Category Archives: Climate Change

Overestimating the Human Influence on the Economic Costs of Extreme Weather Events

Posted on February 14, 2022 by ptbrown31

Estimating the human influence on extreme weather events and their economic costs is relevant to many policy discussions around climate change including those that concern the social cost of carbon. There are many different ways to estimate the economic costs … Continue reading →

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Revisiting a Claim of Reduced Climate Sensitivity Uncertainty

Posted on October 31, 2018 by ptbrown31

Nature has published a Brief Communications Arising between us (Patrick Brown, Martin Stolpe, and Ken Caldeira) and Peter Cox, Femke Nijsse, Mark Williamson and Chris Huntingford; which is in regards to their paper published earlier this year titled “Emergent constraint on … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change | 2 Comments

Signal, Noise and Global Warming’s Influence on Weather

Posted on September 11, 2018 by ptbrown31

Human-caused climate change from increasing greenhouse gasses is expected to influence many weather phenomena including extreme events. However, there is not yet a detectable long-term change in many of these extreme events, as is recently emphasized by Roger Pielke Jr. in … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change | 6 Comments

Contemporary Global Warming placed in geological context

Posted on August 19, 2018 by ptbrown31

Below is a rough comparison of contemporary Global Warming and estimates of past temperature change. This is a visualization in the vein of this plot on Wikipedia. Uncertainties increase substantially as estimates go back further in time. Time resolution also … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change | 7 Comments

Fundamental economics and the costs and benefits of addressing climate change

Posted on August 15, 2018 by ptbrown31

This post is a high-level summary of the central ideas underlying the evaluation of the economic costs and benefits of addressing climate change. One of the primary goals here is to explore, at a fundamental level, what is actually meant … Continue reading →

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Combining Physical and Statistical Models in Order to Narrow Uncertainty in Projected Global Warming

Posted on January 19, 2018 by ptbrown31

Below is a presentation I gave on our recent research published in Nature titled “Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget”. This was for the Stanford University Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Systems Colloquium (EE380). Thus, it is intended for … Continue reading →

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AGU Talk on potential changes in temperature variability with warming

Posted on December 21, 2017 by ptbrown31

Below is my talk from the 2017 AGU fall meeting. This talk is on a paper we published in Nature Climate Change about potential changes in natural unforced variability of global mean surface air temperature (GMST) under global warming. Background Unforced … Continue reading →

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Greater future global warming (still) inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget

Posted on December 21, 2017 by ptbrown31

We recently published a paper in Nature in which we leveraged observations of the Earth’s radiative energy budget to statistically constrain 21st-century climate model projections of global warming. We found that observations of the Earth’s energy budget allow us to infer … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change | 13 Comments

Greater future global warming inferred from Earth’s recent energy budget

Posted on November 29, 2017 by ptbrown31

More-severe climate model predictions could be the most accurate. Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change | 46 Comments

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions helps the economy

Posted on September 28, 2017 by ptbrown31

Potential solutions to climate change are often framed as a tradeoff between reducing our impact on the environment and harming the economy. More specifically, it is thought that we can reduce our climate-change-related impact by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases … Continue reading →

Posted in Climate Change, Uncategorized | 8 Comments