2014 has seen much to talk about in the world of climate science, from devastating flooding to record-breaking temperatures. The year has seen a mountain of climate change reports from the IPCC, polar sea ice debate, and an El Niño that’s more undecided than a scientist in a cardigan shop.
We take look back over how climate science hit the news this year.
Debate over winter flooding
The winter going into 2014 was one of the most exceptional periods of rainfall in England and Wales in at least 248 years, when records began. When the flooding hit, the media was awash with debate on whether climate change was the culprit. Inevitably, some of the stories got things a bit mixed up.
The Times suggested a recent academic study found “the increase in the number of floods in Britain is due to urban expansion and population growth rather than the early impacts of climate change”. Except, as the study’s authors explained to us, it did nothing of the sort.
The Times 20th August 2014
The Mail on Sunday reported that Met Office scientists were arguing amongst themselves on the contribution of climate change to the floods. The Met Office swiftly dismissed the claims, saying “this is not the case and there is no disagreement.”
We thought it best to get an expert in, so Dr Peter Stott from the Met Office wrote us a guest blog on how scientists work out the human influence on extreme weather events.
El Niño can’t make its mind up
This year, El Niño kept scientists on their toes, seemingly unable to make up its mind on whether to appear.
The climate phenomenon affects temperature and rainfall patterns across the world, causing flooding and failed crop harvests, so scientists keep a close watch on Pacific Ocean temperatures for signals that an event is on the way.
In June, scientists put the odds of a summer El Niño at 90 per cent, before scaling them back to 70 per cent by August, and then suggesting there were hints it could be rebounding . By October, scientists were poised for weak El Niño event developing in the autumn. But this also failed to materialise.
It’s no wonder that Professor Mat Collins from Exeter University dubbed it a ” real enigma“. In the end, Japan’s meteorology agency clearly lost patience and declared that El Niño had arrived in December. But no other agency has followed suit, so the wait continues into next year.
Sea surface temperature during El Niño (left) and La Niña (right). Red and blue show warmer and cooler temperatures than the long term average. [Credit: Steve Albers, NOAA]
A mammoth effort from the IPCC
This year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) ensured that nobody anywhere would ever be short of something to read on climate change.
The first part of their Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) was published last September, but this year saw the release of the final two parts . Volume two was published in March, which covers the likely impacts of rising global temperatures and how we could adapt to them. This was swiftly followed by volume three in April, which looks at ways the world can cut emissions of carbon dioxide.
The reports are crammed full of detail on climate impacts, from changing ecosystems to melting Arctic sea ice, and on tackling emissions, from cap and trade systems to reducing deforestation.
The hefty tomes are so comprehensive that we even wrote a guide to how to read them.
For those preferring something a bit lighter, October brought you the Synthesis Report. This was the IPCC’s attempt to summarise their key findings into a document smaller than the Yellow Pages, and included the “ controversial” recommendation that fossil fuels be phased out by the end of the century.
The report’s completion gave us the opportunity to look at how the IPCC’s language had sharpened since the Fourth Assessment Report, and provide some handy resources, such as a guide to AR5 as a whole and a rundown of the IPCC’s frequently asked questions.
Contrasting fortunes for Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice
Polar scientists clearly all received remote-controlled robots from Santa last year, letting them loose in the Antarctic to measure how thick the sea ice is and why its melting.
The Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) called ‘Puma’ ready for deployment through a very thin layer of Antarctic sea ice. Peter Kimball, WHOI.
But September was the big month for sea ice news, with Arctic sea-ice reaching its lowest extent after the summer and Antarctica reaching its largest extent after the winter.
The Mail on Sunday kicked the season off with a report on the “myth of Arctic meltdown”, which wrongly assumed slightly larger sea ice extents in 2013 and 2014 meant the end of a long-term decline.
Shortly after, at a Royal Society conference, Professor Julienne Stroeve from the US National Snow & Ice Data Centre announced that 2014 was the sixth lowest year on record for Arctic sea-ice extent, and that the eight lowest measurements of Arctic summer sea ice had occurred in the last eight years.
For Antarctic sea ice, the record high extent in winter created a bit of a stir, with a Mail on Sunday article claiming that it was “yet another mishap to tarnish the credibility of climate science.” However, as we pointed out, sea ice is only a part of what’s going on in Antarctica, and the world as a whole is losing ice rapidly.
Record breakers
Finally, the year ended with news that both greenhouse gas emissions and global mean temperatures had hit new record highs.
2014 Global temperatures relative to the long-term average. UK Met Office.
The World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) released their latest measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide from 2013. The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached 396 parts per million, they said, 42 per cent higher than pre-industrial levels. We calculated that just six years worth of current emissions would blow the carbon budget for a 1.5 degree temperature rise target.
And the WMO followed that up in December by announcing that 2014 looks set to among the hottest, if not the hottest, year on record, with average air temperature over the land and sea surface at 0.57°C above the 1961-90 average. The UK Met Office also announced that 2014 was likely to replace 2006 as the warmest year since records began in 1910.
The year ahead
So what will 2015 have in store for climate science? We can safely say it will be a while before the next IPCC reports, but that doesn’t mean climate science won’t be in the news.
There’s still a chance that El Niño might finally appear during the winter, and in the next month or so we should get confirmation of whether 2014 was the hottest year on record or just a close second.
As for the rest of the year, we don’t yet know what researchers have got in store, but as climate science is the gift that just keeps giving, it will be exciting to see what advances are to come.