[GWSG] Climate primer; estimate revision; C sensitivity; hot Oct.; slow Antarctic?; climate fixes; climate poetry reading

[Tilley, Al]

1.  Joe Romm's Oxford UP primer Climate Change: What Everyone Needs to Know sounds like just the thing to suggest to a friend who asks for some basic information.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/17/book-review-climate-change-what-everyone-needs-to-know



2.  An analysis of the estimates of how much we need to cut emissions and how fast finds that we have been overly optimistic, even obtuse.  We have less than half the carbon budget we thought, and must cut emissions much more rapidly and at greater cost than we had planned to achieve even the 2C target of warming.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/nov/18/how-scientific-miscalculations-could-crash-the-climate



3.  A new analysis of CO2 levels 50 mya indicates that the earth may be much more sensitive to atmospheric C than we had thought.  http://climatecrocks.com/2015/11/18/is-earth-much-more-sensitive-to-co2-than-thought/



4.  October was not only the hottest October on record, but also broke the record for how much hotter a month was than the historical average.  http://mashable.com/2015/11/17/october-crosses-global-warming-threshold/#N.tRNSyoJaqF

The current strong El Niño has contributed to the heat this year, but each of the past four years has been hotter than the one before.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2015/nov/18/2015-shatters-the-temperature-record-as-global-warming-speeds-back-up



5.  Tamsin Edwards, coauthor of a recent study in Nature of likely contributions to sea level rise by the Antarctic ice sheet, explains their method and the results-for example, they estimate about a fifty-fifty chance of a 12 cm contribution by the Antarctic to sea level rise by 2100.  http://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2015/nov/18/antarctic-ice-sheet-collapse-sea-level-rise-whats-new  The link to the Nature letter in the Guardian article will supply the full letter, thanks to a new sharing initiative of the journal.  As has been the case with previous studies, the results of a study such as this one based on modeling tend to be lower, while those emphasizing the historical record yield higher projections.  The discrepancies have yet to be explained.



6.  For those who have not yet read Tim Flannery's Atmosphere of Hope, he summarizes his list of ways to deal with excess carbon (and to feed people and do lots of building at the same time). http://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/nov/20/climate-crisis-future-brighter-tim-flannery



7.  An impressive collection of actors will read you 21 poems on climate change in this Guardian feature.  http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2015/nov/20/our-melting-shifting-liquid-world-celebrities-read-poems-on-climate-change  ?

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