Category: Ice trends

Current climate models get snow cover trends wrong for all four seasons

Post author By ronan
Post date April 20, 2021

Imelda and Michael in downtown Boston (Massachusetts, USA) during a visit we made in February 2015 to northeast USA to discuss our research with other scientists. According to current climate models the heavy snowstorms that occurred at the time (and which took several months to fully melt) should not have been occurring in 2015. In this post, we summarise the main findings of our 2019 peer-reviewed paper, “Northern hemisphere snow-cover trends (1967-2018): A comparison between climate models and observations” that was published in the scientific journal, Geosciences. We show that the current climate models are completely unable to explain actual trends in snow cover for all four seasons.

Ice trends Our papers

What do we know about Arctic sea ice trends?

Post author By ronan
Post date March 4, 2021

This essay was originally written as an invited guest post for Dr. Judith Curry’s “Climate Etc.” blog. A slightly abridged version was published there on 16th August 2017.

In this essay we summarise the findings of our 2017 “Re-calibration of Arctic sea ice extent datasets using Arctic surface air temperature records” paper.

Ice trends

Is the Arctic melting?

The Arctic is often described as being the “canary in the coal mine” of man-made global warming, i.e., it will be the first place we will see its effects. So, the fact that there has been a fairly steady decline in Arctic sea ice “since records began” has led many people to think that we are seeing unusual global warming, and that the only explanation must be man-made global warming. However, the problem is that the records only began in 1978, i.e., just after a period of several decades of cooling in the Arctic had ended.

In this essay, we will discuss why the recent sea ice decline seems to be just part of the natural variability of the Arctic.