My title today is a quote from John Barrett, who is Professor of Sustainability Research at the University of Leeds. You can listen to him saying those words near the end of this extract from the Paul Hudson Weather Show originally broadcast by BBC Regional Radio across the North of England on May 25th 2014, shortly after John gave a presentation at the Transformational Climate Science conference at the University of Exeter:

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Fresh from testifying on Capitol Hill in front of the United States Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Richard Tol, Professor of Economics at the University of Sussex, has just had a new "short communication" published online in the journal Energy Policy. Since energy policy is one of my own specialist subjects I read it with interest, but now I'm rather confused not least because whilst the paper does mention "climate policy" a few times the word "energy" is noticeable only by its absence. At last week's hearing Richard testified that:

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I've recently become engaged in a conversation over at Andy Extance's "Simple Climate" blog on the subject of "IPCC: Millions of words on climate change are not enough", which is rather clogging up the conversation over there. Here are some edited highlights (with the odd typo fixed, and the odd link added):

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There's a lot of shopping days left until Christmas comes around again, but nonetheless I've been watching a pantomime. You can watch it too if you like. Here's a video recording of Thursday's United States Committee on Science, Space, and Technology hearing that purportedly examined "The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process". I don't usually spend my time avidly watching committee meetings on the other side of the Atlantic, but this one was of great interest to me because a fortnight ago I spent a couple of days at Exeter University listening to a long list of scientists expounding about how they took part in the "IPCC process", and their resulting conclusions.

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The videos from the Transformational Climate Science conference at Exeter University are still not yet available, but on Monday May 19th the Met Office hosted another climate change conference, this time in London. This one was held in conjunction with the Walker Institute at the University of Reading and the Grantham Institute for Climate change at Imperial College London, and was entitled "Climate change – the latest evidence and implications for business". As the title suggests, the audience this time around consisted of businesspeople instead of climate scientists. Some of the speakers from Exeter had headed up to London to speak about all things IPCC for the second time in a week, and those proceedings are already available on video at the Climasphere web site.

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Last week the University of Exeter hosted a two day conference organised in partnership with the Met Office and the University of Leeds, under the banner of  "Transformational Climate Science". According to the conference's "About" page:

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The United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA for short) has published an article on the stormy weather we experienced over the winter. They say that:

In the North Atlantic [there have been] an unusually high number of hurricane-force storms. Between October 25, 2013, when the first hurricane-force event of the season occurred, and March 8, when the most recent one to date occurred, 43 unique hurricane-force events have blasted their way across the North Atlantic. Thirty of them underwent rapid intensification. The most intense system occurred on December 24, 2013; pressure in the heart of the storm dropped to 929 hPa as the storm lurked north and northwest of the British Isles.

and show this chart of wind speed anomalies over the North Atlantic compared to the 1981-2010 average:

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Last week the United Kingdom's Committee on Climate Change "launched a call for evidence in order to identify relevant published information of the risks and opportunities to the UK from climate change". Perhaps not entirely coincidentally, last night I attended a talk organised by Transition Exeter entitled "Climate Change Update – The Pathway to Two Degrees Warming" and subtitled "Can Global Warming be Limited to Two Degrees?"  The evidence was presented on the night by Dr. Jeff Ridley from the Met Office's Hadley Centre here in Exeter and consisted of an overview of the results of the UK Government funded AVOID research programme, followed by a question and answer session with the members of Transition Exeter. The brief executive summary of the answer to today's headline question is :

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It's not often that we devote an article to a learned academic article, but then again it's not often that such an article is published concerning one of our hobby horses here at econnexus.org.uk. It's also not often that an academic paper is published just as the sort of weather it discusses is obligingly demonstrating itself. It's unheard of that such a journal article is introduced by a video! As the St. Jude day storm was causing flood alerts on the River Exe and many other Devon rivers yesterday Dr. James Screen of the University of Exeter had a new paper published in The Institute of Physics journal "Environmental Research Letters" entitled "Influence of Arctic sea ice on European summer precipitation". Here's his introduction:

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The storm of St. Jude is almost upon us, and the official forecast has eased slightly. The latest Met Office news release now says:

The storm is set to deepen rapidly just to the south west of the UK late today, before moving into western areas in the very early hours of Monday morning.

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