Climate Models Might Systematically Underestimate Pace of Global Warming

You might remember one of my recent videos where I talked about the equilibrium climate sensitivity (“ECS”), which is a measure of how much Earth’s surface would warm if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere doubled. The ECS basically quantifies how fast global temperatures are going to increase. In my video, I warned that the ECS could be much higher than the recent IPCC report suggests, and that we therefore severely underestimate the severity of climate change.In a recent paper, an international team of scientists now finds a reason for why many climate models might have underestimated the ECS. They say that temperature patterns in the sea surface starting in the 1980s have slowed global warming and that this might have masked a higher ECS. It’s certainly plausible because it’s no secret that most big climate models get warming patterns over the oceans, especially the Pacific Ocean, wrong. The authors say that this wrong pattern in the models effectively results in an underestimate of the ECS. The low ECS is still supported by very old (Pliocene) data, but that also has been questioned recently.  Tl;dr: If that’s right, it’s really bad news. You can find the paper here, and a more or less helpful Twitter thread here, or maybe watch my videos on the topic here and here.

This episode of Science News covers how to combine quantum physics with gravity. I told you about this new approach, called “Postquantum Gravity” from Johnathan Oppenheim briefly before Christmas. He and his collaborators are now saying that their idea also explains dark matter and dark energy.  You can take the quiz here.Two essays that I have written on the topic:What Physicists Have Been MissingThe End of the Dark Universe?

Electricity as “Glue”

Image: Xu et al., ACS Cent. Sci. (2024)

A team of materials scientists at the University of Maryland recently discovered that electric fields from low direct current (DC) can “glue” hard electrical conductors, such as metals and graphite, to soft wet materials like hydrogels and animal organ tissues. Unlike many traditional adhesives, this effect – dubbed “hard-soft electro-adhesion” – works underwater and is maintained after the field is removed, but may be turned off by reversing the polarity of the electric field. The scientists demonstrated that the effect comes from electro-chemical bonds between the metallic electrodes and polymers in the soft gel-like substances. They say the effect could have applications in robotics or biomedicine. Read the full paper here.

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Heat Pumps That Work in Cold Weather? Coming Right Up

Image: Trane Technologies

A friend of mine in Las Vegas would complain every winter that the heating in their apartment didn’t work on unusually cold days, complaining that it was because the apartment “used these $#!++@^ heat pumps from the 70s”, which is a valid complaint since old school heat pumps struggle to keep up in subfreezing temperatures. But if you’ve seen my recent video on heat pumps, you know that they are getting better, partly due to the use of cleaner and more efficient coolants such as R290. And I have more good news. Recently, eight heat-pump manufacturers (Bosch, Carrier, Daikin, Johnson, Lennoz, Midea, Rheem, and Trane) started a collaboration with the U.S. Department of Energy and Natural Resources Canada on a Cold-Climate Heat Pump Tech Challenge. They will test the suitability of heat pumps for cold climates, down to -26 °C/-15 F.  You can read more about the field tests here.

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