20160321 - sea level

James Hansen and Sea Level Rise – 

the peer-reviewed version

Today we repost a blog entry by PLOS Ecology Community Editor Sasha Wright from August 2015. In it, she interprets and discusses the startling findings by the individual often called the world’s most well-known climate scientist: former NASA Director, James Hansen of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. With 18 co-authors representing far-flung disciplines, Hansen had just released the first draft of “Ice melt, sea level rise, and superstorms: evidence from paleoclimate data, climate modeling, and modern observations that 2 degrees C global warming could be dangerous.” Hansen chose to post this paper on the open access discussion site of the European science journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics prior to its undergoing formal peer review. At the time, Hansen made clear that he’d posted this draft in order to receive constructive feedback from his scientific peers. What he got was more of a firestorm.
Initial reports on the final, peer-reviewed paper, published yesterday in the formal journal, Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics, are that its major findings have not fundamentally changed. In their abstract, Hansen et al describe the primary changes made as structural.

Our paper published in Atmospheric Chemistry and Physics Discussion was organized in the chronological order of our investigation. Here we reorganize the work to make the science easier to follow. First, we describe our climate simulations with specified growing freshwater sources in the North Atlantic and Southern oceans. Second, we analyze paleoclimate data for evidence of these processes and possible implications for the future. Third, we examine modern data for evidence that the simulated climate changes are already occurring.

Here is Sasha’s original August 10th blog post, written as part of PLOS Ecology’s coverage of the Ecological Society of America 2015 annual meeting. It was posted on PLOS Blogs as a preview for Jim Hansen’s appearance on the August 12th PLOS Science Wednesday, the weekly redditscience ‘Ask Me Anything’ hosted by PLOS — where the authors would take questions on the paper’s findings.
At the end of Sasha’s post, we’ve added a Q&A from that AMA; a question that will no doubt be asked again in response to Hansen’s latest publication. It addresses how the authors were able to correlate paleoclimate data with current day climate changes to make these dire predictions.
Your comments are invited on both the authors’ publication process, and the findings in their paper.
— Victoria Costello, PLOSBLOGS

All Eyes on the Oceans: James Hansen and Sea Level Rise

By Sasha Wright
On July 23, James Hansen and 16 co-authors posted a discussion paper on an open-review website about sea level rise and climate change. The article has garnered massive attention around the internet and scientific communities — both for its content and for the unconventional manner in which it waspublished.


 http://blogs.plos.org/ecology/2016/03/23/repost-james-hansen-and-sea-level-rise-the-peer-reviewed-version/