pennsylvania State University

Steven Running, Ph.D., Professor, Director, Numerical Terradynamic Simulation Group, University of Montana

Robert Corell, Ph.D., Chair, Arctic Climate Impact Assessment; Principal, Global Environment Technology Foundation

Dennis Ojima, Ph.D., Professor, Senior Research Scientist, and Head of the Dept. of Interior's Climate Science Center at Colorado State University

Josh Willis, Ph.D., Climate Scientist, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Matthew England, Ph.D., Professor, Joint Director of the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Australia

Ken Caldeira, Ph.D., Atmospheric Scientist, Dept. of Global Ecology, Carnegie Institution

Warren Washington, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Terry L. Root, Ph.D., Senior Fellow, Woods Institute for the Environment, Stanford University

David Karoly, Ph.D., ARC Federation Fellow and Professor, University of Melbourne, Australia

Jeffrey Kiehl, Ph.D., Senior Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

Donald Wuebbles, Ph.D., Professor of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Illinois

Camille Parmesan, Ph.D., Professor of Biology, University of Texas; Professor of Global Change Biology, Marine Institute, University of Plymouth, UK

Simon Donner, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia, Canada

Barrett N. Rock, Ph.D., Professor, Complex Systems Research Center and Department of Natural Resources, University of New Hampshire

David Griggs, Ph.D., Professor and Director, Monash Sustainability Institute, Monash University, Australia

Roger N. Jones, Ph.D., Professor, Professorial Research Fellow, Centre for Strategic Economic Studies, Victoria University, Australia

William L. Chameides, Ph.D., Dean and Professor, School of the Environment, Duke University

Gary Yohe, Ph.D., Professor, Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University, CT

Robert Watson, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Advisor to the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Chair of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

Steven Sherwood, Ph.D., Director, Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Chris Rapley, Ph.D., Professor of Climate Science, University College London, UK

Joan Kleypas, Ph.D., Scientist, Climate and Global Dynamics Division, National Center for Atmospheric Research

James J. McCarthy, Ph.D., Professor of Biological Oceanography, Harvard University

Stefan Rahmstorf, Ph.D., Professor of Physics of the Oceans, Potsdam University, Germany

Julia Cole, Ph.D., Professor, Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

William H. Schlesinger, Ph.D., President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

Jonathan Overpeck, Ph.D., Professor of Geosciences and Atmospheric Sciences, University of Arizona

Eric Rignot, Ph.D., Senior Research Scientist, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; Professor of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine

Wolfgang Cramer, Professor of Global Ecology, Mediterranean Institute for Biodiversity and Ecology, CNRS, Aix-en-Provence, France