Attribution of extreme weather and climate-related events.

Extreme weather and climate-related events occur in a particular place, by definition, infrequently. It is therefore challenging to detect systematic changes in their occurrence given the relative shortness of observational records. However, there is a clear interest from outside the climate science community in the extent to which recent damaging extreme events can be linked to human-induced climate change or natural climate variability.

The Normative Orientations of Climate Scientists.

In 1942 Robert K. Merton tried to demonstrate the structure of the normative system of science by specifying the norms that characterized it. The norms were assigned the abbreviation CUDOs: Communism, Universalism, Disinterestedness, and Organized skepticism.

Decreased frequency of North Atlantic polar lows associated with future climate warming.

Every winter, the high-latitude oceans are struck by severe storms that are considerably smaller than the weather-dominating synoptic depressions. Accompanied by strong winds and heavy precipitation, these often explosively developing mesoscale cyclones-termed polar lows-constitute a threat to offshore activities such as shipping or oil and gas exploitation. Yet owing to their small scale, polar lows are poorly represented in the observational and global reanalysis data often used for climatological investigations of atmospheric features and cannot be assessed in coarse-resolution global simulations of possible future climates.

Controlling lead concentrations in human blood by regulating the use of lead in gasoline.

After having been emitted at maximum rates in the 1960s and 1970s, lead has become less ubiquitous in industrialized countries as a result of increasingly stringent policies to limit the use of this heavy metal as an anti-knock additive in gasoline. Using a detailed reconstruction of lead emissions in Europe (PbE), of the air concentration of lead in Europe (PbC) and repeated measurements of lead concentrations in human blood (PbB) in Germany since about 1980, we have constructed an empirical model that estimates PbB given PbE. This model is used for 2 purposes: i)To estimate PbB levels for the 1960s and 1970s in Germany, when emissions were maximum and monitoring blood levels had not yet begun.

Four decades of gasoline lead emissions and control policies in Europe: a retrospective assessment.

Over decades, large amounts of the neurotoxin lead were released into the European environment, mostly from gasoline lead additives. Emissions were growing unabatedly until the 1970s, when a series of regulations on the allowed gasoline lead content were adopted. As a result, in the 1990s most gasoline contained only small amounts of lead.